The photograph in Figure 1 was taken in 1914.Footnote 1 It depicts a small group of Senegalese men, women, and children as well as two stringed instruments: a Mande kora and a plucked lute, likely a Wolof xalam.Footnote 2 Yet this photograph was not taken in Senegal, but rather in Kristiania, Norway, now known as Oslo.
These seven people, whose names I have not yet been able to determine, were part of a troupe of eighty who lived and performed in Oslo at an attraction called Kongolandsbyen, or ‘the Congolese village’. Kongolandsbyen drew large crowds as part of Jubilæumsutstillingen (the Jubilee Exhibition), a major national event staged in Oslo to commemorate the centenary of Norway’s constitution. The exhibition ran from May to October 1914 and covered most of Frognerparken, Oslo’s largest public park, with a separate site for maritime exhibits on the fjord at nearby Frognerkilen.Footnote 3 Visitors explored displays devoted to Norwegian industry, technology, art, sports, and tourism, as well as a working model farm. During its five-month span, approximately 1.5 million people visited the fair, at a time when Norway’s population was only about 2.5 million.Footnote 4 This photograph is the front of a souvenir postcard that could be purchased by visitors to the exhibition.
A postcard photo taken in the Kongolandsbyen section of Norway’s Jubilee Exhibition, 1914. A kora (plucked bridge-harp) sits on the ground in the centre, while the man second from the left holds what appears to be a xalam (plucked lute). (‘Norges Jubilæumsutstilling 1914. Fornøielsesavdelingen. Kongolandsbyen’. National Library of Norway, http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-nb_digifoto_20211105_00003_bldsa_PK10182, accessed 23 January 2024).
Kongolandsbyen was only one example of a practice ubiquitous at world’s fairs and national exhibitions in the United States and Europe between about 1890 and 1920 – the exhibition of people of the Global South in so-called ‘villages’ that promised an authentic glimpse into their residents’ everyday lives. Such exhibitions, first popularized at zoological gardens in Western Europe beginning in the 1870s, drew considerable attention at world’s fairs including the Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1889) and the World’s Columbian Exhibition (Chicago, 1893) and, by the early twentieth century, had become ubiquitous at fairs from St Petersburg to St Louis.Footnote 5 Village exhibitions drew simultaneously on the tradition of the circus sideshow and the nascent field of academic ethnography in what scholars have termed ‘commercial ethnography’ or, conversely, ‘ethnological show business’.Footnote 6 Historian Brita S. Brenna argues that Kongolandsbyen ‘was … part of a tradition of exhibiting people of color’ for three interwoven purposes: ‘for the sake of entertainment and profit, to provide an object lesson on foreign cultures and to manifest imperial power’.Footnote 7 Writing of ethnographic exhibitions more generally, historian Volker Barth identifies their three aims as ‘entertainment, popularization of knowledge and colonial indoctrination’.Footnote 8 Put simply, village exhibitions were about education, entertainment, and empire.
In this study, I consider Kongolandsbyen’s relationship to these European colonialist discourses of education, entertainment, and empire, widening the lens as I go to address, first, Senegalese musicians’ performances within Kongolandsbyen and Norwegian reactions to them; second, Kongolandsbyen’s status as a sideshow peripheral both physically and thematically to the Jubilee Exhibition as a whole; and finally, how Kongolandsbyen represented Norwegians’ attempt to demonstrate a relationship to colonized peoples comparable to that of imperial France. This approach to Kongolandsbyen reveals as much about Norway’s marginal place in Europe as a newly independent nation with limited geopolitical power as about its imagined relationship to Africa.
Examining music’s performance and reception in Kongolandsbyen demonstrates how the national ambitions of even a peripheral country such as Norway could be promoted through stereotypes about African people and their music. Music scholars have ably examined the role of Indigenous music and dance in ‘village’ displays, but they have tended to focus on major international fairs and exhibitions.Footnote 9 Kongolandsbyen, in contrast, was part of a national, not an international fair. It celebrated the recent independence of a small nation, Norway, then often regarded as a provincial backwater by commentators in Western Europe and the United States. Kongolandsbyen played a complex but significant role in the exhibition’s larger project of national uplift.
Kongolandsbyen’s contribution to this nationalist project, I will argue, was a function of its very tawdriness and triteness. The ethnographic ‘village’ had by 1914 become a tired but familiar genre with predictable conventions of staging, performance, and audience engagement constantly reiterated at countless fairs across Western Europe and the United States. In particular, Kongolandsbyen’s promoters mimicked ethnographic exhibitions long common in France and Germany, at which audiences sought both to learn about unfamiliar societies through observation and to be entertained by sensationalized displays of ostensibly primitive cultures. Norway may not have had its own colonies, but Kongolandsbyen demonstrated that it could nonetheless stage an ‘African village’ (or, as one report termed it, an ‘exhibition colony’ (utstillingskoloni)) that was the equal of any in Western Europe, and particularly France.Footnote 10 With Kongolandsbyen, the Jubilee Exhibition’s organizers both proved their ability to host a full-scale fair and suggested that Norway’s relationship to colonized peoples was similar to that of larger colonial powers.
Close reading of primary sources also demonstrates how the Senegalese troupe at Kongolandsbyen pushed back against colonialist, racist representations through both sincere presentations of traditional culture and strategic indications of their own modernity, in a deliberate insistence on what musicologist Gabriel Solis terms ‘the cosmopolitanism of subalterns’.Footnote 11 Historians such as Pascal Blanchard sometimes refer to village exhibitions less euphemistically as ‘human zoos’.Footnote 12 This label appropriately indicts the degrading primitivism underlying such exhibits but fails to do justice to the agency and dignity of those people who participated in them.Footnote 13 While there is little to celebrate about Kongolandsbyen, a careful examination enables us to honour the creativity and resourcefulness of Kongolandsbyen’s Senegalese performers as it also acknowledges the challenges they faced.
