The 1895 African Exhibition at The Crystal Palace was an instance of a human zoo in London. The colonial exhibition presented around eighty people brought from Somalia along with two-hundred African animals. [1]
The 1895 African Exhibition at The Crystal Palace was an instance of a human zoo in London. The colonial exhibition presented around eighty people brought from Somalia along with two-hundred African animals. [1]
The exhibition was organised by Carl Hagenbeck and Josef Menges as an effort to rehabilitate the Crystal Palace which was becoming less popular among visitors. [2]
The Somalis were brought from Berbera, Somaliland. [3] The "exhibits" at the human zoo spent their time in a kraal but slept in covered buildings due to the cold weather. [3] They were wearing exotic animal skins and had red mud in their hair. [1] During the exhibition, they had to perform national sports and dances multiple times a day, set up and take down of their accommodation and cook food. The people also had to mimic "warfare" where different tribes attack each other until Europeans arrive to end the conflict. [3]
The display included large paintings and set pieces representing Somalia. These served as a backdrop when all the people and the animals formed a "caravan" and passed through the space. [3]
The Horn of Africa (HoA), also known as the Somali Peninsula, is a large peninsula and geopolitical region in East Africa. Located on the easternmost part of the African mainland, it is the fourth largest peninsula in the world. It is composed of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Djibouti; broader definitions also include parts or all of Kenya, Sudan, South Sudan, and Uganda. The term Greater Horn Region (GHR) can additionally include Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania. It lies along the southern boundary of the Red Sea and extends hundreds of kilometres into the Guardafui Channel, Gulf of Aden, and Indian Ocean and shares a maritime border with the Arabian Peninsula of Western Asia.
The Crystal Palace was a cast iron and plate glass structure, originally built in Hyde Park, London, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. The exhibition took place from 1 May to 15 October 1851, and more than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in its 990,000 square feet (92,000 m2) exhibition space to display examples of technology developed in the Industrial Revolution. Designed by Joseph Paxton, the Great Exhibition building was 1,851 feet (564 m) long, with an interior height of 128 feet (39 m), and was three times the size of St Paul's Cathedral.
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, also known as the Great Exhibition or the Crystal Palace Exhibition, was an international exhibition that took place in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October 1851. It was the first in a series of World's Fairs, exhibitions of culture and industry that became popular in the 19th century. The event was organised by Henry Cole and Prince Albert, husband of Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom.
The Scramble for Africa, also called the Partition of Africa, the Conquest of Africa or the Rape of Africa, was the invasion, annexation, division, and colonization of most of Africa by seven Western European powers during an era known as New Imperialism. The 10 percent of Africa that was under formal European control in 1870 increased to almost 90 percent by 1914, with only Liberia and Ethiopia remaining independent.
A menagerie is a collection of captive animals, frequently exotic, kept for display; or the place where such a collection is kept, a precursor to the modern zoo or zoological garden.
Human zoos, also known as ethnological expositions, were public displays of people, usually in a so-called "natural" or "primitive" state. They were most prominent during the 19th and 20th centuries. These displays sometimes emphasized the supposed inferiority of the exhibits' culture, and implied the superiority of "Western society", through tropes that purported marginalized groups as "savage". The idea of a "savage" derives from Columbus's voyages that deemed European culture remained pure, while other cultures were titled impure or "wild", and this stereotype relies heavily on the idea that different ways of living were "cast out by God", as other cultures do not recognize Christianity in relation to Creation. Throughout their existence such exhibitions garnered controversy over their demeaning, derogatory, and dehumanizing nature. They began as a part of circuses and "freak shows" which displayed exotic humans in a manner akin to a caricature which exaggerated their differences. They then developed into independent displays emphasizing the exhibits' inferiority to western culture and providing further justification for their subjugation. Such displays featured in multiple colonial exhibitions and at temporary exhibitions in animal zoos.
The British Empire Exhibition was a colonial exhibition held at Wembley Park, London England from 23 April to 1 November 1924 and from 9 May to 31 October 1925.
Abraham Dee Bartlett was a British taxidermist and an expert on captive animals. A superintendent of the London Zoo, he was a prominent observer of animal life and a zoologist who became a popular authority on wildlife. Bartlett brought the London Zoo into prominence and was associated with many naturalists including Charles Darwin.
Guy the Gorilla (1946–1978) was a western lowland gorilla who was London Zoo's most famous resident and often profiled on children's TV shows and natural history productions. The exact day of Guy's birth was unknown, but the official birthday was set by the Zoo as May 30, and he received large numbers of cards each year.
