Superior

2

It’s a Small World

How did scientists enter the story of race?

ONCE, A LONG TIME AGO, I floated around the earth in the space of minutes.

I was on a ride at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, Florida, my little sisters and I perched alongside each other in a slow mechanical boat, buoyed by sugar. ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’ chimed in tinny children’s voices, while minuscule automata played out cultural stereotypes from different countries. From what I can recall, there were spinning Mexicans in sombreros and a ring of African dancers laughing alongside jungle animals. Indian dolls rocked their heads from side to side in front of the Taj Mahal. We sailed past, given just enough time to recognise each cultural stereotype, but not quite enough to take offence.

This long-forgotten vignette from my childhood is what comes back to me on the drizzly day I approach the eastern corner of the Bois de Vincennes woodland in Paris. I had heard that somewhere here I’d find the ruins of a set of enclosures in which humans were once kept – not as cruel punishment by the authorities, and not by some murderous psychopath. Apparently they were just ordinary, everyday people, kept here by everyday people, for the fascination of millions of other everyday people, for no other reason than where they happened to come from and what they happened to look like.

‘Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,’ American anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in 1973. These webs are ours only until someone comes along to pull at the threads. The nineteenth century had marked an age of unprecedented movement and cultural contact, turning the world into a smaller place than it had ever been. It was less mysterious, perhaps, but no less fascinating. And people wanted to see it all. So in 1907 there was a grand Colonial Exposition on this overgrown site in Paris, within the Bois, in what was known as the Garden for Tropical Agriculture, recreating the different parts of the world in which France had its colonies.

Eight years earlier, the garden had been founded as a scientific project to see how crops in distant lands might be better cultivated, helping to bring in more income for colonisers back in Europe. This exposition went a step further. To exotic plants and flowers it added people, displaying them in houses vaguely typical of the ones they might have left behind, or at least how the French imagined them to be. There were five mini ‘villages’ in all, each designed to be as realistic as possible so visitors could experience what normal life was like for these foreigners. It was an Edwardian Disneyland, not with little dolls, but actual people. They transformed the tropical garden into nothing less than a human zoo.

‘In Paris, there were many exhibitions with human zoos,’ says French anthropologist Gilles Boëtsch, former president of the scientific council at the National Center for Scientific Research, who has studied their dark history. There was a circus element to it all, a cultural extravaganza. But there was also a genuine desire to showcase human diversity, 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.

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 people and dividing these groups, it was easier to control them.

It is no accident that modern ideas of race were formed during the heyday of European colonialism, when those in power had already decided on their superiority. By the nineteenth century, the possibility that races existed and some were inferior to others gave colonialism a moral kick in the drive for public support. The truth – that European nations were motivated by economic greed or power – was harder to swallow than the suggestion that the places they were colonising were too uncivilised and barbaric to matter, or that they were actually doing the savages a favour.

In the United States, the same tortured logic was used to justify slavery. The transatlantic trade in slaves officially ended in 1807 once the United Kingdom passed its Slave Trade Act, but the exploitation continued for far longer. The use of slave labour continued, people’s bodies plundered both in life and death. Dead black slaves, for instance, were routinely stolen or sold for medical dissection. Daina Ramey Berry, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, has documented the economic value of slavery in the United States. She notes that there was a brisk trade in black corpses in the nineteenth century, some exhumed by their owners for a quick profit. It’s ironic that much of our modern scientific understanding of human anatomy was built on the bodies of those who were considered at the time less than human.

‘If you could say that the slavers were naturally distinct from the slaves, then you have essentially a moral argument in favour of slavery,’ explains Jonathan Marks. Given this distinction, many feared that the abolition of slavery would set free the human zoo, unleashing chaos. In 1822 a group calling itself the American Colonisation Society bought land in West Africa to establish a colony named Liberia, now the Republic of Liberia, motivated largely by the desperate dread that freed black slaves would want to settle among them, with the same rights. Repatriation to the continent of their ancestors seemed like a convenient solution, ignoring the fact that after generations in slavery, most black Americans simply didn’t have a tangible connection to it any more – let alone to a new country that their ancestors may never have seen.

Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist who had been mentored by Georges Cuvier and moved to America in 1846, argued passionately against blacks being treated the same as whites. Shaken by such an intense physical disgust towards black domestic workers serving him food at a hotel that he almost couldn’t eat there at all, he became convinced that separate races originated in different places, with different characters and intellectual abilities.

Enslavement was turned back on the slaves themselves. They were in this miserable, degrading position not because they had been forcibly enslaved, it was argued, but because it was their biological place in the universe. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Plymouth in 1841, an American slave owner from Kentucky named Charles Caldwell had already claimed that Africans bore more of a resemblance to apes. In their 1854 book Types of Mankind, American physician Josiah Clark Nott and Egyptologist George Gliddon went so far as to sketch actual comparisons between the skulls of white and black people, alongside those of apes. While the typical European face was artfully modelled on classical sculpture, African faces were crude cartoons, exaggerating features that made it seem they had more in common with chimpanzees and gorillas.

Propelled by a belief that black people had their own unique diseases, Samuel Cartwright, a medical doctor practising in Louisiana and Mississippi, characterised in 1851 what he saw as a mental condition particular to black slaves, coining it ‘drapetomania’, or ‘the disease causing Negroes to run away’. Harvard University historian Evelynn Hammonds, who teaches Cartwright’s story to her students, laughs darkly when she recounts it. ‘It makes sense to him, because if the natural state of the negro is to be a slave, then running away is going against their natural state. And therefore it’s a disease.’

For Hammonds, another chilling aspect of Cartwright’s work is the way in which he methodically described the sufferers of drapetomania. ‘The colour of the skin is the main difference,’ she reads for me from her notes, ‘… the membranes, the muscles, the tendons, all fluids and secretions, then the nerves, and the bile. There’s a difference in the flesh. The bones are whiter and harder, the neck is shorter and more oblique.’ Cartwright continues this way, couching racism in medical terminology. ‘These kinds of observations turned into questions to be explored going forward. Since the 1850s, people have been trying to figure out if black bones are harder than white bones,’ Hammonds explains. Cartwright’s medical ‘discoveries’ were patently rooted in the desire to keep slaves enslaved, to maintain the status quo in the American South where he lived. In place of universal humanity came a self-serving version of the human story, in which racial difference became an excuse for treating people differently. Time and again, science provided the intellectual authority for racism, just as it had helped define race to begin with.