A past stripped of humanity

A child visiting a museum walks into a room named after a colonial explorer. He screams out in horror, finding a mummified gentleman and two dead children looking back at him. This figurative scene introduces the public of the Seminario Vescovile in Mantova to the real-life stories of the three humans, who were kidnapped from their African motherland to serve as slaves and ethnographic study objects for eighteenth-century European society.

Angelo Soliman's story is recounted by Hungarian novelist Gergely Péterfy in The Stuffed Barbarian, and the children Tukuba and Makunka are protagonists of Italian-Somali writer Igiaba Scego’s graphic novel The children of the forest. Together with professor and storyteller Melania Mazzucco, the two authors trace the real-life origins of their characters.

Soliman, captured in early childhood, reached Vienna when he was given as a gift to Austro-Hungarian prince Wenzel von Liechtenstein. A cultured man, during his lifetime he was able to ascend the social ladder and was deeply admired by Austrian high society, in particular the musicians Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn as well the Hungarian poet Ferenc Kazinczy.

Nonetheless, Soliman had to wrestle peers who categorised him as “an exotic Moor” and “physiognomic Moor”. The two qualities made reference on one hand to the practice of owning an African servant, a status symbol for European aristocrats since the Middle Ages, and on the other, to emerging nineteenth-century positivist theories that characterised the African race as inferior to the European one. After his death, this objectification resulted in Suliman being mummified and exposed in an exhibition at the Imperial Natural History Museum in Vienna.

Tukuba and Makunka had a similar treatment, in that they were violently brought to Italy and exhibited to the public as Pigmys, exotic objects. They were children, but lacked the protection which is the right of every child.

Their stories and that of Soliman’s, which until now have remained largely untold, are a testament to the suffering caused by European colonialism. Unfortunately, such a past has not been processed: the human remains exhibited in museums with little to no explanation are a manifestation of what has been buried.

Retrieving the memory of European imperialism, and its forgotten victims, however, is crucial. The child standing in front of that brutal human tableau must be given the tools to understand his horror. It is by knowing and honoring the past that he will be able to consciously create his present.