The Jubilee Exhibition
With the Jubilee Exhibition, Norwegian elites hoped to establish Norway’s reputation as a European power by mimicking the large exhibitions hosted by imperialist nations. (Figure 2). As art historian Caroline A. Jones argues, part of the point of fairs and exhibitions has always been ‘to show off the capacity to orchestrate’ the event itself.Footnote 14 Although Norway’s constitution had been signed in 1814, Norway did not achieve full independence until the dissolution of its union with Sweden in 1905, and the grand scale of the exhibition showcased this new nation’s progress and its contributions to Europe and the contemporary world. As historian Anne Simonnæs notes, the goal of the exhibition was ‘to place the capital city, Kristiania, on the map of Europe’.Footnote 15 As a result, while Norway’s national cultural and technological achievements were highlighted, the ‘framework’ of the exhibition ‘was obviously taken from the major international exhibitions and was inspired by international trends’.Footnote 16 Although economic and political anxieties surrounding the outbreak of World War I in July caused a temporary dip in attendance, the fair remained a highly popular and widely discussed event.Footnote 17
‘The Jubilee Exhibition 1914: Main Entrance’ (‘Jubilæumsutstillingen 1914 Hovedindgangen’, www.nb.no/items/URN:NBN:no-nb_digifoto_20151211_00196_bldsa_PK10401, accessed 13 June 2025).
Kongolandsbyen, one of the most visited sections of the exhibition, was produced and promoted by impresario Benno Singer of London firm European Attractions Limited. In 1913, Singer had presented a ‘Congo troupe’ in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) and ran a similar exhibition in Cologne, Germany concurrently with the one in Oslo.Footnote 18 A press release promised that
with enormous difficulties and costs, about 80 natives, men, women, and children, have been brought here directly from the dark mainland. They will inhabit the village built for them, which will give an accurate picture of the conditions in their homeland with its peculiar morals and customs. They will display their crafts, present their games, and display their athletic skills. The whole village will seem so deceptively realistic that the visitor will feel directly transported to Africa’s interior. For scientists and teachers this gathering of natives will present things of the greatest interest. In the village there will also be found a mosque and Mohammedan school.Footnote 19
Kongolandsbyen, a seeming anomaly at a Jubilee Exhibition devoted to pride in the Norwegian nation-state, was the only exhibit presented there that did not feature either Norwegians or Norwegian expatriates.Footnote 20
Kongolandsbyen, a vision of ‘darkest Africa’ in the heart of the nation’s capital, represents only one particularly dramatic example of Norway’s troubling involvement in colonialism. This revelation runs counter to ‘popular understandings of history in Norway’, which, as anthropologist Marianne Gullestad explains, ‘place Norway outside the history of European imperialism and therefore see the country as free of responsibility for the failings of colonialism’.Footnote 21 Recent scholarship has begun to uncover Norway’s role in colonialism and imperialism, challenging the common ‘self-congratulatory’ vision of Norway ‘as exerting a thoroughly benign global influence’.Footnote 22 Although Norway, both during and after its union (1814–1905) with Sweden, was not strictly speaking a colonial power, its massive shipping fleet played a key role in sustaining colonial networks of trade and migration, its entrepreneurs benefited from extractive and exploitative colonial practices, and its Protestant missionaries sought converts among colonized populations.Footnote 23 Such activities encompassed various parts of sub-Saharan Africa, including present-day Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania. Anthropologist Bjørn Enge Bertelsen coins the term ‘noncolonial colonials’ to describe Norwegians’ in-between status as not precisely colonialist but nonetheless essential to the colonial project.Footnote 24 Examining Kongolandsbyen reveals the complicity of Norwegian promoters and audiences in popularizing imperialist notions of ‘the primitive’. It also demonstrates how the cultural manifestations of colonialism, including musical practices, extended beyond the boundaries of those nations with formal empires.
‘You can learn a lot here’: Kongolandsbyen as education
Kongolandsbyen was not the first exhibition of an African troupe in Norway. In 1889, for example, a ‘Dahomey Caravan’ toured the country and sang for King Oscar II.Footnote 25 Nor were Black performers, often African American musicians and dancers performing in minstrel or cakewalk shows, unusual in Oslo by 1914. During Kongolandsbyen’s run at the exhibition, Black entertainers at Kristiania theatres included the comic song-and-dance team of Rudy and Fredy Walker (at Tivolihaven) and musician-acrobats the 3 Tiger Graces (at Cirkus Norbeck).Footnote 26 Kongolandsbyen stood out, however, for its long and well-publicized tenure at one of the most significant displays of national pride in Norway’s history. The Jubilee Exhibition’s promoters found themselves obliged to justify its relevance. What role was Kongolandsbyen to play among celebrations of Norwegian arts, industry, and commerce?
