Pygmie exhibit shunned
2002-08-21 00:38
Yvoir, Belgium - Marie Alem and nine other Pygmies came to Belgium two months ago and built a traditional village, complete with huts and life-size figures at a private nature park.
They showed videos about Pygmy life, played music and sometimes performed dances for visitors in return for a cut of the admission fee.
The Pygmies say their goal was to bring in money to pay for
wells, schools and hospitals for their Baka tribe back home in
Cameroon.
What they and the park have mostly drawn is a storm of
criticism. For many Belgians, recalling the country's sometimes
brutal colonial past and mocking exhibitions of Africans in the
19th century, the Pygmy show is demeaning and racist. Few people
have visited.
Alem says she and the other Pygmies have had enough of the
criticism and they're ready to go home, although the show runs
until August 31.
"I don't understand," Alem said in broken French. "We are
carrying out a humanitarian project for a better life. That was
our objective for coming here."
So political
The exhibit was the brainchild of Louis Raets, who runs the
Oasis Nature Park in the Meuse River valley just outside Yvoir,
about an hour's drive southeast of Brussels. The park normally
features tropical fish and butterflies, but those exhibits were
removed for the Pygmy show.
Raets, who said he paid the air fares for the five female and
five male Pygmies, said he got the idea for the show as a way to
help the Baka tribe during a visit to Cameroon last year.
"This is for a 100% humanitarian operation," he said.
"Everything has become so political in this case. All we are
trying to do is to give them a hand up."
Not many people have seen it that way.
"We disapprove of this exposition, which brings back the
exploitation of humans and defies human dignity," said Joseph
Aganda of the Movement for New Migrants, an advocacy group for
African immigrants in Belgium.
Human rights activists and the immigrant group appealed to
Belgium's civil rights watchdog to halt the show. The agency
declined, ruling the show is not racist, but that did not stop the criticism and protests.
A history of exhibiting people
"Belgium, like other former colonial countries, has a history of exhibiting people," Johan Bosman, an analyst at a Belgium support group for indigenous peoples, wrote in the newspaper De Morgen. "We only have to look back at the colonial expositions of King Leopold II, during 1894 and 1897, where 'real Congolese' were brought over and looked at by some 1 million people, who threw peanuts at them."
Seven Congolese died in those exhibits from exposure to cold
weather.
"Many question if people do this for a good cause, even if they are free to come and go as they please," Bosman added.
Criticism also has come from Cameroon, where the show has
attracted widespread media coverage.
'Do they understand?'
In an editorial, the state-run Cameroon Tribune asked if the
Pygmies even understood what was happening to them.
"Do they know what is expected of them, and how the resources
accruing from their exhibition will be used?" it wrote. "Certainly not. As Jean Bibe, one of the Pygmies noted, he is content with having entered an airplane and a train."
Raets said he couldn't say how much money they show has brought in, but said not many tickets had been sold.
Alem and another Pygmy, Roger Owonu Ze, said the group doesn't
know how much money it has raised. They are to get about 40%
of each 6 euro admission ticket.
But because of the criticism, only a few hundred people have come, Owonu Ze said. "This (criticism) has created a lot of prejudice," he said. - Sapa-AP
- SAPA