Protests against Human Zoo i Houston: Africans on display together with chimpanzees?

Five years ago people from all over the world protested against the “African Village” in the zoo in Augsburg, Germany. Now, a new campaign is being planned against “The African Forest“, a $50 million project in the Houston Zoo, where “African culture” is on display together with chimpanzees and giraffes.

The 6.5-acre exhibit is designed “to give patrons the illusion they are strolling through an open landscape populated with chimpanzees, giraffes and other equatorial animals". “Through presentations and artifacts, human cultures of the equatorial forests will be included in the exhibit” , landscape architect Jim Brighton told the Houston Chronicle. “Houses fashioned from tree leaves — a form of temporary housing — will be constructed for children’s activities.".

“This is indeed like the African village in Augsburg - except this is a project that costs tens of millions of dollars and will be permanent - and some of the same anthropologists who protested that human zoo are onboard to protest this one such as Nina Glick Schiller and Data Dea", explains Shannon Joyce Prince, Dartmouth Lombard Fellow and citizen of Houston, in an email to me.

The Zoo is according to Prince “only showing aspects of Africa that fit Western stereotypes of cultural anachronism and primitivism. It “falls neatly into the contemptible tradition of its human zoo predecessors, replicating a non-white village, a place where non-white humans live, in a zoo among the habitats where animals live".

“The African Forest is about exhibiting and teaching inaccurate Western conceptions of African indigenous cultures in a place designed to exhibit and teach about animals. The African Forest is also about making and keeping African indigenous peoples conservation refugees. The African Forest and the practices it promotes are neither about respecting Africans nor protecting animals. They’re about claiming authority over African land, wildlife, and human lives", Shannon Joyce Prince writes in a paper.

In the Zoo’s view, Africans are in conflict with wildlife, she writes. Therefore, African Forest plans to promote ecotourism as a way to “help” Africans and African wildlife. But the consequences of such conservation activities are often devasting specifically for central Africans and pygmies. For in Africa it’s common for conservationists to create refuges to conserve wildlife by simply kicking Africans out. The Zoo is funded by corporations like Exxon, Chevron, Shell that have are involved in this business:

Basically, among the corporations that fund the Houston Zoo are some of the most human and wildlife rights abusing corporations in existence. These same businesses try to clean up their images by creating wildlife refuges – but they create those refuges by forcing indigenous people off their land. Then the Zoo, which receives funding from those corporations, claims that the indigenous people who are getting kicked off their land are the ones who harm wildlife and promotes conservation and conservation refuges.

>> Shannon Joyce Prince: Human Zoos, Conservation Refugees, and the Houston Zoo’s The African Forest (pdf, short versjon)

>> Human Zoos, Conservation Refugees, and the Houston Zoo’s The African Forest (long version)

Shannon Joyce Prince sent a letter to the Houston Zoo several weeks ago which has not received a response.

She asks for “opposing The African Forest, human zoos, and the creation/perpetuation of the conservation refugee crisis in one or more of the following ways":

1. Tell the Houston Zoo you are against The African Forest human zoo and the creation of conservation refugees as well as the continuation of the conservation refugee crisis by contacting the Houston Zoo here: http://houstonzoo.com/contact/. Tell the Houston Zoo that you will boycott zoos that host human zoos and/or make/keep Africans conservation refugees. Please mention your affiliations. Be sure to send a copy of your message to nohumanzoo (AT) yahoo.com so that we have a record of your letter in case the Zoo doesn‚t respond and to prevent the Zoo from deciding to claim that no one is protesting.

2. Send your name and affiliation to nohumanzoo (AT) yahoo.com if you want to be put on a petition stating, „We, the undersigned, do not support The African Forest human zoo, the creation of conservation refugees, or the continuation of the conservation refugee crisis.”

3. Raise awareness about The African Forest through your blog and encourage others to write the Zoo and sign the petition.

Please be aware that, naturally, the letter you send or your signature on the petition may be made public.

“The racialization processes facilitated by the Augsburg zoo and other zoos are not benign because they can lay the ground work for discrimination, barriers to social mobility, persecution, and repression", anthropologists Nina Glick Schiller, Data Dea and Markus Höhne wrote in their report African African Culture and the Zoo in the 21st Century: The “African Village” in the Augsburg Zoo and Its Wider Implications (pdf)

Such “ethnological exhibitions” or “Völkerschauen” have a long history, linked to colonialism. For more than half a century - from the beginning of the 1870s to the end of the 1930s - the exposition of so-called exotic peoples in zoological gardens** and international expositions attracted a huge public.

UPDATE: Interesting debate and round-up at ZooChat: Cultural Zoo Exhibits = Racist? » Houston Zoo

SEE ALSO:

African village in the Zoo: Protest against racist exhibition

In Detroit and London: More African Villages in the Zoo

Thesis: Conservation for Whom? Telling Good Lies in the Development of Central Kalahari

In Norwegian TV: Indian tribe paid to go naked to appear more primitive

Is this anthropology? African pygmies observe Britains in TV-show

Geldof’s Live8 and Western myths about Africa