(dramatic music)
They traveled the world
in search of them for more than 100 years.
From the mid-1800s until the Second World War.
They were classified as freaks and human zoos.
Human beings everywhere have viewed
in the same way almost 35,000 exhibits.
In the 19th and 20th centuries
there were almost 1.5 billion visitors.
Human beings exhibited by other human beings.
In zoological gardens and circuses.
Theaters and anatomy rooms.
At Colonial Exhibitions and World Fairs.
These men and women were placed
on the same level as animals.
So it's extremely troubling.
At the same time there was a degree of conditioning
that it was very difficult to escape from.
Children, women and men were put on display in order
to support a hierarchization of the races
and justify world wide colonization.
(dramatic music)
Why was it so successful?
For a simple reason.
People came to see these savages
from extraordinary distant lands
who had long been fascinatingly exotic
and now at last they could be seen in the flesh.
(dramatic music)
They were asked to pretend to be cannibals,
whereas these people on display weren't cannibals at all.
They were asked to perform.
Thanks to human zoos,
racism became accepted and ordinary.
The savages people came to see were exotic,
terrifying and now on display.
Their names were Tambo, an aborigine from Australia.
Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Congo.
Marius Kaloie, a Kanak from New Caledonia.
Moliko, a Kau'na from Guyana.
Like them, thousands of other people were exhibited.
History has forgotten their names.
(dramatic music)
(people chattering)
Wanting to remember,
isn't about attaching blame to people.
Wanting to remember is above all about trying
to understand what happened
and why we are the outcome of this story.
(dramatic music)
From the 16th century Europeans imported people
they considered strange and savage
from far flung lands in order to exhibit them.
(dramatic music)
They were displayed in royal courts
and before rich aristocrats.
At the beginning of the 19th century the fashion
for ethnographic exhibitions spread to fairs, taverns
and theaters thereby reaching a larger audience.
(dramatic music)
Meanwhile, in the U.S.A.,
the king of human exhibitions was Phineas Taylor Barnum.
(dramatic music)
Since 1841 the monsters
in his famous freak shows had been attracting huge crowds,
making a fortune for its producer.
(dramatic music)
His idea was to stage shows
featuring the most exotic and strangest people in the world.
Dwarves, mermaids, Siamese twins, bearded ladies and giants.
They were assembled in a sort of gallery of oddities
which would give visitors a vision of another kind of world.
An extraordinary, fantastic world.
Hollywood didn't exist,
but Barnum had created this fascination
with what was strange.
(dramatic music)
Barnum revolutionized the American circus
by creating The Greatest Show on Earth,
a huge traveling circus with 5,000 seats.
He now intended to include savages as one of his features.
(dramatic music)
Before their popular success,
human exhibitions were reserved for the elite.
From the 16th century Europeans had brought
from remote lands people judged to be strange
or savages to exhibit them.
(birds calling)
An Irishman, Robert Cunningham was
to give him what he wanted.
(dramatic music)
When he heard about Barnum's message in 1883,
he was in North Queensland in Australia.
This was the home of the aborigines.
The country's indigenous people.
Oppressed by British colonists since the 18th century.
Deprived of the most basic rights,
victims of violent segregation,
they were remit of the Flora and Fauna Office.
Queensland wasn't a state then, it was a colony.
This was a turning point for aboriginal people
who'd been living here for thousands and thousands of years
and countless generations
because their land was being taken by Europeans.
So, aboriginal people began to move away
from the homelands and more settlers came into the area.
And then aboriginal people started fighting back.
It was a very brutal time for aboriginal people.
(dramatic music)
At a black camp as the closed villages
where aborigines were forced to live were called,
Cunningham met a young aboriginal man who he named Tambo.
Cunningham's choice of name was a reference
to the old American tradition of whites performing
with soot covered face in black face minstrel shows.
This would attract a better price from Barnum.
In these shows whites made up their face
in order to mock Afro-American slaves.
There were two stock characters present on stage.
Tambo on one side and Bones on the other.
An aborigine who had been given the name Tambo,
was a clear signal to the American public.
Suggesting that while it wouldn't be exactly the same kind
of show, the entertainment would be just as interesting.
(dramatic music)
Tambo's companions were also given new names.
