- By Brett Bailey
A ‘human installation’ that charts a river of racism running through European ethnographic displays and human zoos, the scientific racism that spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the atrocities committed by colonial forces in German South West Africa, and the current policies towards African immigrants in Europe.
The audience enter one-by-one and travel in their own time through the rooms of the exhibition. In Vienna the work was presented in an abandoned wing of the ethnographic museum in the Hoffburg Palace.
Performed by ten Namibian performers, a South African, and five African asylum seekers living in the host city.
This work is the first part of a series. EXHIBIT B will take in the French and Belgian colonial experiences in the two Congos, and EXHIBIT C will include the British and Portuguese colonial excursions in Africa. An document outlining the whole series can be found in the ARTICLE link below.
See EXHIBIT A at the Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki, 6-9 October 2011
Human Zoos:
Human zoos were major events from the mid 19th Century up until the Second World War. Tens of millions of Europeans and Americans flocked to these spectacles of colonial domination, where people from the non-Western world were exhibited in enclosures. Anthropologists jostled to analyse these ‘Natives’, and to measure their skulls against those of white people. Their dubious findings ‘proved’ that these ‘primitives’ were of a lower evolutionary order, and that colonising their land, destroying their cultures and reducing them to servitude was justifiable. Today, a century later, tens of thousands of skulls of the ancestors of the people of the free world are still held in the underground vaults of the museums and universities of their former colonial masters.
Genocide in German South West Africa:
In 1884 Africa was summarily divided amongst European powers at the Conference of Berlin, and Germany raised its flag over South West Africa. The Age of Empire was in full bloom. ‘A place in the sun’ brought with it national pride, global status, lebensraum, and wealth. The Herero and the Nama were two of the most centralised and populous peoples in South West Africa. Within 15 years the German colonial administration had brutally and systematically colonised them and appropriated vast swathes of their territory and their cattle. In January 1904 the Herero struck back in frustration, and the Kaiser threw the weight of his military might at them. Defeated at the Battle of Waterberg, they were pursued by the Colonial forces into the terrible Omaheke Desert. Here the military governor, General Lothar von Trotha issued his notorious ‘extermination order’:
“Every Herero, armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot dead. I shall take in no more women and children. I shall drive them back to their people or have them fired on.”
Wells were poisoned and tens of thousands perished of thirst or were hunted down and shot. In the forced-labour camps set up after the war, rape and beatings were routine. Under dreadful conditions several thousand Herero and Nama died of disease, exposure, starvation and exhaustion. In total, between 50 000 and 65 000 Herero (50% to 70% of the total Herero population) and 10,000 Nama (50% of the total Nama population) were killed. The attempted annihilation of these people is acknowledged as the first genocide of the 20th Century.
The Present:
EXHIBIT A links the above themes with the rising tide of racism towards African (and by extension, other non-European) immigrants living in Europe. Racism on the streets as well as state-sanctioned xenophobia.
‘ That Bailey has managed to negotiate this problematic and highly sensitive arena with almost faultless judgment is deserving of extraordinary praise. He has learned from previous miscalculations, such as his production of Safari, which was patronisingly praised by European audiences. This time the knives are out and Bailey subversively turns exotic spectacle on its head. His brave hosts at the Wiener Festwochen have given him artistic free rein. ’MAIL AND GUARDIAN