Impact of colonialism in Africa remain largely uncovered and ignored despite lasting impact as reflect in artist’s new provocative performance installation

Shining light on Africa’s colonial atrocities

Pygmies exhibited like animals before a gawping public. Forced labour with amputations to encourage productivity. Medical experiments used to justify Nazi theories of Aryan superiority. Even now, many of the horrors of colonial Africa are insufficiently understood in the countries that inflicted them, according to Brett Bailey, a South African whose latest performance installation, Exhibit B, explores some of the most shocking. “A lot of these atrocities were committed in the name of colonialism and in the name of bringing civilisation, Jesus Christ etc to Africa,” he told AFP in Paris.

“Thousands and tens of thousands were murdered and these have all been covered up and secreted away.”
Bailey, who uses real people in his installation, was inspired by the “human zoo” exhibits popular during the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries. Europeans and Americans once flocked to these exhibits in which Africans such as pygmy Ota Benga posed in native dress. Ota was brought to New York in the early years of the 20th century by American Samuel Verner after the explorer and businessman stumbled on a village inhabited by cannibals in the Belgian Congo. The cannibals had captured a group of pygmies and after establishing that the prisoners would rather go to America than be eaten Verner negotiated their sale.