Who remembers human zoos?

Othering: The act of putting people down on the basis of defined or perceived characteristics.

Human zoos: The act of putting people on display for their purportedly inferior characteristics.

I just wrote an essay for publication that used the term othering,[1] and the editors asked me what it meant. It seems ubiquitous these days, but perhaps less familiar to those unaccustomed to our English jargon. Such a simple, yet profound word – to which Sayyida Salme’s life and experience also speak.

The country I live in was “made great” through othering, including by eradication (free land) and exploitation (free labor). Few in the United States were spared, as the othering carried across the original native populations to imported African slaves and their descendants,[2] to migrating Mexicans and other Latinos,[3] to Irish, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, German, and other immigrants, to Jews, to Muslims and Arabs, to people who are LGBTQ+, and more, plus fully half the population, to women. Much of this continues. Even some white, straight men now claim that they are being othered.

There is surely no country in the world that has no history of othering. The great conflicts of our time are sparked and fueled by othering. It is a human condition – to other or be othered – even as humanity strives to overcome this deeply engrained, readily triggered, and easily sustained flaw in our individual and collective psyches. Based on whatever distinguishing feature can be manipulated to separate the in-group from the out-group, these social divisions and hierarchies have found a particularly tenacious foothold in race.

Sayyida Salme grew up in a mid-19th century society on the island of Zanzibar that was defined by race and racism. As she tells it, the harem where she was born, part of the Omani Sultanate, was stratified largely by color as that translated into race and tribe (e.g., Memoirs, pp. 25-27). Among her detailed descriptions, Sayyida Salme also makes a handful of racist comments in her Memoirs and Letters, for which she has been justifiably criticized.[4]  But these comments are a sign of her times; not even the “civilized” West was immune. Even abolitionists pushing against slavery were racist – for example, white slaves were more "revolting" than black slaves, and free Africans were still uncouth and unenlightened (Memoirs, p. 250). This prevailing Western racism was then also turned on Sayyida Salme when she reached Germany.

In her case, her own mindset of othering, practically innate from birth, was followed by others who othered her. For every racist line she wrote out of her upbringing, she also described at least as many incidents of racism against her in Germany. It was all around her:

Since there were so few exotic individuals to be seen in Germany at the time — relative to England and France — I suffered immensely during those first years. At parties, in theatres and concerts, I felt like I was under constant surveillance, which I found extremely vexing. (Letters, p. 20)

About a decade ago, the city of Hamburg, to its credit, decided to make up for the lack of women among its many honorific street signs. That included celebrating Sayyida Salme with a street post in her name. But then a few citizens vehemently railed against this decision, citing her racist, slaveholding past, until the sign was taken down.[5] So much for embracing complexity, or even acknowledging the local racism against her! Rather than don blinders of self-righteousness, we might consider Hamburg’s own racist strands right around the time Sayyida Salme lived there. [6]

And with that, I’ll come to the punchline of this piece:

Who still recalls the sordid history of “human zoos”?

It was in Hamburg, of all places, that notions of Western superiority were tapped by Carl Hagenbeck, who built a market exhibiting exotic animals – and eventually also people. Leveraging his animal connections around the world, he came upon the idea of putting on human shows,[7] starting with Samoans and Sàmis (Laplanders) in 1874 and Egyptian Nubians in 1876. When audiences came in droves, the idea took off internationally. It was a frenzy of profiteering that catered to the voyeuristic attitudes of prude society. Human zoos became a mass phenomenon for the next several decades.[8]  

Visited by literally millions, these exhibits spanned from actual cages to staged villages, in which a variety of “wild,” “exotic,” and “primitive” peoples were displayed as inferior races, often under egregious conditions. To add an air of seriousness, Hagenbeck and other impresarios, as they were called, engaged academics who catalogued races by their characteristics (e.g., Carl Dammann, see Letters, pp. 163-64) or were looking for Darwin’s missing link between ape and man.[9]  As to be expected, recent scholarship has substantiated how human zoos effectively perpetuated and deepened the derogatory clichés, paternalism, hierarchies, and racism of colonialist societies.[10] 

Imagine Sayyida Salme living in an uptight society trained on conservative, religious values that was not only unaccustomed to ethnic differences, but also captivated when people that looked like her were showcased alongside animals – they’re not like us, not as good as us, odd enough to ogle – and then trying to be herself and fit in. Indeed, the Western racism that othered her must have been quite a shock compared to the highly integrated and interdependent caste system she had experienced during Zanzibar’s greatest prosperity, in a place where Europeans, notably, were able to practice their own cultures. As she points out:

That Europeans come to us, to a setting where they are always able to maintain their lifestyles, struck me as child’s play in comparison to my situation. … Everything initially seemed so impossibly difficult, especially considering that so much went against my grain, and yet I still had to conform. (Letters, p. 31)

This is not about excusing Sayyida Salme’s racism, but about seeing it in context. Perhaps Hamburg will come to reconsider the exceptional fate of a woman who – in addition to her remarkable contributions – also revealed the othering of her time as both subject and object, who, in fact, was objectified by the very city that has now objected to her. This is about a greater appreciation of history in all its complexity.

Let her history surprise you; let her story inspire you – let her authentic voice speak to you.

Andrea Emily Stumpf

October 9, 2024

Photo credit:  Der Spiegel magazine (“Menschen im Wildgehege”, February 4, 2009) from the collection of Peter Weiss; depicting a reconstructed Nubian village showing “daily life” complete with stuffed crocodile.

[1] The concept of “othering” has roots in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), where he described how the West othered the East to define its own identity. Today, the term primarily refers to amplified differences of race, gender, nationality, or culture used to create hierarchies of exclusion, reinforce superiority, and justify discrimination.

[2] Quoting from Howard W. French’s excellent book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War (2021): “African labor, in the form of slaves, became the providential factor that made the very mise en valeur or development of the Americas possible.” (p. 6)

[3] Another eye-opening book is Kelly Lytle Hernandez’s Bad Mexicans: Race Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (2022).

[4] See my essay “On Controversy” in the Memoirs, pages 243-51.

[5] Her sign was renamed Teressa-Platz in memory of an infant that represented all immigrant infants who died because of the Nazi regime – clearly a politically safe choice, since infants have no track record to be criticized.

[6] Sayyida Salme lived in Hamburg from 1867 to 1872/3.

[7] Known in German as Völkerausstellungen and Völkerschauen.

[8] In Germany, these exhibits began petering out only after World War I, until they were banned by Hitler in 1940 for fear of contamination between the races.

[9] Far from being interested in the actual scholarship, the point was to benefit from up to 40% reductions in the pleasure tax on their profits (Lustbarkeitssteuer).

[10] See, for example, Anne Dreesbach, “Kolonialausstellungen, Völkerschauen und die Zurschaustellung des ,Fremden,‘“ in Europäische Geschichte Online (2017). Also in English: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0159-2012050324