Press releases, drawing on the high-minded rhetoric associated with the exhibition as a whole, sometimes implied that the ‘village’ would provide special opportunities for ethnographic study. The announcement cited earlier, for example, claims that ‘for scientists and teachers this gathering of natives will present things of the greatest interest’. During this period, the popular Ethnographic Museum of the Royal Frederick University (now the University of Oslo), under long-time director Yngvar Nielsen, was rapidly expanding its collections with significant acquisitions of African artefacts and musical instruments.Footnote 27 There is no evidence, however, that ethnographers took an interest in Kongolandsbyen, as they did at similar displays at numerous international and national exhibitions during this era.Footnote 28 Musicians and music scholars were similarly absent. While at various fairs in the United States and Europe comparative musicologists made cylinder recordings and transcriptions of Indigenous music and wrote articles detailing their findings, no such work appears to have taken place at Kongolandsbyen.Footnote 29 Norwegian musicians also appear to have been unengaged, in contrast to well-known European composers such as Claude Debussy who drew on music heard at fairs in their compositions.Footnote 30
Rather than highlight ethnographic scholarship, then, Kongolandsbyen’s publicists emphasized its value as a less formal means of public education. Such rhetoric was already a well-established way of legitimizing ethnographic exhibitions in France and Germany. Singer, accused of violating an ordinance prohibiting public entertainment during the Pentecost religious holiday, contended that in other countries Kongolandsbyen would be considered an example of ‘instruction’ (belæring) rather than a ‘performance’ (forestilling) – in other words, a form of education, not mere entertainment.Footnote 31 Newspapers adopted a teacherly tone in reports on the traits and behavior of the villagers, including their musical performances. ‘Here they cook and here they eat (with their fingers), here we get to see their schools, their amusements (dance and music) and their home crafts … This Kongolandsbyen is, in addition to being very enjoyable, also highly educational and instructive.’Footnote 32 One reporter promised that ‘you can learn a lot here about customs, work, and play in a Negro village’, while another recommended a visit to ‘geography students, who like visual education’.Footnote 33
Kongolandsbyen’s very name, however, demonstrated its promoters’ indifference to ethnographic precision and the limits of the exhibit’s educational value. The troupe was from Senegal, then part of the colonial federation of French West Africa, not the Congo region of central Africa.Footnote 34 As Ryan Thomas Skinner argues, historically ‘the signifier “Congo” operates to index a racialized ethnoscape – “Black Africa” – in the Nordic region’.Footnote 35 The label ‘Kongolandsbyen’ thus was likely chosen as an exotic signifier that generically evoked sub-Saharan Africa, or perhaps as a topical reference given the contemporaneous presence of Norwegian soldiers, sailors, and missionaries in the Belgian Congo.Footnote 36 Some newspaper reports added to the confusion by referring to the villagers as ‘Zulus’ or ‘Moors’.Footnote 37 Such vagueness about ethnic and geographical identity mirrored common practice in France, where Senegalese troupes were sometimes advertised as ‘arriving straight from central Africa’.Footnote 38 While newspaper reports occasionally noted that the Kongolandsbyen troupe was from Senegal, they continued to refer to the ‘Congolese village’, creating the impression that differences among African regions and societies were insignificant.Footnote 39
Norwegian commentators’ reliance on generalizations and stereotypes ignored the urbanity and cosmopolitanism of Senegal and particularly its ‘Four Communes’ (Dakar, Gorée, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis), which ‘alone among French possessions in West Africa, had the right to send a deputy to Parliament and enjoyed the same civil and electoral rights as municipalities in France’.Footnote 40 The Four Communes’ inhabitants included so-called originaires, Black people who were born or resided there, as well as elite métis, or mixed-race, families often educated in France.Footnote 41 On 10 May 1914, shortly before the Jubilee Exhibition opened, Blaise Diagne was elected the Four Communes’ deputy, making him the first Black member of the Chamber of Deputies.Footnote 42 Diagne ran on a platform of full citizenship for originaires, proclaiming ‘they say that you aren’t French and that I’m not French! I tell you that we are, that we have the same rights’.Footnote 43 After France entered World War I, Diagne sponsored a law stating that originaires should serve in the regular French army instead of the colonial units, and in 1916 Parliament passed a second ‘Blaise Diagne Law’ clarifying that originaires and their descendants ‘are and remain French citizens’.Footnote 44 Beyond occasional mention of Senegalese troops after the outbreak of the war, these dramatic developments in French and Senegalese politics received no coverage in the parochial Norwegian press, so that even Norwegian visitors to the exhibition who learned that the Kongolandsbyen troupe was Senegalese likely knew little about contemporary life in Senegal.Footnote 45
It therefore fell primarily to the troupe themselves to educate Norwegians about Senegal. The only known film of Kongolandsbyen, less than a minute long, demonstrates that Norwegian visitors mingled with the Senegalese troupe and had the opportunity to speak with them.Footnote 46 Such conversations did not always go smoothly. In 1981, a man who had visited as a ten-year-old boy recalled that his uncle,
who had been a kind of judge or some other fancy thing in Congo and Abyssinia … babbled away in a (for me) completely incomprehensible gibberish; but the Black person he stopped and thought he was chatting with shook his head in despair, he understood nothing. Then he started talking to my uncle and it was uncle’s turn to shake his head, he didn’t understand anything either. It was probably something with the dialects.Footnote 47
The uncle and nephew’s apparent assumption that all Africans spoke the same language suggests a limited understanding of African societies not much improved by their visit to Kongolandsbyen, despite its purported educational value for the people of Norway.
A more sustained and successful engagement can be seen in an interview with the village’s so-called ‘chief’ (høvding), Jean Thiam, conducted by reporter Wladimir Moe for a detailed report on Kongolandsbyen in the women’s magazine Husmoderen. Footnote 48 As scholars of village exhibitions have noted, sources that highlight the voices of troupe members are rare within colonialist archives, making Moe’s interview with Thiam an unusual and valuable document.Footnote 49 During their conversation, likely conducted in French and later translated into Norwegian, Thiam instructed Moe about the troupe and its traditions, explaining, for example, that while they were Muslims and avoided alcohol, none were polygamous.Footnote 50 He also pointed out that the supposed ‘villagers’ actually represented several different ethnic groups within Senegal. Thiam explained to Moe that ‘we represent seven, eight tribes (stammer) from French Senegal’, and added that ‘every tribe has its specialty. The Mandinka are kora players, the Toucouleur dancers, the Serer weavers, the Susu balafon players, the griots tam-tam players and so on.’Footnote 51 Moe seems to have misunderstood ‘griots’ (griotene in Moe’s Norwegian) as the name of an ethnic group rather than as a profession common to several. Thiam, who was Wolof, surprisingly does not name his own ethnic group, and it is possible that his mention of griot drummers was intended to refer to a Wolof sabar ensemble.Footnote 52 Thiam describes a division of cultural and performative labour among ‘villagers’ of various ethnicities. It is clear that the notion of an authentic ‘village’ was a fiction. Rather, this was a staged community featuring actors tasked with portraying a stereotyped vision of Africa for Norwegian observers, ‘choreographing authenticity’ as Eric Ames puts it in his study of ethnographic displays in Germany.Footnote 53 Such a presentation reinforced Norwegians’ received ideas about their supposed cultural and technological superiority to African societies.