Toby, Jenny, and their son Toby junior.
Billy, Suzie, Jimmy and Bob.
(dramatic music)
The prevailing pseudo-scientific ideology
ranked aborigines lowest among the human races.
Making them highly sought after for human zoos.
They were said to be an underdeveloped species,
unsuited to modern life.
And facing extinction.
(dramatic music)
I do know that not long after Cunningham got them
on the boat, from Townsville they wanted to go back
to their communities, they wanted to go home.
We know that the people was not aware
of what they were getting themselves involved with.
Cunningham actually had to remove all their clothes
so they wouldn't run away.
When they got into Sydney,
two people actually still escaped.
One of 'em actually stabbed a policeman.
The whole matter ended up before the court.
The judge still released the two escapees
into the care of Cunningham through a bond.
(dramatic music)
In the wake of this upset
the group hastily boarded the ship,
leaving the port of Sydney.
After the long crossing
they joined The Greatest Show on Earth in New York.
(dramatic music)
Barnum had prepared for his new acquisitions
to be the stars of his show.
The story he'd invented for them featured bespoke roles.
Cower before Billy the Hunter with his terrifying scars.
Succumb to the charms of Suzie Princess of Queensland.
Experience the thrill
as fierce Warrior Tambo performs his sensational war dance.
(man shouting)
(dramatic music)
The pictures included
in the booklets promoting the aborigine shows
evoked the idea of cannibals
who might potentially be dangerous.
But they are also presented as people who will entertain
by performing feats such as throwing boomerangs.
So once again, there's kind of a circus element.
A certain preoccupation with entertainment
and a fascination with cannibalism.
(train whistling)
(dramatic music)
The tour traveled across America
at breakneck speed.
(dramatic music)
The troupes appearance in more than 130 U.S.
and Canadian cities pushed them to exhaustion.
(dramatic music)
Barnum and Cunningham made a fortune.
(dramatic music)
I can only imagine coming from a remote island
in North Queensland to be paraded in front of 30,000 people,
the horror they were feeling.
To be exhibited there.
So, in a strange land, strange people,
strange noises, smells.
God knows how that would feel.
(dramatic music)
In 1884 one year after arriving in America
and having traveled the whole country,
Tambo fell ill and died while still on tour.
Cunningham had his body mummified and sold his remains
to a fairground museum in Cleveland.
(dramatic music)
More deaths followed in quick succession,
however, the show continued.
Despite these losses,
Cunningham knew his troupe could conquer Europe.
They set out for London.
The capitol of human zoos.
(dramatic music)
London had a tradition of human zoos
since the beginning of the 19th century.
Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus is often cited
as one of the first people to be exhibited in shows
that mixed science with entertainment.
When the aborigines arrived in London in 1884,
the British Empire was the worlds leading imperial power.
In the space of a century, between 1810 and 1914,
the population of the empire rose
from 10 million to 400 million.
The aborigines were actors.
They worked with an impresario.
They'd signed a contract,
they even received wages just enough
to cover basic living essentials, but no more.
So there's a case for describing them
in fact as professional savages.
(dramatic music)
In London Cunningham made the acquaintance
of Guillermo Antonio Farini the major impresario
for ethnic troupes who exhibited Namibian desert bushmen
at the Royal Aquarium.
(dramatic music)
This famous photograph was taken there
to promote his exhibition.
The white man is dominant posing paternalistically
with a hand on the child's shoulder.
The aborigines were used to being presented in this way.
In London they performed nightly at the Crystal Palace
which was constructed in 1851 for the Great Exhibition.
The Australian cannibals presence was trumpeted abroad,
their show was a stunning success
in the capitol of human zoos.
(dramatic music)
I'm not sure that the people
who went to see the show had that distance.
That they said, it's just a business.
So it isn't really true.
They're just play acting.
I don't think there was that distance.
And that's a very dangerous thing.
(dramatic music)
After England the Aborigines set out
on a grand tour of the Old World's theaters and music halls.
The Panopticum Castile in Berlin.
The Arcadia in St. Petersburg.
The Folies Bergere in Paris
where the survivors were photographed.
Jenny and Toby junior, who would both die from tuberculosis.
The fate of Billy, Tambo's companion is unknown.
The eyes of Billy are very serious.
