S6 E7: The making of the “African barbarian” cliché: the stuffed African of Banyoles

My African Cliches (English)

My African cliché of the day is a question “How many? ". How many generations of tourists from all over the world had seen “El Negro”? How many have left this museum with the simplistic association at the head of "Black or African = barbaric?" ". did I just say Barbaric? Who is really is the barbaric here? Is it the Bechuana? or rather those who stole a dead buried body, who stuffed it, those who sold it, bought and exhibited it, those who took a picture of him without batting an eyelid, those who posed in front of it and shrugged their shoulders before going to taste tapas, those who refused to send him back home, in short, all those who failed to see an anomaly of their culture and history, to acknowledge human suffering. Come on, we are talking about the end of the 1990s, it was like yesterday! And yet since 1947, Birago Diop, the great Senegalese poet, already said it, in his sublime poem titled Spirits, which I allow myself to slightly change hoping the purists will forgive me.