The Jubilee Exhibition’s organizers drew on professional networks already well established in imperial Europe and the United States. As Pascal Blanchard et al. point out, ‘the title of “native performer” was, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, applied to a profession which employed 2,000–3,000 individuals a year on average’ in Europe and North America.Footnote 54 Such performers, while they pretended to embody timeless cultures untouched by capitalism, often worked under detailed contracts and were well aware of the market value of their talents and labour.Footnote 55 Historian Sierra A. Bruckner argues that ‘performers in ethnographic showcases were often as entrepreneurial in spirit as those who contracted them … perceiv[ing] themselves as professional performers and as individual agents acting within an emerging global economy’.Footnote 56
Jean Thiam’s role as ‘chief’ exemplifies the professionalization of ethnographic ‘villages’. Thiam, whom one reporter described as ‘an older, dignified-looking gentleman who carries himself with exquisite grandeur’, belonged to the Wolof hereditary tegg caste of master jewellers and watchmakers and was also a municipal councillor in Gorée.Footnote 57 Born in Saint-Louis in 1866, Thiam was a French citizen. He had appeared frequently in ethnographic villages in France since 1899, including the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, where he was awarded the Legion of Honour (Figures 3 and 4). During the 1900s and 1910s, Thiam worked for French promoters as a recruiter who contracted with relatives, friends, and others in the Dakar area to appear at fairs in Europe. Thiam thus was not really a ‘chief’ but rather a theatrical manager who collaborated with Singer to present Kongolandsbyen to the public in a style that he had developed in France.Footnote 58 He was likely better travelled and conversant in more languages than most Norwegian visitors to Kongolandsbyen. One Norwegian observer described Thiam as an ‘extremely amiable and educated man, far more educated than many “natives” tend to be’, a formulation that upholds racist conceptions of Africans by presenting Thiam as a rare exception.Footnote 59 Like this reporter, most Norwegians viewed the Senegalese performers from a position of assumed superiority and failed to acknowledge Senegalese intelligence and professionalism.
Jean Thiam, ‘chief of Black village’, at Exposition de Reims, France, 1903. https://twitter.com/eneffekei/status/1049570623767408641 (accessed 13 June 2025).
‘The village’s chief’. Jean Thiam depicted in Oslo newspaper Aftenposten, 21 May 1914.
The troupe’s presentations of music and dance had to negotiate the contradiction between their own modernity and the Norwegian audience’s stereotyped expectations. There are no extant audio recordings, films, or notated transcriptions of performances that might reveal precisely which forms of Senegalese music and dance were performed in Kongolandsbyen. The instruments that were featured certainly included kora, plucked and bowed lutes, balafon, and drums of some kind. Kora and balafon, which also featured commonly in Senegalese performances at fairs in France, were played relatively informally in an outdoor setting where visitors could approach the musicians and closely observe the instruments.Footnote 60 Moe heard kora and balafon as parts of a larger outdoor soundscape that included the voices of Senegalese students:
Here and there, balafon and kora players sit at the thresholds with their delicate instruments. Through their tones, a drone of natural children’s voices penetrates from one of the houses. The same jingle buzzes continuously, which in our ear sounds like: ba, bi, bo, bu – ba, bi, bo, hu. It is the village’s schoolchildren, of all ages, who spell and read the Qur’an, while the teacher, Marabout-Pruten, sits enthroned behind them and sees to it that they learn their lessons.Footnote 61
An illustration (Figure 5) published in Aftenposten shows two musicians playing kora and a scraped metal idiophone (karinyan or nege in Maninkakan).Footnote 62 The sound of the kora made a particularly strong impression on some Norwegian listeners. One reporter rhapsodized that ‘the music that the kora player produces is delightful, it is like tones under water, a singing ache from a spring in the primeval forest’, a formulation that, while primitivist, reveals unusual aesthetic appreciation.Footnote 63
‘Musicians in the Negro village’. Aftenposten, 21 May 1914.
Rather than seriously consider the artistic merits of Senegalese music, however, Norwegian journalists generally revealed condescension or incuriosity about the more formal shows of music and dance presented in Kongolandsbyen’s Festhal (festival or celebration hall) pavilion, a label suggesting entertainment rather than edification.Footnote 64 Moe reviewed the music as ‘boring and horribly monotonous’, marked by the ‘incessant hammering’ of a drum, and described the women’s dancing as a ‘grotesque’ display of ‘abdominal gymnastics’.Footnote 65 An insulting notice in the newspaper Ørebladet, reprinted in the satirical magazine Vikingen illustrated with caricatures of Africans drawn from blackface minstrelsy, suggested that many visitors treated the performances as a combination of circus, zoo, and peep show:
Especially around the natives’ dancing-place there is constant crowding … here the Africans constantly jump around in their red and blue and fairly white shirts, so that it smells like Negroes for a long distance. And the city’s young ladies march up with chocolate and confections that they stick in between the Congolese gentlemen’s glistening jaws. This seemed to us less amusing to look at; but it may be due to envy; for there were certainly no little ladies here who thought of treating us with chocolate!Footnote 66
The joking tone here fails to mask anxiety about the sexual menace that African men supposedly posed to Norwegian women.Footnote 67 Historians Olav Christensen and Anne Eriksen suggest that the moral of this notice was that ‘when the sensuality of the Black people was provoked, they could not be controlled. One should protect one’s women by keeping them at home.’Footnote 68 Another commentator moralized instead about the supposed impropriety of Senegalese women, claiming that, while they danced, their neglected children dozed, ignored by mothers ‘who no longer paid attention to the child that hung on their back’, then awoke suddenly to stare in fear at ‘all the pale “ghosts” around them’. The author noted that the dances continued after ‘the town’s church bells had long since called our own children to bed’. This likely indicated simply that evening performances were expected of the troupe but here served as evidence that Norwegian (and implicitly Christian, as the church bells suggest) parents took better care of their children than did their ‘Congolese’ (and Muslim) counterparts.Footnote 69
The most noted ‘educational’ event staged in Kongolandsbyen was the holiday held at the conclusion of Ramadan, known in Senegal as Korité and more widely in Arabic as Eid al-Fitr. Staged Korité celebrations were already a common feature of Senegalese exhibitions in France.Footnote 70 Although Eid al-Fitr fell on Sunday, 23 August in 1914, Singer ignored the Muslim calendar and held the event on the following Saturday, 29 August, likely to ensure a larger audience and perhaps to avoid debates about presenting ‘entertainment’ on a Sunday. As Bergougniou et al. point out, French promoters also commonly rescheduled religious events for commercial reasons, leaving us to ‘wonder how the “villages” really celebrated those festivals that actually fell during the Village’s open season’.Footnote 71
The Norwegian press reported widely, if inaccurately, about the ‘villagers’’ observance of Ramadan. A press release explained that
the Congo troupe at the exhibition, following Mohammedan custom, has held a fast for the last 30 days. This long fasting time is named ‘Karem’ or ‘Radamah’ [sic] and as long as it lasts every Mohammedan is forbidden to eat during the day; only at night may one eat and drink. The fasting time ended on August 25 and a few days after that, as soon as the fasting ones have regained their strength, big festivities tend to take place.Footnote 72
While such reports may have educated readers about an important aspect of Muslim tradition, the ‘big festivities’ were the real draw. Utstillingsavisen, a newspaper produced specially for the Jubilee Exhibition, promoted the event with a joking reference to skin colour:
The coal-black Negroes have now, because of their Mohammedan faith and the consequent injunctions, fasted for so many weeks that they have become quite pale. But today they will cast aside their sorrow and show their joy to one another and to us. They have now gained so much strength after the prescribed starvation diet that they can organize foot races and sack races and other strenuous things. The women will rush around in their picturesque garments with hollowed-out gourds full of water on their heads, and the children will fight, exactly like white children, over bananas and other goodies, if the audience donates.Footnote 73
Again, the jokes reveal both anxiety about and fascination with racial boundaries. If Black people could become pale and Black children behaved ‘exactly like’ their Norwegian counterparts, was the colour line more porous than it seemed? Because this question challenged assumptions of Norwegian superiority, however, it could only be insinuated but not answered.
