Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ to give a glimpse of life in the faraway colonies. According to some estimates, the 1907 Paris Exposition attracted two million visitors in the space of just six months – a hit with curious citizens who wanted to see the world in their backyard.

      Wherever they were held, most evidence of human zoos has long disappeared, most likely deliberately forgotten. The Garden for Tropical Agriculture is one rare exception. That said, the French authorities don’t appear to want to brag about it. It’s tucked behind some quiet and well-to-do apartment blocks with barely any signposting. Greeting me as I enter is a Chinese arch that was once probably bright red, but has since faded to a dusty grey. As I walk under it down a gravel path, the place is peaceful but dilapidated. To my surprise, most of the buildings have survived the last century fairly intact, as though everything was abandoned immediately after the tourists left.

      To one side is a weathered sculpture of a naked woman, reclining and covered in beads, her head gone, if it was ever there at all. A solitary jogger runs past.

      For European scientists, zoos like this offered more than fleeting amusement value. They were a source of biological data, a laboratory stocked with captive human guinea pigs. ‘They came to the human zoos to learn about the world,’ explains Boëtsch. Escaping the bother of long sea voyages to the tropics, anatomists and anthropologists could conveniently pop down to their local colonial exhibition and sample from a selection of cultures in one place. Researchers measured head size, height, weight, colour of skin and eyes, and recorded the food these people ate, documenting their observations in dozens of scientific articles. With their notebooks, they set the parameters for modern race science.

      Race itself was a fairly new idea. Some of the first known uses of the word date from as recently as the sixteenth century, but not in the way we use it now. Instead, at that time it referred to a group of people from common stock, like a family, a tribe, or perhaps – at a long stretch – a small nation. Even until the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, many still thought about physical difference as a permeable, shifting quantity. It was rooted in geography, perhaps explaining why people in hotter regions had darker skins. If those same people happened to move somewhere colder, it was assumed their skins would automatically lighten. A person could shift their identity by moving place or converting to another religion.

      The notion that race was hard and fixed, a feature that people couldn’t choose, an essence passed down to their children, came slowly, and in large part from Enlightenment science. Eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, famous for classifying the natural world from the tiniest insects to the biggest beasts, turned his eye to humans. If flowers could be sorted by colour and shape, then perhaps we too could fall into groups. In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, a catalogue published in 1758, he laid out the categories we still use today. He listed four main flavours of human, respectively corresponding to the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, and each easy to spot by their colours: red, white, yellow and black.

      Categorising humans became a never-ending business. Every gentleman scholar (and they were almost exclusively men) drew up his own dividing lines, some going with as few as a couple of races, others with dozens or more. Many never saw the people they were describing, instead relying on second-hand accounts from travellers, or just hearsay. Linnaeus himself included two separate sub-categories within his Systema Naturae for monster-like and feral humans. However the lines were drawn, once defined, these ‘races’ rapidly became slotted into hierarchies based on the politics of the time, character conflated with appearance, political circumstance becoming biological fact. Linnaeus, for instance, described indigenous Americans (his ‘red’ race) as having straight black hair and wide nostrils, but also as ‘subjugated’, as though subjugation were in their nature.

      And so it began. By the time human zoos were a popular attraction, when the ghostly enclosures of the Bois de Vincennes were not eerily empty as they are now, but full of performers – when I would have more likely been within a cage than outside it – the parameters of human difference had become hardened into what we recognise them as today.

      Paris wasn’t the only city to enjoy this breed of spectacle. Other European colonial powers hosted similar events. Indeed by the time of the 1907 Paris Exposition, human zoos had been around for more than a century. In 1853 a troupe of Zulus undertook a grand tour of Europe. And forty-three years before this an advertisement in London’s Morning Post newspaper signalled the arrival of a woman who would go down in history as one of the most notorious of all racial freak shows, her story echoed by those to come. ‘From the Banks of the River Gamtoos, on the Borders of Kaffraria, in the interior of South Africa, a most correct and perfect Specimen of that race of people,’ it announced.

      The ‘Hottentot Venus’, as she was described in the paper, was available for anyone to take a peek at, for a limited time only and at the cost of two shillings. Her real name was Saartjie Baartman and she was aged somewhere between twenty and thirty. What made her so fascinating were her enormous buttocks and elongated labia, considered by Europeans to be sexually grotesque. Calling her a ‘Venus’ was a joke at her expense. The Morning Post took pains to mention the expense shouldered by Boer farmer Hendric Cezar in transporting her all the way to Europe. He was banking on her body causing a scandal.

      Baartman had been Cezar’s servant in Africa, and by all accounts, she had come with him to Europe of her own free will. But it’s unlikely that the life she endured as his travelling exhibit was what she expected. Her career was brief and humiliating. At each show, she was brought out of a cage to parade in front of visitors, who poked and pinched to check that she was real. Commentators in the press couldn’t help but notice how unhappy she seemed, even remarking that if she felt ill or unwilling to perform, she was physically threatened. To add to the humiliation, she became, quite literally, the butt of jokes across the city, rendered in relentless caricature like a Twitter meme of Kim Kardashian.

      At the end of her run, Baartman ended up in Paris. She found herself at the mercy of celebrated French naturalist Georges Cuvier, a pioneer in the field of comparative anatomy, which aims to understand the physical differences between species. Like so many before him, he was spellbound by her – but his was an anatomist’s fascination, one that drove him to undertake a detailed study of every bit of her body. When she died in 1815, just five years after being displayed in London, Cuvier dissected her, removing her brain and genitals and presenting them in jars to the French Academy of Sciences.

      As far as Cuvier was concerned, this was just science and she was just another sample. The prodding, cutting, dehumanising fingers of researchers like him sought only to understand what made her and those like her different. What gave some of us dark skin and others light? Why did we have different hair, body shape, habits and language? If we were all one species, then why didn’t we look and behave the same way? These were questions that had been asked before, but it was nineteenth-century scientists who turned the study of humans into the most gruesome art. People became objects, grouped together like museum exhibits. Any sense of common humanity was left at the door, replaced by the cold, hard tools of dissection and categorisation.

      Following a lifetime of being relentlessly poked and prodded, Baartman remained on show for a hundred and fifty years after her death. Her abused body ended up at the Musée de l’Homme, the Museum of Man, looking out on the Eiffel Tower, a plaster cast of it still standing there until as recently as 1982. It was only in 2002, after a request from Nelson Mandela, that her remains were removed from Paris and finally returned to South Africa for burial.

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      ‘In the modern world we look to science as a rationalisation of political ideas,’ I’m told by Jonathan Marks, a genial, generous professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is one of the most outspoken voices against scientific racism. Race science, he explains, emerged ‘in the context of colonial political ideologies, of oppression and exploitation. It was a need to classify people, make them as homogeneous as possible.’ By grouping СКАЧАТЬ