When most people think of a zoo, they think of animals behind fences and glass. But for well over a century, zoos in Europe and North America also put human beings on display. These so-called “human zoos” exhibited thousands of indigenous men, women, and children from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. They were transported — sometimes legally, sometimes not — to foreign cities where paying crowds came to stare at them as if they were specimens of a lesser species. This practice was not a fringe curiosity. It was mainstream, widely celebrated, and financially profitable, drawing tens of millions of visitors across dozens of cities including Paris, Hamburg, London, Barcelona, Antwerp, Milan, and New York City.
The people held in these exhibitions were forced to live in constructed “villages” or open enclosures that were designed to look “primitive.” They were required to wear only their traditional clothing regardless of the season, performing in freezing winters and sweltering summers with no adjustments made for climate. Organizers instructed them to carry out humiliating acts for crowds: mock rituals, staged fights, barking alongside dogs, and demonstrations of skills that Western audiences had been told were signs of savagery. The people on display had no meaningful freedom to leave, particularly those brought from distant continents, because they had no money, no language, and no network to rely on in a foreign country.
One of the most heavily documented human zoo events in the United States was the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. The fair featured an area called the “Anthropology Exhibit,” which displayed indigenous people from around the world as living examples of racial hierarchy. Native Americans, Filipinos, Congolese Pygmies, and Patagonian tribes were all brought to the fairgrounds and housed in replica settlements. The event was officially tied to the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, but its ethnological exhibits were designed to show a clear ranking of human “types,” with white Europeans at the top.
The treatment of Filipinos at these events was particularly well-documented. Groups of Igorot people were brought to exhibitions across the United States and displayed performing their traditional practices. Crowds were especially drawn to them because American newspapers had widely publicized stories about Igorot dog-eating rituals, which organizers then staged as regular performances. The Igorot were described in promotional materials as fierce warriors barely removed from savagery, language that was used to justify both their colonization by the United States and their display as curiosities.
Germany was among the most active countries in organizing human exhibitions. Professor Lutz Heck, director of the Berlin Zoo, personally traveled to Africa to recruit members of indigenous tribes and bring them back to Germany for display. In 1931, he arranged for members of the Sara-Kaba tribe to be exhibited at the Berlin Zoo alongside the facility’s animals.
Much of the framework for these exhibitions was built by one man: Carl Hagenbeck, a German animal trader who is often credited with creating the modern zoo concept. Hagenbeck pioneered the use of open enclosures instead of caged environments for animals — but he applied the same idea to people. He organized what he called “ethnographic exhibitions,” capturing indigenous people and bringing them to Europe for display in naturalistic settings alongside animals. In one well-documented case, he captured eleven members of the Selk’nam tribe from Tierra del Fuego in South America and transported them to Europe, where they were displayed in cages.
The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair also hosted a series of athletic competitions for indigenous exhibitees under the name “Savage Olympics Exhibition.” The event was organized to compare the physical abilities of people from colonized regions against those of Western athletes, with the explicit goal of showing that “primitive” people were inferior competitors. The participants had not traveled to St. Louis voluntarily as athletes. They were already there as exhibits.
These exhibitions were not a relic of the distant past. The 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium — held just thirteen years after the end of World War II — featured a “Congo Village” in which Congolese people were displayed behind wooden fences for the amusement of Belgian visitors. Photographs from the event show a young African girl being watched by a crowd of white tourists, her expression blank as visitors peer in from behind the fence. Belgium still controlled the Congo as a colony at the time, and the exhibit was framed as an educational display of colonial life.
One of the most tragic individual cases within the human zoo era was that of Ota Benga, a Congolese man brought to the United States and exhibited at the Bronx Zoo in New York City in 1906. Zoo officials placed him in the Monkey House alongside orangutans and labeled him — in official promotional materials — as a “missing link” between humans and apes. The exhibit drew over 40,000 visitors per day. Crowds mocked him, poked at him, and treated him as an animal. Some Black ministers in New York City protested loudly, and Benga was eventually released from the zoo. But he never recovered from what had been done to him. In 1916, unable to return to a Congo that had been destroyed by Belgian colonialism and unable to fully assimilate into American life, he took his own life.
Native American leaders, including the Apache leader Geronimo, were also put on display at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Geronimo was held as a U.S. military prisoner at the time, and his appearance at the fair was arranged by federal authorities. He signed autographs and posed for tourists. Several other Native American chiefs were similarly displayed at the event, framed as exotic remnants of a dying culture rather than as leaders of nations.
Children were not spared from these exhibitions. Some were born inside the fairgrounds themselves, their entire early lives spent as displays for foreign tourists. An Inuit child born at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was later transferred to the 1904 St. Louis fair as an exhibit. The child’s birth at a world exposition was treated as a novelty, a marketing detail rather than the beginning of a human life.
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was one of the earliest large-scale events in the United States to incorporate human exhibits. Performers and indigenous people from across the colonial world were brought to Chicago and displayed on the fairgrounds. Women from various regions were exhibited as exotic performers, their bodies and appearance used as entertainment for white American and European visitors.
In Norway, human exhibitions were held as late as 1914. Photographs taken in Oslo that year show African men and women posed in enclosures, identified in records only as “exhibition subjects.” They are surrounded by constructed huts, their names unrecorded by the organizers, who saw no reason to document them as individuals.
Hagenbeck’s exhibitions extended far beyond individual cases. His “Galla Troop,” a group of East African people, was displayed in an enclosure alongside ostriches, zebras, goats, camels, and donkeys. They were given three huts to live in within that same enclosure. Organizers saw no distinction between the animals and the people sharing the space.
Paris hosted its own version of the human zoo in the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale, a garden built as a direct symbol of France’s colonial reach. The exhibit was constructed to recreate entire villages representing France’s overseas territories, complete with indigenous inhabitants who were required to live and perform in them. Agriculture, architecture, and daily routines were all staged for public viewing. The Jardin attracted over one million visitors in just six months.
One of the most well-known individuals subjected to this kind of display was Sarah Baartman, a South African woman from the Khoikhoi people. She was brought to Europe in the early 19th century and exhibited in London and Paris, where crowds paid to stare at her body. After her death in 1815, her remains — including her brain and skeleton — were kept in Paris’s Museum of Mankind on public display. They remained there for nearly two centuries, until Nelson Mandela formally requested their return in 2002. She was finally buried in South Africa that same year.
Germany’s so-called “Negro Village” exhibitions placed African families — including mothers and young children — behind chainlink fences for German audiences. The people inside lived in constructed huts with no meaningful privacy. Visitors walked past them the same way they walked past the animal enclosures in other parts of the same facilities.
The 1931 Parisian World Fair was among the largest human exhibition events ever held. That year, the exhibit drew 34 million visitors — a number that reflects just how normalized and popular these displays had become across Europe. The fair’s colonial exhibition was designed specifically to showcase France’s empire, with indigenous people from across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific brought to Paris and placed in elaborate simulated environments.
Women were also specifically recruited for exhibitions based on their physical characteristics. Women with a genetic trait called steatopygia — which results in pronounced buttocks — were brought to Paris zoos specifically so that white visitors could stare at their bodies. The exhibitors advertised this openly and promoted it as a scientific curiosity, using the language of anthropology to frame voyeurism as education.
