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The exhibition, Tarzan! ou Rousseau chez les Waziri (1) presented at the Musée du Quai Branly, in September 2009, seemed to me to be portraying a very dangerous and offensive tendency in Western culture, namely, the tradition of ridiculing, trivializing and distorting the image or the perception of non-European peoples, especially Africans and their culture. This tendency has been described by some Francophones as “crapulocratie”. (2)

The homepage of the Musée du quai Branly describes Tarzan as





“This hero of literature for young people, comic strips and the cinema who inspired the dreams of many a teenager in the 20th century, is today the paragon of a new fable: the son and protector of nature, Tarzan, with "the stoicism of an animal and the intelligence of man” exists first and foremost through his relationship with the African jungle, a stereotypical jungle, populated with wild animals, but invaded in turn by Roman armies, anthropoids, Amazons, and men...He also invites us to broaden our ecological conscience.(3)

The exhibition which retraces the Western prejudiced imaginations of Africa utilizes Tarzan films, photos and grotesque objects to represent racist colonialist ideology whereby the white man and woman enter wild Africa, inhabited by apes and ape-like creatures, face unforeseen dangers, battle with horrible creatures and animals but finally, come out as victors.

Right from the entrance to the exhibition, the visitor is confronted with a huge gorilla whose threatening size and expression indicate that one is entering a dangerous zone inhabited by unimaginable creatures like the ape-men. The masks, the films and feathers transpose the visitor to another world: the jungle of Africa as imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan who was influenced, inter alia, by Rudyard Kipling in the Jungle Book.

One sees also a lonely sculpture of a mother and baby which is titled “African maternity”. The baby looks as old as the mother and has no baby-like features except that it is smaller and lying on the lap of the mother. It should be noted that the museum has many beautiful sculptures from Africa depicting the theme of maternity, albeit stolen from Africa but these do not appear in this exhibition because they do not fit into the distorted image of Africa that the exhibition seeks to present.

The question I kept asking myself is what the curator and the Musée du quai Branly hoped to achieve with this horrible exhibition which throws us back to the worst periods of racism and colonialism. An interview in The Guardian with the curator of the exhibition is reported as follows:

"The idea is to tackle the imagery through which we westerners see our friends from Africa," said the curator, Roger Boulay. "It's about exploding stereo¬types and looking at how this big ¬western Tarzan myth was created through an intellectual mish-mash of ideas”.

"It's also about explaining the big ideas at the turn of the century from Darwinism to the enfant sauvage, the concept of nature and the King Kong myth of the giant ape kidnapping the white woman." (4)

When President Jacques Chirac opened the museum in 2006, he advanced as argument for building a new museum in Paris, against much opposition, that the arts of Africa, Asia, America and Oceania hitherto described as primitive and not accorded much respect, deserved a better place where their contributions to civilization could be appreciated:

”France wished to pay a rightful homage to peoples to whom, throughout the ages, history has all too often done violence. Peoples injured and exterminated by the greed and brutality of conquerors. Peoples humiliated and scorned, denied even their own history. Peoples still now often marginalized, weakened, endangered by the inexorable advance of modernity. Peoples who nevertheless want their dignity restored and acknowledged.”(5)

What kind of dialogue did the museum which describes itself as “the place where cultures dialogue” expect? Can one expect a meaningful dialogue from an exhibition where Africa is not presented as it was or is but as imagined by Westerners who had never been to Africa, such as the creator of Tarzan? Are Africans expected to discuss the ridiculous image of their continent presented by a racist American or the horrible ideas of those with no experience of their continent but bent on presenting it as land of savages and creatures inferior to Europeans and closer to apes than to men?

The Musée du Quai Branly obviously cannot escape its history and the social and political context in which it was born without great efforts. Though it is housed in a new building, the museum inherited looted artefacts that had been in other French institutions such as Musée de l'Homme and the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens as well as the racist superiority complexes which underpinned colonialism and neo-colonialism. The museum and its officials also inherited the manifestations of arrogance and feelings of superiority which Westerners have demonstrated in their encounters with non-European cultures and peoples since the sixteenth century. Chirac condemned evolutionary theories in his inaugural speech but such Darwinist ideas, in one form or other, are as alive today as they were in previous ages. The designations “Arts primitifs” or “arts premiers” are based on an assumed scale of development on which the Europeans are at the top and the non-Europeans at the bottom. (6)

At the establishment of the museum, there was a definite movement from the overtly condescending designation of “art primitif” to “arts premiers” or “art africain” among French intellectuals and institutions, including the Musée du Quai Branly. The art dealers in Paris however stuck to the pejorative name, “art primitif”. Paradoxically, at the time the Musée du Quai Branly was showing Tarzan and the very distorted image of African art and culture, the Parisian art dealers were having their own exhibitions which demonstrated the beauty and elegance of African art (7).True, many of the cultural objects displayed probably have dubious provenance and possibly came from the large stock of objects the French looted in the colonial era. (8). Jacques Chirac who opened the dealers' exhibition recently was still talking about the need to respect cultural diversity and rejected theories of evolution. He must surely have been aware that the museum he opened three years previously was busy purveying ideologies and theories based on evolution through the Tarzan show.(9)

Many who have seen the Tarzan! exhibition have acknowledged its failure. A New York Times feature article gave this devastating evaluation:

“The show is a mess, truth be told. It has wonderful drawings from bygone comic artists like Burne Hogarth and Hal Foster, and it means to use Tarzan to help dissect how Western pop culture has (mis)interpreted the non-Western “other.” But it's displayed in cramped galleries at a museum whose theatrical, heart of darkness installation of non-European cultures as diverse and unrelated as Inuit and Cameroonians — in meandering ill-lighted spaces connoting primitive, spooky peoples — is of a piece with the antediluvian ethos of the original Tarzan. (10)



Marion Festraëts has remarked that the exhibition resuscitates the worst racist, colonialist and sexist stereotypes. (11).

Probably the organizers did not expect Africans to visit this insulting exhibition even though in a city like Paris, with a sizeable population of Africans and people of African descent, this is hard to imagine. An African seeing this exhibition is instantaneously revolted and filled with nausea, anger and wish either to leave the exhibition or destroy it. He can hardly avoid confrontation with the insinuations and implications purveyed by images of ape-men and leopard-men; they are supposed to inhabit the same territory as Africans. The racist tones are unavoidable and those who have been subjected to racist torment and comments by Europeans do not take long to recognize and feel these attacks. Are the African visitors supposed to dialogue about the over-sized sexual organs of the ape-men and the leopard-men? The sick products of Western minds are thrown at us as necessary materials for serious reflection by a museum supposedly dedicated to portraying our cultures and the contributions we have also made to civilization. Continued    Source: Kwame Opoku, Dr.

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