Music sometimes created an imagined identification between Norway’s national musical traditions and those of the Senegalese troupe, but again any sense of similarity only went so far. A common rhetorical strategy compared African and European instruments. One writer explained, for example, that ‘the Negroes’ instruments are fun to listen to. One of the Negroes performs on a kind of stringed fiddle some compositions that are suspiciously reminiscent of our own native Fele-Slaatter’ (the repertoire associated with Norway’s Hardanger fiddle).Footnote 74 In another incident, children collaborated across racial lines to make music. Utstillingsavisen reported, in a brief caption alongside a grainy photo, that ‘it was cheerful in Singer’s Kongolandsby yesterday afternoon. One of the boys’ bands gave a concert and a Negro boy was the conductor, as our picture shows. The boy proved to possess both rhythm and musical feeling and directed well. He was wonderfully amusing.’Footnote 75 While this moment might have reflected some desire to establish personal contact between African and Norwegian children, the goal appears to have been a novel spectacle rather than sustained cultural exchange.
Other observers rejected cultural exchange altogether. An overtly racist review of Senegalese performance appeared in the women’s magazine Urd, whose editor Anna Bøe described the dancing as
one of the ugliest spectacles we have seen before our eyes … One of the women comes out at a time, often with a child in a sack on her back, she twists her body in front of the musician, while the latter emits some inarticulate and excited sound that stinks of primitive force and titillating sensuality. One can become sick at heart from seeing and hearing, and we leave the blacks’ village animated by one happy feeling: It is lovely that we are white, white--!’Footnote 76
A more open statement of white supremacy is hard to imagine. Here music and dance did not inspire ethnographic understanding but rather reinforced a dehumanizing racial essentialism and a proclamation of Norway’s fundamental whiteness.
Even over a century later, one hesitates to give a platform to Bøe’s rhetoric, which will already sound regrettably familiar to scholars of colonialism. Yet the familiarity is precisely the point. Commentators such as Bøe, rather than stake out a distinctly Norwegian position on issues of racial and cultural difference, simply borrowed the primitivist conventions of European imperialists in discussing Senegalese music and dance. In so doing, they affirmed their own place in modern Europe at the expense of the colonial subjects of nations more powerful than Norway.
‘A single indescribable charivari’: Kongolandsbyen as entertainment
Norwegians’ demeaning understanding of Senegalese music and culture was reflected in Kongolandsbyen’s location. Kongolandsbyen was not situated on the main grounds of the Exhibition, where the works of Norwegian composers such as Edvard Grieg and Christian Sinding were performed in an elegant music hall (Sangerhallen) and even the lighter music in restaurants required approval from the exhibition committee’s ‘expert member’, Kapellmeister Halvorsen.Footnote 77 Rather, the ‘village’ was secluded behind a ridge on the eastern edge of Frogner Park in the Exhibition’s ‘amusement section’ (fornøielsesavdelingen), which also included a carousel, a funhouse, a shooting range, and a ‘Lilliput train’ for children, as well as a roller coaster that became the most visited attraction at the entire exhibition (Kongolandsbyen was the second) (Figures 6 and 7).Footnote 78 One reporter conflated Africans and entertainment with a paternalizing neologism, calling them ‘Mr. Singer’s amusement-Congolese’ (fornøielseskongolosere).Footnote 79
‘Plan of the Construction at Frogner’, N. A. Brinchmann, Norges Jubilæumsutstilling 1914: Officiel Beretning (Kristiania: Grøndahl & Søn, Reference Brinchmann1923), 159. Annotations by the author.
Entrance to Kongolandsbyen with ‘Lilliput train’ in foreground. Still from Jubileumsutstillingen på Frogner 1914, dir. Hans Berge (Framfilm, 1914). National Library of Norway, https://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-nb_digifilm_167274_20131118 (accessed 9 March 2024).
In presenting African people as part of an entertainment complex, the Jubilee Exhibition drew on a tradition of imperial display going back to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, at which a so-called ‘Dahomey Village’ was exhibited in the Midway amusement area. This mode of staging remained standard practice in France, where a ‘village’ might be placed next to a casino or a carousel.Footnote 80 The implicit lesson, as historian John P. Burris writes, was that colonial subjects ‘belonged only in the carnival, that they were comparable to domestic freaks, and that they did not need to be taken in full seriousness’.Footnote 81 The setting encouraged visitors to approach Kongolandsbyen not primarily as an educational experience, but rather as only one of a set of enticing if somewhat vulgar diversions.
