Week 3: Race and Ethnicity

While the main focus of the 1888 Exposició Universal was industry (particularly local industry), bolstered by arts, culture, and science, the European and American imperial worldview was hardly absent from the exposition. Not much attention was devoted to the contemporary imperial aspects of the Spanish state—perhaps because Spain's empire was in such marked decline compared to that of visiting nations, or because Catalonia's regional identity got in the way—but one exhibit stands out for overtly epitomizing nineteenth-century concepts of European racial dominance and ethnological hierarchy.

In the 1830s, the Verreaux brothers, two French taxidermists, exhumed the body of a young man in modern-day Botswana, stuffed and preserved the body, and displayed it in their shop in Paris along with various examples of African wildlife they had brought back as well. In the 1880s the body was purchased by Catalan veterinarian, taxidermist, and later first director of the Barcelona Zoo, Francesc Darder i Llimona. In 1888 this taxidermied body, posed holding a spear, was the centerpiece of Darder's own exhibition at the Exposició Universal.

Pages from a book published by Darder in 1888 to promote his exhibit. Source: University of Botswana History Department.

It appears this figure, nicknamed "el Negro" ("the Black"; "el Negre" in Catalan) at the Exposition, was not controversial in the least during the Exposició Universal, nor for the subsequent century. After Darder's death, el Negro, along with the rest of Darder's collection, was donated to a museum in the small town of Banyoles, not far from Barcelona. In the Museu Darder, el Negro was largely forgotten until the 1992 Olympic Games, when African nations threatened to boycott the Games on account of the display. [1] In 1997 the exhibit was taken down, and the body was returned to Botswana and interred in Harare in 2000. [2]

"El Negro" on display in the Museu Darder, Banyoles, Spain. Source: University of Botswana History Department.

[1] Cress, Doug. "Mummy in Museum Stirs Racial Dispute." The New York Times, 5 Feb 1992.

[2] University of Botswana History Department. "El Negro of Banyoles." 2003. . Accessed 25 Sep 2011.