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

Any reader with the preconception that African entertainers were absent from major European and American cities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be surprised by this book and horrified by the notoriety of the case studies it explores. Using period illustrations and citing from unabridged archival sources, Bernth Lindfors offers readers a sweeping, yet thorough, account of black subjects: performers, quacks and freaks who were ruthlessly abused and exploited for commerce and science.

The first two chapters are largely devoted to a poignant and extensively illustrated account of Sartjee Baartman, the infamous Hottentot Venus, who "gained some notoriety in London in 1810 to 1811 as a popular performer" (36) and was immortalized in English and French caricature portraits. Not even in death did she cease to be exhibited and exploited, as Lindfors points out. "the Hottentot Venus lived on in Europe as a symbol of the backwardness and bestiality of Africans. She became emblematic of the exotic othernesss of sub-Saharan Homo sapiens" (46). Following her death in 1815, and "to satisfy public curiosity about unusual African peoples, the skeleton, brain, and a plaster cast of the body of the Hottentot Venus were placed on public display" (31) in France until the exhibition was forced to close in 1982.

Lindfors then moves on from stories of bizarre Georgian caricatures and ignominiously intrusive physical examinations, carried out in the name of science, to the American-born actor, Ira Aldridge, whose appearance as William Shakespeare's Othello on the Covent Garden stage in 1833 was unprecedented. However, as Lindfors observes, Aldridge, even though African-American, was deceitfully promoted as "a native of Senegal" (47) to tap into audiences' curiosity about the stereotype of the inept and barbarous "African Tragedian" depicted in a popular one-man show by "England's leading mimic, Charles Matthews the Elder" (48). In fact, Aldridge, though an accomplished actor in his own right, was not spared the ignominy of being caricatured as "a stupid looking, thick lipped, ill formed African" (49). Such racial stereotyping was in keeping with the prevailing wisdom of the time which used caricature as a method of distancing Africa from Europe and reassuring white audiences of their presumed racial superiority to blacks. The rest of the chapter chronicles the many controversies generated by Aldridge's performances and presence on the London stage at a time when the British political establishment was coming to terms with the 1833 Act abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire.

In the next six chapters Lindfors returns to the Euro-American obsession with Africans as freaks, exotic human curiosities and bizarre fairground entertainers who were displayed for their novelty value. Chapter 4 considers examples of a group of Bosjesmans from South African who were exhibited between 1846 and 1850 in Britain. The chapter also compares the sort of reception accorded the Bosjesmans to that experienced by two youngsters, Martinus and Flora, labelled "Earthmen" or Bushman-Troglodytes. Chapter 5 examines the exhibition of a group of Zulu performers in 1853 Britain, while Chapter 6 offers an account of Victorian London from the point of view of one of the Zulus. They were said to have travelled voluntarily and were paid for shows in which they gave an "extremely dramatic performance, not a static sideshow" (93). However, this did not shelter them from the racial assault and ridicule that had been visited on others before them. Lindfors points out that such disdain for blacks was aptly exemplified in Charles Dickens's vitriolic onslaught in "The Noble Savage", which he wrote after seeing the Zulus perform:

To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, wholly fails to reconcile me to him. I don't care...