The amusement section’s musical offerings highlighted Norway’s national traditions alongside light classics from France and Italy and contemporary international popular genres. ‘Tanagra’, a magic theatre in which actors’ silhouettes were projected onto a writing desk using ‘an ingenious system of mirrors’, featured dancers performing minuets, gavottes, and ‘modern French dance’ as well as musicians performing ‘old, pretty folk songs’, the aria ‘O Columbina’ from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, and ‘Solveig’s Song’ from Grieg’s Peer Gynt.Footnote 82 ‘Huskestua’ (Norwegian for ‘hullaballoo’ or ‘uproar’), billed as a ‘thoroughly Norwegian cabaret’, featured Setesdal dancers wearing traditional rural bunader and quintessentially Norwegian musicians such as Hardanger fiddler Ketil Flatin and Kristiania cabaret singer Bokken Lasson.Footnote 83 Huskestua also drew audiences with vaudeville performers of racially coded genres of European popular music, including Norwegian dancer Hedvig Dietrichson, who ‘perform[ed] a Negro dance with a totally delightful humor’, and the Barossis, who performed tango (also described in the press as a ‘Negro dance’) and the French Apache dance.Footnote 84 At the nearby dance pavilion, ‘Flora-salongen’, professional dancers (possibly the Barossis), also performed tango and Apache and patrons crowded like ‘herrings in a barrel’ onto ‘a beautifully equipped, open dance floor’ where everything from ‘the wildest one-step tones’ to ‘the softest waltz music’ was performed by ‘an excellent band’.Footnote 85
These and the many other attractions of the amusement section produced a literally carnivalesque blur of indiscriminately layered sensory impressions that contrasted with the clear, didactic messages of national pride pervading the main part of the Jubilee Exhibition. To some extent, the chaos was visual. One reporter explained that in place of a ‘uniform, harmonious style’, the amusement section appealed to visitors with ‘its thousands of whims and its diversity’; for example, the juxtaposition of the Norwegian rosemaling folk painting of Huskestua with the ‘hypermodern’ airplane carousel and the ‘real Africa-style’ of Kongolandsbyen.Footnote 86 Most commentators focused instead on the sonic complexity of the amusement section, sometimes using the term tingel-tangel, borrowed from German.Footnote 87 Moe celebrated the section as ‘a single indescribable charivari of music, laughter, and outbursts of joy’.Footnote 88 A reporter for Ørebladet explained that ‘one gets ears full of sound from the 3–4 huge organs [or perhaps hurdy-gurdys] that simultaneously drool away with 3–4 different melodies, while the Lilliput train sprints around and squeals and beeps and tries to drown out the delighted howl of the flock of teenage girls from inside the fun wheel’.Footnote 89 Historian Espen Ytreberg writes that the amusement section ‘was a place of unbridled noise; shouts, laughter, and shrieks from the roller coaster blended with the carousel music, with tooting from “Prince Olav,” the locomotive of the “Lilliput train,” and chiming bells from the amusement park apparatus’.Footnote 90 This cheerful sonic disorder marked a clear distinction between the amusement section and the more sedate central portion of the fair devoted to promoting the Norwegian nation.
Norwegian fairgoers thus were led to interpret Senegalese music and dance not primarily in educational terms, but rather as raucous entertainment perhaps more reminiscent of the Black American minstrel performers then appearing in Oslo’s theatres than an ethnographic reconstruction. Within the confusing soundscape of the amusement section, the musicians’ drums and voices were divorced from their social and cultural context and subsumed instead into a cacophony of jumbled sensations. An Utstillingsavisen columnist described the beginning of a day in the amusement section:
Then, as is well known, the Congolese village opens – and little by little ‘the roller coaster, Tanagra, and all the other attractions’. And the Congolese village is the nearest neighbor of the outdoor cafés. Nothing is more entertaining than the sound of the hollow Negro drums and the melodic croaking of the Negro women. You smoke your cigarette and read your Utstillingsavisen with delight to such accompaniment. And, as stated, little by little the other attractions blend their harmony with the drumbeats and the women’s croaks. When all the hurdy-gurdys set in with their hoarse voices, you enter the correct, unadulterated exhibition frame of mind.Footnote 91
The newspaper Tidens Tegn reported similarly that ‘the gas flames burn on the terrace and are reflected in the dark water, the orchestra plays from the folk restaurant; from the amusement section the hurdy-gurdys and the Negro music blur together with the roars from the roller coaster and the sharp whistle of the Lilliput train’.Footnote 92 Tingel-tangel characterized even supposedly educational events like the Korité celebration. On 31 August, next to a photograph of Jean Thiam and his family, Morgenposten described the event in chaotic terms:
The joyous party was held on Saturday. The Lilliput train’s shrill sound, the carousel’s bass tones, and all the other hurly-burly music competed with the Negroes’ drum and tympani beating and hoarse howls in creating a hugely nerve-wracking spectacle, which obviously delighted the black souls, both old and young, but otherwise was of little edification to the poor neighbors.Footnote 93
In such accounts, Senegalese and Norwegian music alike are decontextualized and separated from their makers, part of a palimpsest of unruly sounds whose primary value was understood to be its invigorating effect on the ‘frame of mind’ of Norwegian auditors. This mode of understanding Senegalese music parallels that described by Bruckner at fairs in turn-of-the-century Germany, at which ‘spectators were no longer encouraged to participate as critical observers’ with an interest in anthropology, as in earlier ethnographic displays, ‘but rather were animated to lose themselves’ in a voyeuristic experience of exotic titillation available in the amusement section but not in the ‘serious’ parts of the fair.Footnote 94
As Morgenposten’s report on Korité reveals, however, some Norwegian visitors found the tingel-tangel of the ‘amusement section’ not amusing but rather irritating or exhausting, ‘intrusive’ rather than ‘sensational’ in terms proposed by sound studies scholar Karin Bijsterveld.Footnote 95 The carousel, according to one sarcastic reporter, featured ‘music so divinely pure and splendid that one gets a headache when one has travelled around a few times’.Footnote 96 Morgenposten described an (apocryphal?) incident in which the dance master in Florasalongen, tired of the ‘locomotive screeching’, derailed the Lilliput train, leading the irate driver to beat him up, after which the driver ‘finally let him dance an angry tango on the spot’.Footnote 97 Such reports, in which snobby journalists cast themselves as superior to tingel-tangel, recall Bijsterveld et al.’s depiction of late nineteenth-century Amsterdam, where visitors were ‘quick to associate the less agreeable sounds with uncivilized behavior or lower classes and cultures’.Footnote 98 Elsewhere, Bijsterveld addresses campaigners against noise in the decades around 1900, for whom ‘silence stood for everything higher in the social hierarchy (unless it was imposed), and noise for everything down the ladder’.Footnote 99 The noise of the amusement section reflected both its lowbrow entertainment offerings and the presumably low social status of the visitors who frequented it.Footnote 100
