92
Abdulaziz Dino Gidreta
World Fairs, Colonial Exhibitions and Missionary Collections
Before a century or two from now, most affairs of the ‘representation of others’ happened
in the context of public communication in form of festivals, exhibitions, fairs and expo-
sitions. The fact that such public events were widely practiced representational media
in the 19
th
century and early 20
th
century can be well linked to historical development of
communication mediums from the physical-human, to mass media, and to virtual phases.
At that period, even print and broadcast representational mediums have been quite in-
significant. So inevitably the subjects of representation and misrepresentation happened
in the context of proximate and physical human contacts in form of interpersonal, group
and public interactions.
In the global and regional contexts, the impacts of cross-cultural exhibitions can be deter-
mined by their volume which again can be associated to event management capabilities.
Obviously, in the imperial era, the entire power relation of the time was established on the
simple division of colonizer and the colonized. And with all its accumulated affluences
and influences, it was only the colonizer that could run large scale and international level
exhibitions, mostly the colonized being the exhibited. Thus, it sounds helpful to examine
the practices of European and American collection and exhibition of Africa together with
their motives and possible impacts on the regenerations-crossed some ‘reductive’ imag-
es of Africa.
In short, in intercontinental level, the cultural representation of others has been very much
dominated by power-relations in the practices of world fairs and colonial exhibitions as
well as the missionary collections of the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries. So here, the question
‘what exactly were these world fairs and colonial exhibitions, and how did they exhibit the
colonized, with what effect?’ appears vital.
World fairs and colonial exhibitions were not as such limited events by category. They
rather implied wide-verities of public events situated in the ‘international’ coverage of the
time. They were very large-scale happenings that combined features of trade and indus-
trial fairs, carnival, music festivals, political manifestations, museums, and art galleries. At
these gigantic exhibitions staged by principal colonial powers, ‘the world was collected
and displayed’ for grand motives (Corbey, 1993: 338-441). In particular, world fairs of the
late 19
th
century attracted millions of visitors. The 1851 first world fair in Crystal palace,
in London, attracted 6 million visitors; the 1878 the world fair in Paris attracted 16 million;
and the 1900 Paris fair, still before the era of the cinema and television, attracted 50 mil-
lion (Corbey, 1993: 339).
These fairs were created with ‘unlimited trust in Enlightenment ideas and the rational con-
structability of the world’ which is made based on the ‘Western’ self-image and standards
(Corbey, 1993: 140-141). They were then characterized by the regulation of relationships