So he just wondering where he is,
just lookin' at him, he's confused.
He's depressed feeling.
Low, low, low esteem, self-esteem.
Going overseas into another world, you know,
he's been stripped of his powers in a sense of,
he's been humiliated.
Because he's dominated by somebody else
who telling him what to do.
In our society he was respected as a law man.
But now he's not.
And you see that.
(gentle music)
With Australian government help,
Granddad Walter arranged for Tambo's remains
to be repatriated to this plot on Palm Island.
To allow him to rest in peace among his people.
(gentle music)
Tambo's mummified body was located in 1993 in the U.S.A.
in the basement of a funeral parlor in Cleveland.
When we brought Tambo back on the boat,
it was cloudy and the rain was going around the community.
I had to do the smoking ceremony.
And when we laid him to rest here, the trees with the wind
and the season were coming down in the rain.
And when he was completely home and buried, it cleared up,
everything was finish, completed and there was peace,
he was at peace with all.
(dramatic music)
I feel strong because of he's back on his ancestral country.
I feels his strength and his spirit is back home now
and he's free.
He's free.
(gentle music)
This story needs to be told.
Purely because the mistakes
of the past don't revisit us in the future.
(dramatic music)
(people chattering)
In this period when exoticism was all the rage,
showmen were not the only ones
to grasp the interest the exhibitions aroused.
(train whistling)
The colonial powers saw a ready opportunity to introduce
to their citizens both their colonies
and the validity of their imperial policies.
(dramatic music)
At the end of the 19th century in the West,
a renewed impulse to colonize prompted the European powers
together with the U.S.A. and Japan
to freely divide among themselves
those territories still available.
In particular Africa.
There was an effort to divide up the African continent
in this case, into colonial bits
that would keep everybody happy.
So there was the British and the French
and Germany of course got its colonies in West Africa
and in East Africa.
The Portuguese were still there,
the oldest colonial power in Africa.
And then the Italians became interested too in the Northeast
and so they simply carved out the African continent
among themselves.
(gentle music)
The world was gradually appropriated
by those who saw themselves as uniquely civilized.
At the same time, human zoos proliferated
to justify colonial domination of the world.
(dramatic music)
There was undoubtedly a sense
that if you displayed these other people,
you were providing a mirror to yourself.
The supposed elevation in civilization became a part
through having these primitive people
to demonstrate how much more advanced you were.
(gentle music)
Colonized people had to accept, share
and participate in the myth that made them.
That occurred in the colonial period.
Not just in Africa, but also in Japan and other places.
(gentle music)
But in order for the savage to exist,
those who are presumed to be savages have
to somehow accept that that is what they really are.
(camel groaning)
At the beginning of the 1890s,
the role of human zoos was shifting.
In response to political objectives.
Which were masterfully staged and orchestrated.
(gun firing)
(dramatic music)
Moliko's story is that of a survivor.
After months of humiliation,
she was able to return to her village and people.
(gentle music)
100 years later, for her descendants,
the memory of her ordeal sheds light
on the trauma of being exhibited.
(gentle music)
Moliko and her companions belong to the Kau'na people,
Amerindians from Guyana who used
to be called Galibees in Europe.
In 1882 Moliko, together with other people
from her village left the banks of the Maroni River
in Guyana accompanied by the sound of drums.
She and 32 others had volunteered
to undertake the journey to Europe.
The elders told us
that just before they left, a big feast took place.
They were able to recall a mast
and that gradually the ship disappeared over the horizon.
Up to that point they could see what happened.
But once the ship was beyond the horizon, there was silence.
(dramatic music)
, The Kua'na didn't know what awaited them.
But the French explorer Francois Levaillant,
sent to them by the Ministry for Colonies had managed
to persuade them.
He had promised them money and marvelous sights
and vouched for their good treatment.
France possessed one
of the greatest colonial empires.
It shared almost one third of the world's surface
with the British.
But people also had to be informed
about this colonial power.
So, human zoos represented a fabulous opportunity
by letting people who didn't travel,
experience these imperial conquests.
(dramatic music)
The Zoological Garden knew exactly how
to publicize every exhibition.
A model among human zoos,
the park with the miniature train
had already received many other peoples.
It was here that the Kua'na were to be exhibited.
