"It was, the posters said, a rare chance to see a little known but interesting people: a live display of 57 Somali men, women and children who cooked, weaved and danced for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of Edwardians who flocked to Yorkshire to see them."
"Members of the Somali troupe, namely leader and broker Sultan Ali, negotiated contracts and wages, sold crafts to visitors and, according to researchers, staged a protest in the park after receiving compensation of 15 equivalent to just over 1,600 in today's money which they believed was inadequate after a fire that destroyed four huts in the village."
"Yet curators of the new exhibition, which opens on Saturday, believe a modern view of the village masks its complicated reality. Abira Hussein, guest curator, avoided describing the village as a human zoo, because while the phrase captures the violence of colonial display, it can flatten the conditions of recruitment, labour and negotiation that shaped the Somali village."
"The project is not about recreating the spectacle. Instead, it attempts to centre the lives and experiences of the Somali people,"
A 1904 Bradford Great Exhibition featured a live Somali village of men, women, and children who cooked, weaved, and danced for large crowds. The attraction drew more than 350,000 visitors and helped fund Cartwright Hall’s civic art collection for decades. The display ran from May to October and showed daily activities including slaughtering sheep, attending school, and learning Arabic and the Qur’an. A modern exhibition revisits the event to spotlight Britain’s colonial legacy and to avoid reducing the village to a simple “human zoo” narrative. Somali troupe members negotiated contracts and wages, sold crafts, and staged a protest after compensation for fire damage was considered inadequate. Some participants returned home, while others continued touring across Europe and North America.
#colonial-legacy #bradford-great-exhibition-1904 #somali-diaspora #museum-exhibitions #human-zoo-debate
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]