Question

Why does the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle have an exhibit of an east African village?

From a Zoo press release (February 2001):

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation generously funded African Village, which opens this May. The exhibit will immerse visitors in a representation of a rural village in East Africa. The village will contain both traditional (thatch-roofed) and contemporary (metal-roofed) structures, including a community pavilion (palaver hut) for educational programming and special events, a primary school house, a teacher's house and a traditional Kikuyu house. The Kikuyu are the largest ethnic group in Kenya.

At least there aren't any actual Kikuyu on display.

Photo credit: windflowers43

Comments

[Andy]

A couple of contrasting views of the same thing....
http://endearing-and-astute.blogspot.com/2007/09/flora-fauna-and-foreigners_26.html
and
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/lifestyle/24547_fam25.shtml

[Judith]

Hmmm. The first one addresses the Maasai Journey exhibit from 2007, which is actually unrelated to the African Village, and had its own controversial reactions. The Village, however, opened in 2001.

The second one still makes it sound sketchy to me:

"The village marks a divergence from other major zoo efforts," says exhibits curator John Bierlein. "We decided to make the savanna a culture of place. Typically you hear an institutional voice, but here you can hear the voice of East Africans."

Really? The voice i heard was saying, "This zoological institution thinks it is appropriate to display artifacts of current human culture from eastern Africa, but it does not do so for any other of the geographical locations represented within its walls. This is because it does not occur to us that Africans are human."

Maybe i'm wrong, and we have discussed this in person as well, but at the very least the African Village is a grossly misguided attempt at cultural literacy.