Moliko was accompanied
by men, women, and children.
Volunteers who were now kept in cages.
Savages, once again in Paris, they made pottery,
played with pirogues,
they played at being savages for people through their bars.
They were neither recognized for what they were
nor seen as anything other than savages.
(dramatic music)
Subjected to constant humiliation, the Kua'na,
like all the others peoples exhibited were subjected
to racialist scientific studies.
(dramatic music)
The prevailing ideology claimed
that photography proved that humanity could be divided
into civilized races and savages.
(dramatic music)
The exhibition of the Kua'na was a great success.
The public flocked to the zoological garden.
The Kua'na embodied to perfection the idea
of what savages were like.
(dramatic music)
The winter, disease and exhaustion rapidly caused the deaths
of some members of the troupe in Paris.
The show continued none the less.
(dramatic music)
of the 32 Amerindians who had set out for France,
only 10 returned to their village.
Moliko was one of them.
(dramatic music)
The story of the Kau'na.
It's distressing because the Kau'na people were never able
to mourn what had happened.
Mourning is something essential for the Kau'na people.
A century on, they have still not mourned.
Caroline and Lydia are mother and daughter.
They are direct descendants of Moliko.
They had never seen these photographs of her
and her companions in misfortune taken by Roland Boneparte.
That's Moliko.
That was your grandmother's name.
She was called Moliko.
We don't know who the other one was.
She said they were afraid when they reached France.
That's what she used to say about what happened.
It's what she told me.
I feel a little bit sorry for them.
When I see these photos.
My father told me that his grandmother had left,
but I never saw the photos.
Today, is the first time I've seen the photos.
This unspoken trauma
is something the descendants still struggle with today.
(gentle music)
I don't think it's right.
What was it about, the way the whites messed them around.
What did they want to do with them?
If you mess around with somebody,
it means you're mistreating them.
If a white man takes someone away,
he has to respect that person.
It was shameful to do that.
They wanted to make the Kua'na do as they were told.
But maybe the Kua'na wouldn't obey.
Maybe, maybe not.
No one really knows what happened.
(gentle music)
No manual existed.
There were no courses in Amerindian history
and no historian down to the present has worked
on this aspect.
None the less, it's part of our identity of course.
But it's also a facet of the history of France.
And that's what interests us today.
(dramatic music)
The exhibition of the Kua'na
was a first major stage in the use by the state
of colonized peoples for propaganda purposes.
(dramatic music)
Now the Ministry of Colonies took control
of human exhibitions giving its authorization
for all the private shows.
(dramatic music)
The human zoos moved gradually
from scientific racism to run of the mill racism.
We've been asking how the shift occurred.
It wasn't via books or films, there was no cinema.
It wasn't via photos or Jules Verne's novels.
It was via a popular cultural practice of going
to see savages for entertainment at the weekend
at the Zoological Garden or the Eiffel Tower.
(dramatic music)
Of all the peoples exhibited one stood out
in terms of popularity.
Six diminutive Africans attracted everyone's attention.
They were Batwa pygmies from the Belgian Congo.
The Saint Louis Anthropology Department had financed
an expedition to Africa under the leadership
of explorer Samuel Verner, to bring them
to be presented exclusively at the exhibition.
Ota Benga was one meter 41 in height.
This young man with an enigmatic smile would soon
be the most popular among them.
(gentle music)
Samuel Verner was commissioned explicitly
to bring back pygmies because it was believed at that time
that they were the least civilized people on the planet.
And so, the whole point of the Saint Louis World's Fair was
to map human progress from the lowest to the highest
with the pygmies said
to represent the lowest form of humanity.
(gentle music)
Since 1885 the Congo had been the property
of the Belgian King Leopold II.
His authority was unchallenged.
And his dominion especially violent and harsh.
Acts of brutality were common place.
(gentle music)
Samuel Verner himself said how he captured the pygmies.
He wrote about how the people were crying
as he was like loading these people onto the ships
and how some got away.
He also indicated how he had gone into villages with force,
he was armed and he had the consent
and the support of a brutal regime to exercise his mission.
(dramatic music)
Of all the specimens presented
at the exhibition,
the pygmies aroused the greatest curiosity among visitors.
They were symbols of absolute savagery.