These visitors flocked to the roller coaster, an exciting novelty for many Norwegians, that circled constantly only yards from Kongolandsbyen’s western border. Its most noted sound was not mechanical but rather human. Not long after the exhibition’s opening, it had already become a cliché for reporters to comment on the screaming of the passengers, particularly the women. One reporter wrote that ‘again and again the squeals sound: O i-i-i-i i! from small, frightened ladies, and now and then a roar from a strong boy’s voice!’Footnote 101 A report from the exhibition’s opening explains that ‘young ladies … try the roller coaster, and every time it sets off over one of the precipices, they squeal with a mix of horror and joy. It looks like it could be a lot of fun’.Footnote 102 A poem about the exhibition explained that ‘on the roller coaster you are gently lifted up/And hurled away at a dangerous gallop/While women’s inciting howls resound’.Footnote 103
Some accounts drew explicit comparisons between Senegalese music and the screams from the roller coaster. The newspaper Social-Demokraten, combining primitivist stereotypes, advised that the Tanagra theatre provided a calming break from ‘the roller coaster’s Indian howl [indianerhyl] and Kongolandsbyen’s hammer music’.Footnote 104 The official report on the exhibition, published in 1923, states that
a 700 m. Roller Coaster, built in a loop on and around the western ridge, evoked shuddering sensations in its passengers with its violent precipices and climbs but at the same time had a certain horrifying attraction especially for the weaker sex. Those who did not know better, but had heard tell of the 80 Negroes from Congo, would have believed that the piercing howl that sounded every day from the amusement section was a war cry from these savages. But it wasn’t. It was the railway’s passengers, who in this way released their joyful fear.Footnote 105
In this account, the ‘joyful fear’ of the Norwegian women leads them to make sounds indistinguishable from ‘savage’ ‘war cries’, a conflation that imputes ‘primitive’ emotionalism to Norwegian women even as it equates African vocal expressions with fear and war.
This concern with howls and noise reflects long-standing tropes about the supposed tolerance of ‘primitive’ people for sounds intolerable to the ‘civilized’. In 1878, for example, British philosopher James Sully argued that ‘if the savage is incapable of experiencing the varied and refined delight which is known to our more highly developed ear, he is on the other hand secure from the many torments to which our delicate organs are exposed’.Footnote 106 What made the roller coaster both titillating and frightening was its revelation that Norwegians, and Norwegian women in particular, could easily overcome this intolerance, revealing a shocking similarity to the ‘savages’ on display. As Ana María Ochoa Gautier demonstrates, the howls of colonized peoples as described ‘in the colonial archive seem to defy a description as either speech or song, and are thus likened to animal sounds’.Footnote 107 For early comparative musicologists, such heightened but ostensibly unmusical vocalizations supposedly enabled access to the primordial past where music itself was born.Footnote 108 But what did these sounds mean when Norwegians made them while travelling at lightning speed in a mechanical marvel? As Emily Thompson argues in relation to early jazz in the United States, the ‘curious conjunction of things seemingly primitive with those technologically advanced drove not only critics, but also the most fervent enthusiasts of a culture self-consciously defining itself as “modern”’.Footnote 109
By bridging a perceived gap between howling savagery and industrial precision, the roller coaster seemed to launch Norwegians headlong into the modern world. But the Senegalese troupe was not invited to join them there. As Brenna puts it, Norwegian visitors understood ‘the Africans [as] part of the amusement section’s “tingeltangel” and “worthless junk,”’ where ‘the comical was the most important thing’.Footnote 110 Whether they considered it as education or as entertainment, Norwegians understood Kongolandsbyen as a foil to their own incipient modernity and as proof of their own claim to the privileges of European civilization.
‘I’ve seen bigger exhibitions’: Kongolandsbyen and empire
In presenting Kongolandsbyen in terms of education and entertainment, the Jubilee Exhibition mimicked conventional imperialist rhetoric about the purpose of ethnographic displays. A third discourse associated with such displays, that of empire, did not apply as directly or overtly to the Jubilee Exhibition.Footnote 111 Although some press coverage extolled the troupe’s supposedly high regard for the Norwegian monarchy – Tidens Tegn reported that ‘the Negroes in Kongolandsbyen at the exhibition have donated 37 kroner and 45 øre to the Queen’s collection with touching kindness’ – Senegalese people could not be showcased as imperial subjects in Norway as they would have been in France.Footnote 112
Yet this does not mean that concerns about empire had no significance to Kongolandsbyen. Burris writes that ‘the juxtaposition of … less-industrial cultures with the imagined communities of civilized nations at international expositions, given the latter’s material dominance, legitimated national identities in a way that comparison exclusively with other similar nations could not’.Footnote 113 Kongolandsbyen was intended to demonstrate Norway’s national prestige through a kind of competitive pseudo-imperialism directed primarily at France.Footnote 114 As Elisabeth Oxfeldt demonstrates, since the early nineteenth century ‘Nordic orientalism’ in Norway had imitated French models in an effort to legitimate Norway’s cosmopolitanism, in a display of what she terms ‘Paris-envy’.Footnote 115 Reports on the exhibition often reveal Norwegians’ anxiety that their admiration for the French was unrequited. In May, Aftenposten’s Paris correspondent visited travel and tourist offices to ask whether tourism to Norway would increase because of the exhibition, only to learn that, despite the exhibition’s advertising campaign in France, ‘the influence the Kristiania exhibition will have on the planning of trips to Norway is quite minimal’. Most French visitors to Norway wanted ‘to see the country, the nature, the mountains, the fjords’ rather than the exhibition.Footnote 116 A brief visit by Emma Debussy, ‘the famous French composer’s elegant wife’, was the subject of a long report in Tidens Tegn reassuring readers that she considered the Norwegian leather and furs on display in the Hall of Industry the equal of those found in Paris.Footnote 117
