Early African Entertainments Abroad: From the Hottentot Venus to Africa’s First Olympians by Bernth Lindfors (review)

This book is a collection of essays on Africans and pseudo-Africans who toured the British Isles in the nineteenth century. Inevitably, then, a major theme is the British racism and ignorance that depicted Africans as inferior humans, or even subhuman. It is thus frequently painful to consider the examples discussed in this work. A chapter on Saartjie Baartman, for example, explores how this San woman was exploited as “the Hottentot Venus” and paraded, mocked, poked, and studied. Well-illustrated chapters on Africans in early-century caricatures and late-century circuses help readers imagine what Britons thought of Africans and how little they knew. An essay on Charles Dickens shows how in the 1850s this hugely influential novelist used Zulu entertainers to promote the idea that Africans were simply savages, rather than Noble Savages. It is clear that the victims of such entertainments and discussions were not only Africans, but also British audiences who were enchanted by savagery and difference.

At the time, however, those who might have known better did not always consider exaggeration for show business pure fabrication. Reports from Africa, from explorers and missionaries, traders, and travelers, mostly described Africans as “brutish, dimwitted, naïve, emotional, undisciplined, uncultured—in short, children of nature who needed to be civilized and domesticated” (6). Lindfors emphasizes that with regard to Africa, nineteenth-century entertainment, ethnography, and anatomy were deeply entwined. European understanding of Africa was so limited that everyone—the public and scientists alike—wanted access to the Africans available in Europe. Scientific theories about African biology and culture, based on massive ignorance and racism, were only a bit more sophisticated than the advertisements of the entertainment hucksters.

Fortunately, Lindfors goes beyond victimization and makes efforts to understand African agency. Throughout the book he pays attention to the performers’ reasons for being in Britain, and their opinions about what they were experiencing. While all African performers in Europe (and the United States) were seen as savage and simple, and while many suffered, others profited from their situations. Some volunteered to come to Europe because they were curious. Others, such as a pair of conjoined twins (the United African Twins), found entertainment a much-needed way to make a living. Some, such as the twins, and also actor Ira Aldridge, were not Africans, but actually African Americans who pretended to be from Africa in order to attract a larger audience. Some truly enjoyed entertaining spectators, and some liked to take advantage of the myths and fears of the West by pretending to be savages. Most, says Lindfors, were good actors.

Lindfors concludes with a reminder that modern Western attitudes toward Africans descend from the racism and ignorance of the nineteenth century. He notes that recent performances in London and New York of “degrading South African musicals that denigrate Africa and Africans” are part of the Western inheritance. Most readers will agree that other contemporary examples of Africa’s being stereotyped and denigrated are widespread, even if they are much subtler than in the nineteenth century.

Lindfors, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, is a scholar of African literature and folklore and the leading authority on early African spectacles in Europe and the United States. He first published the essays in Early African Entertainments Abroad as articles in difficult-to-locate scholarly journals between 1979 and 2007. These essays are still fresh and engaging and complement the themes and examples provided by Lindfors’s Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Indiana UP, 2000).