(dramatic music)
Their small stature was due to a morphological adaptation
to living in the Equatorial Forest.
(dramatic music)
But according to Westerners,
it signified that they were subhuman.
They saw in them confirmation of man's descent from apes.
Proof of Darwin's famous postulated missing link
between man and the animals.
(dramatic music)
Day after day, Ota Benga was treated
to Americans vulgarity and contempt.
(dramatic music)
Ota Benga's teeth were probably most responsible
for the horrendous experience he had in the United States
because of his teeth which were chipped to points.
It's a very common practice in the Congo.
This imagery validated this idea
that he had been a cannibal and of course he was not.
(dramatic music)
This deception
consummated Samuel Verner's success.
He received the St. Louis gold medal
at the closing ceremony of the exhibition
which had attracted 20 million visitors.
(dramatic music)
After traveling to the Congo again,
the explorer finally took Ota Benga to New York.
His American adventure had resumed.
But behind bars.
It was 1906, Samuel Verner was unable to provide
for his pygmy so he loaned him to the head of the Bronx Zoo,
who put him in a monkey cage.
He was made to play the savage with bow and arrows as props.
In a few short years more than 40,000 people came
to see him in this enclosure next to a chimpanzee.
His partner in a number of small acts.
(dramatic music)
THere's an outcry in the press
and not just the African American Press,
but increasingly in the mainstream press
that this is so degrading and so contrary
to what a civilized nation should be doing
that zoo authorities together with some of the ministers
in New York, worked out an arrangement
to have Benga conveyed to an orphanage.
(dramatic music)
Now free and in the care
of a religious community, Ota Benga hoped finally
to be able to integrate into his adopted country.
The black ministers who took him in
in 1910 gave his a Western Christian education.
He went to primary school and took English lessons.
Subsequently he was sent to Lynchburg, Virginia,
where he got to know Anne Spencer,
a respected Afro-American poet and civil rights activist.
She taught him to write.
Protected and supported, Ota Benga tried
to live a normal life and to go to work.
But as a Congo Pygmy, he could not adapt
to the country of the Ku Klux Klan.
Well the end of the story is
the First World War breaks out
and it's clear to Benga
that it's going to be very, very difficult
to get back to the Congo.
And we don't know exactly what precipitated his action
but he takes his own life.
He has a gun and leaves his residence
and shoots himself through the heart.
(dramatic music)
By the time of his death 12 years
after coming to the U.S.A.
he had become the most famous savage
in American show business.
His body was never claimed by the Congo.
(gentle music)
The story of Ota Benga is the story
of racism.
The thousands of people who saw Ota Benga failed
to see a human being.
We can see how throughout history effectively,
certain discourses have de-legitimized men and women.
Certain discourses have constructed the alleged superiority
of white people.
(dramatic music)
(upbeat music)
(dramatic music)
The First World War reset attitudes
to exhibiting people and to colonial populations.
The two great powers, Britain and France chose out
of economic and military opportunism
to enroll people from their colonies from 1914.
They now believed they could be civilized
and were useful when kept under control.
(dramatic music)
Yesterday's savages were today's brave soldiers
or indigenous workers.
(dramatic music) (artillery booming)
States deployed them against those they saw
as even more savage.
The Germans.
(dramatic music) (artillery booming)
After victory was achieved, Afro, Caribbean,
Hindu, Afro-American, Kanak, North African
and Asian soldiers of the French
and Allied armies paraded
on the Champs-Elysees cheered by the crowds.
Post war exhibitions were quite unlike those
before the First World War.
They were no longer savages they were natives.
They were not our equals
but they had emerged from the darkness.
They had entered the civilization phase.
These former savages had to be shown
to be of service to the colonial powers.
These pacified territories must be showcased
by bringing folkloric, exotic, even erotic elements to bear.
The task was to show a world working under Western hegemony,
that means change but the aim was the same.
To show that the masters were here
and the natives over there.
(gentle music)
Marius Kaloie was 21 when he agreed
to leave his native New Caledonia for Paris
with 100 fellow Kanaks.
(dramatic music)
It was 1931.
He trusted the French official
who suggested he and the others present Kanak culture
at the Colonial Exhibition in Vincennes.
(dramatic music)
They were to return in eight months.