The Ajuran Sultanate, also natively referred-to as Ajuuraan, and often simply Ajuran, was a Somali Empire in the Middle Ages in the Horn of Africa that dominated the trade in the northern Indian ocean. They belonged to the Somali Muslim sultanate that ruled over large parts of the Horn of Africa in the Middle Ages. Through a strong centralized administration and an aggressive military stance towards invaders, the Ajuran Empire successfully resisted an Oromo incursion from the west and a Portuguese incursion from the east during the Gaal Madow and the Ajuran-Portuguese wars. Trading routes dating from the ancient and early medieval periods of Somali maritime enterprise were strengthened or re-established, and foreign trade and commerce in the coastal provinces flourished with ships sailing to and coming from many kingdoms and empires in East Asia, South Asia, Europe, the Near East, North Africa and East Africa.
The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are a series of sculptures of dinosaurs and other extinct animals, incorrect by modern standards, in the London borough of Bromley's Crystal Palace Park. Commissioned in 1852 to accompany the Crystal Palace after its move from the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, they were unveiled in 1854 as the first dinosaur sculptures in the world. The models were designed and sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the scientific direction of Sir Richard Owen, representing the latest scientific knowledge at the time. The models, also known as Dinosaur Court, were classed as Grade II listed buildings from 1973, extensively restored in 2002, and upgraded to Grade I listed in 2007.
Carl Hagenbeck was a German merchant of wild animals who supplied many European zoos, as well as P. T. Barnum. He created the modern zoo with animal enclosures without bars that were closer to their natural habitat. The transformation of the zoo architecture initiated by him is known as the Hagenbeck revolution. Hagenbeck founded Germany's most successful privately owned zoo, the Tierpark Hagenbeck, which moved to its present location in Hamburg's Stellingen district in 1907. He was also an ethnography showman and a pioneer in displaying humans next to animals in human zoos.
A zoo is a facility in which animals are kept within enclosures for public exhibition and often bred for conservation purposes.
The 1911 Festival of Empire was the biggest single event held at The Crystal Palace in London since its opening. It opened on 12 May and was one of the events to celebrate the coronation of King George V. The original intention had been that Edward VII would open it in 1910, however, this was postponed after his death shortly before the planned opening day. The Festival contained a display of landscapes and exhibits from the British Empire, mainly the dominion countries, to encourage emigration to those nations; and it contained a large scale pageant dramatising British history. It was described at the time as 'a social gathering of the British family' encouraging the 'firmer welding of those invisible bonds which hold together the greatest empire the world has ever known'. It has since been described as the 'ultimate imperialist propaganda showcase'.
The Pageant of Empire was name given to various historical pageants celebrating the British Empire which were held in Britain during the early twentieth century. For example there was a small Pageant of Empire at the town of Builth Wells in 1909. In 1911 a giant Pageant of Empire took place at the Festival of Empire at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, where thousands of amateur performers acted out historical scenes The most notable was the Pageant of Empire which took place in London in 1924.
Zoo City is a 2010 science fiction novel by South African author Lauren Beukes. It won the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2010 Kitschies Red Tentacle for best novel. The cover of the British edition of the book was awarded the 2010 BSFA Award for best artwork, and the book itself was shortlisted in the best novel category of the award.
Somali nationalism is centered on uniting the Somali people who share a common language, religion, culture and ethnicity, and as such constitute a nation unto themselves. The ideology's earliest manifestations in the medieval era are traced to the Adalites whilst in the contemporary era its often traced back to SYL, the first Somali nationalist political organization to be formed was the Somali National League (SNL), established in 1935 in the former British Somaliland protectorate. In the country's northeastern, central and southern regions, the similarly-oriented Somali Youth Club (SYC) was founded in 1943 in Italian Somaliland, just prior to the trusteeship period. The SYC was later renamed the Somali Youth League (SYL) in 1947. It became the most influential political party in the early years of post-independence Somalia. The Somali guerilla militia Al-Shabab is noteworthy for incorporating Somali nationalism into its Islamist ideology.
The royal Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal is shown on a famous group of Assyrian palace reliefs from the North Palace of Nineveh that are now displayed in room 10a of the British Museum. They are widely regarded as "the supreme masterpieces of Assyrian art". They show a formalized ritual "hunt" by King Ashurbanipal in an arena, where captured Asian lions were released from cages for the king to slaughter with arrows, spears, or his sword. They were made about 645–635 BC, and originally formed different sequences placed around the palace. They would probably originally have been painted, and formed part of a brightly coloured overall decor.
The Gorilla sculpture by David Wynne stands beside the Lower Lake in Crystal Palace Park, in Bromley in south-east London. Completed in 1961 and installed in 1962, the black marble sculpture depicts Guy the Gorilla, a western lowland gorilla brought from West Africa to London Zoo in 1947. It became a Grade II listed structure in 2016.
The Indian Ocean slave trade, sometimes known as the East African slave trade or Arab slave trade, was multi-directional slave trade and has changed over time. Africans were sent as slaves to the Middle East, to Indian Ocean islands, to the Indian subcontinent, and later to the Americas.