More disturbing was the reluctant realization that the Senegalese performers, rather than serving as an exotic foil demonstrating the comparable sophistication of France and Norway, might be looking down on Norwegians just as the French did – indeed, because they were French. Alongside the primitivist reports previously discussed were those showing a very different vision of the troupe. Some observers suspected that the ‘villagers’’ supposed unfamiliarity with life in contemporary Europe was just an act. One report described a troupe member who spoke ‘perfect French’ and wore ‘tight trousers and modern puttees’ when there were few visitors to Kongolandsbyen but changed into a ‘mysterious toga’ and spoke ‘Bangala’ when the crowds picked up.Footnote 118 Another noted that ‘the Negro chief [probably Jean Thiam] is condescending today and talks to the public. He is a French Negro from Senegal and was at dinner yesterday with the French minister.’Footnote 119 Another report observed that not only do ‘they speak French as intelligibly as many a member of the Alliance Française, but now they have even begun to apply themselves to the language spoken by the natives of the land of the midnight sun’ – i.e., Norwegian.Footnote 120 One reporter followed the observation that ‘both he [Thiam] and several of his subjects speak fluent French and German’ with the line ‘these Negroes are not completely unaffected by European culture’, which seems like an intentional understatement.Footnote 121
Reading between the lines of Norwegian accounts reveals that the Senegalese troupe found ways to highlight the contrast between their own experiences as knowledgeable travellers and Norwegians’ stereotypes of innocent, uncivilized Africans. Thiam, in a teasing understatement of his own, told an interviewer: ‘Of course, I’ve seen bigger exhibitions – I was at the Paris exhibition in 1900. That probably impressed me a little more.’Footnote 122 As musicologist Inge van Rij observes, ‘exhibits of living peoples at overseas exhibitions often shaded into the problematic ethics of the “human zoo”, but they could also afford a valuable opportunity for self-representation on the national and international stage’.Footnote 123 Highlighting such moments acknowledges what musicologist Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit calls ‘the work that subjects of colonialism themselves undertook upon their entrance to the global-colonial register’ and reveals colonial subjects ‘as reactive thinkers rather than unknowable subalterns’.Footnote 124 In the face of racist condescension, Thiam and the Senegalese troupe asserted their own dignity and worldliness.
Epilogue
In 2014, Norway celebrated the bicentennial of its constitution and the centennial of the 1914 Jubilee Exhibition. To mark the occasion, artists Mohamed Ali Fadlabi and Lars Cuzner, residents of Norway originally from Sudan and Sweden respectively, created a controversial art installation: a meticulously detailed, but uninhabited, recreation of Kongolandsbyen in Frogner Park. They named their recreation ‘European Attraction Limited’ in a mordant reference to the agency that promoted the original Kongolandsbyen. Fadlabi and Cuzner explained that ‘we heard about the village, and we assumed that this was common knowledge among [Norwegian] natives … As it turned out, pretty much no one we talked to had ever heard about it (even if they had heard of human zoos in other countries) … It is hard to understand the mechanisms of how something could be wiped from the collective memory. We decided then to work on this project’.Footnote 125 As anthropologist Ånund Brottveit points out, the recreation unintentionally sparked ‘a debate about the artists’ own attitudes and ethics’ rather than Norway’s troubled historical relationship to Africa and Africans.Footnote 126 Nonetheless, the artists sought to counter what social scientist Suvi Keskinen critiques as the ‘ignorance and denial of participation in global colonial histories and the continued colonialism in the [Nordic] region’.Footnote 127 Fadlabi and Cuzner argued that ‘Scandinavia in general has a hard time accepting the racist realities embedded in the system and culture because the idea of superior goodness is a message that starts from an early age and is reaffirmed continually through messages of chart-topping moral standings.’Footnote 128
In 2025, immigrants and their children born in Norway make up approximately 21 per cent of Norway’s population and 35 per cent of the population of the urban districts of Oslo. About 2.8 per cent of Norway’s population are immigrants from Africa and their children. All fifty-four UN-recognized nations in Africa are represented.Footnote 129 These Norwegians include musicians of West African heritage, such as Ibou Cissokho (born in Senegal) and Solo Diarra (born in Burkina Faso), who perform on kora for diverse audiences at such Oslo venues as the bohemian bar Kafé Hærverk or the cultural centre Melahuset.
Yet Norway’s official doctrines of inclusivity and social justice are often undermined by Islamophobia, de facto residential segregation, and arguments about the impact of immigration on crime and the welfare state.Footnote 130 Norwegian institutions sometimes draw on music to encourage acceptance of immigrants. On 17 May 2014, for example, one hundred years after the opening of the 1914 Jubilee Exhibition, Oslo’s Operahuset hosted the bicentennial pageant ‘Yes, We Love’, presented by Fargespill (‘Play of Colors’), a troupe of one hundred Norwegian children and teenagers from varied backgrounds. The title ‘Yes, We Love’ referred to Norway’s national anthem, ‘Ja vi elsker dette landet’, or ‘Yes, we love this country’. Fargespill performed what the event’s advertising described as ‘Ethiopian shoulder dance meets Norwegian gangar. Mogadishu meets Kollywood. Sami joik meets Afghan 7/8 time presented in vossabunad with beatboxing, and “fallturillturalltura” meets “habibi habibi”, and clapping games from around the world are united in a single, great, polyphonic, common mantra.’Footnote 131 I attended this performance, and as this description suggests, it involved an energetic fusion of various global traditions that brought to mind the ‘world music’ aesthetic of the Putumayo record label or the WOMAD festival. I was struck by the unresolved contradiction the pageant presented between an earnest celebration of multicultural Norway and insistence that immigrants assimilate into a shared nationalist vision. In this contentious but hopeful moment of social change, perhaps the story of Kongolandsbyen can serve as a reminder of the musical underpinnings of Norwegian nationalism.
Open access