Some 100 people agreed to undertake the journey
including teachers, pupils, customs officials,
waiters and seaman.
Little did they know they would become formidable heroes
in one of the greatest humiliations in French history.
(dramatic music)
At the Zoological Garden, Marius was told
he could not leave his enclosure unaccompanied,
rest or pray.
None of the promises made were kept.
He fallen into a trap.
(dramatic music)
It was like a return to the 19th century.
(dramatic music)
It was terrible because I had
to perform Kanak customs all day.
The women had to breastfeed in public,
they had to make pirogues, dance all day.
They were slaves.
I think it shameful.
It makes me feel sad and angry.
Even if no one was killed,
people simply should not treat other people like that.
(dramatic music)
Some of the troupe went to Germany.
While twice a week the others performed
at The Colonial Exhibition in Vincennes.
The organizers exhibited them as natives from New Caledonia,
as part of the colonies official presentation.
(dramatic music)
Unlike the Zoological Garden,
they were not presented as savages,
but as bold natives of the empire.
(people chattering)
(dramatic music)
France wished to showcase the scope
of an Empire which was at its peak.
With a population of 100 million
and an area twice that of the Roman Empire.
(dramatic music)
To picture a Colonial Exhibition you have
to take Disneyland today, multiplied by two or three
and not 30 kilometers away from Paris,
but right in the heart of Paris.
In the former workers districts, completely remodeled.
It's the world of the early days of cinema,
talkies are just arriving
and here's a life sized reconstruction.
It's Hollywood.
(dramatic music)
The exhibition was inaugurated
by President Gaston Doumergue and Marshall Lyaurtey,
joined by the Under-Secretary of State
for Colonies Blaise Diagne.
In just a few months 33 million tickets were sold.
(dramatic music)
The facade of The Colonial Palace in bas-relief,
designed by the sculptor Alfred August Janniot
was a huge fresco of 1,130 square meters
that illustrated the wealth of the French colonies.
(dramatic music)
The interior of the palace included a fresco painted
by Ducos de la Haille.
It's depicted allegories and scenes
from daily life illustrating what France had done
for the colonies.
The end result is a colonial fantasy
around the natives displayed.
I think that 1931 was the peak,
but that means that the decline is really getting under way.
The have to show that there's history which costs money,
investment, which cost all the political debates
and all the Assemblies.
They have to show it wasn't pointless.
And that they had kept some of the promise
to have raised inferior peoples
to something approaching the level of metropolitan France.
(dramatic music)
All over the world,
voices were beginning to denounce human zoos.
For the first time an enormous scandal erupted.
In France, the Human Rights League, the Communists
and even former colonists in New Caledonia protested.
All agreed that such displays were unacceptable.
You could not glorify the civilizing mission
of colonization and at the same time exhibit fake savages.
(dramatic music)
(camera flash popping)
Exhibited in Germany, the Kanaks themselves rebelled.
Less and less willing to play the game.
(dramatic music)
The protest prompted the Minister of Colonies
to order the Zoological Garden to stop the exhibition
and to bring back the part of the troupe
in Germany at Hagenbach.
At stake was the honor of the French Republic
which could not stoop to condoning such displays.
(dramatic music)
The authorities decided to repatriate the troupe.
The Kanaks arrived home in July 1932.
(dramatic music)
(bells clanging)
Marius Kaloie did not wish to return.
He saw his future in France.
He refused to board the ship in Marseille
and returned to the woman he loved.
She was French.
Her name was Juliet Gabrielle Fabre
and she was the only good luck he had in France.
(dramatic music)
A few weeks later the couple married in Bordeaux.
(dramatic music)
There is one surprising thing.
The marriage certificate says the bride has asked
to be able to retain her French nationality.
Because the Kanaks were considered to be foreigners.
Where as it was a French colony.
Sylvette was born one year later.
She was only a few months old when Marius died
in a street car accident.
Her family always hid the fact that her father was a Kanak.
Only in her old age did she discover her origins,
thanks to a journalist friend.
(dramatic music)
Today Sylvette has returned to the Zoological Garden
where her father was exhibited.
(dramatic music)
It's a story about France
and a story about New Caledonia.
But I really am, I'm proud because he was my father,
but the way he was treated it's shocking.
It's not a very nice story.
Especially as I never knew him.
It doesn't happen everyday.
It was French Colonialism, it was the period.
It's shameful I think.
The truth must be told, it has to come out.
We weren't the ones at fault.
What happened, happened.
But it mustn't happen again.
There's something, it's as if this garden is full
of those men you see.
(gentle music)
In 2006 Sylvette arranged
for Marius' remains to be returned to New Caledonia.
Today he rests among his people
in Natalo Cemetery in La Foa.
He returned by ship.
We took him to the tribe.
They prepared food, the children sang.
Everyone spoke about the story, he's returned.
He's returned home.
(dramatic music)
The exhibition of the Kanaks was one
of the last in Europe.
The scandal was so great
that such shows were no longer possible.
In the decade prior to the Second World War,
human zoos and Colonial Exhibitions gradually ceased.
The last such exhibitions took place at the end
of the decade in Britain, Portugal, Germany and Italy.
(dramatic music)
They were no longer profitable.
The public was tired of them.
Only a few diehards hung on.
But their productions were so blatantly mediocre
that visitors would have none of it.
(dramatic music)
(boots thudding)
The end of human zoos marked the start
of revolts heralding decolonization wars.
(dramatic music)
To abandon the zoos was to abandon colonial domination.
(dramatic music)
A new era had begun.
But one of conflict and suffering.
The next 20 years from 1940 to 1960 would be the darkest
and most violent of the 20th century.
(dramatic music)
The Second World War, decolonization,
the revolts against desegregation in the U.S.A.,
a wave of violent struggles swept over the world.
(dramatic music)
This long chapter of history really only concluded
when the colonies won their independence
between 1960 and 1970.
Thereafter the West would use any means
to erase the shameful past.
(dramatic music)
For more than 30 years human zoos were banished
from our collective memory,
stowed away in securely locked crates in museums.
It was the age of oblivion.
The History of human zoos faded
because it was that of popular culture.
Not the great colonial adventure.
It was forgotten because researchers
in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s only found fragments of it.
Didn't look in the archives.
Weren't interested in what was behind Buffalo Bill.
What we've begun to rediscover today stems
from a simple question,
how could Westerners believe
that across the seas there were savages.
(dramatic music)
In the mid-1990s researchers
and museum directors began to open the crates,
search the archives and even to exhume remains.
(dramatic music)
They rescued human zoos from oblivion.
In less than two decades silence gave way to words.
(dramatic music)
(camera flash popping)
Understanding the past is important
for understanding what's happening today.
What I mean is that,
if you want to understand why there is racism
in our societies you have to ask questions about human zoos.
You have to ask questions about the history of colonization.
You must ask questions about the history of slavery.
And then you can understand why today
there is still a domination.
(dramatic music)
To lay this past to rest,
the bodies must rest in peace.
In spite of the obstacles, this process has begun.
Especially since the return in 2002 of the bodily remains
of the Hottentot Venus to her home country South Africa.
We're increasingly aware
that this undigested history has really stuck
in the collective memory.
More and more countries are asking
to have their history back in a way.
We still have human remains in our collections.
In museums, in universities, in hospitals everywhere,
we have thousands and thousands of skeletons
in Europe which were brought here illegitimately.
And to give up a skeleton,
is also to acknowledge this colonial history.
(dramatic music)
The issue is now an international one.
Many bodies are still inaccessible.
(dramatic music)
To give back the bodies,
to find the bodies in the museums,
in the exhibition spaces is in a way,
to appease consciences.
Pacify memories and also to allow everyone
to lay this past to rest.
Look it in the face sure.
But also turn the page
so that tomorrow we can overcome racial violence
and construct a new common destiny.
(dramatic music)
Will we one day send home the bodies
of the exhibited?
As we did in the past for Tambo?
Will we one day write the story of Moliko
into the history of Guyana and the history of France?
Or that of Marius Kaloie
to overcome the conflicting memories that persist,
not least in New Caledonia.
(dramatic music)
What can we do, so that one day the body
of Ota Benga is reclaimed by the Congo
and written into his country's history.
(dramatic music)
It is now the duty of a generation to rescue this story
from oblivion in order to pacify memories
and once and for all turn the page on human zoos.
(dramatic music)