Some commentators, including ones who should know better, have mustered all kinds of defences for this exhibition going ahead — citing free speech, artistic expression and the promotion of dialogue about serious subjects, to give a few examples. 

A number of their pronouncements may even appear sound at first glance until they’re examined in the context of the actual world we live in, not the fairy-tale planet of a certain kind of white liberal and their black and brown servants.

It’s the same world inhabited by “humanitarian” imperialisms and “post-racial” posturing.

Black humans were indeed literally exhibited in zoos next to chimpanzees and other primates in Europe and the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is partly the origin of the monkey chants and banana skins that are still all too often aimed at black sport figures today. 

These zoos formed part of the western propaganda that justified bringing “civilisation” to Africa, in the process killing 10 million-plus in the Congo, practically exterminating the Herero and Nama peoples and installing apartheid regimes in much of southern Africa, not to mention the countless millions shipped across the Atlantic or the induced Irish and Indian famines. 

This 21st-century recreation of those very real human zoos is deplorable and achieves none of the aims its supporters claim it does. 

Why? Because it’s aimed at the Barbican’s primary audience, predominantly white and with disposable income. 

If its aim is to promote dialogue, with whom are these people going to be dialoguing in the privileged space of the Barbican, so rarely accessed by the wider community? 

More importantly, what is the psychological profile of the kind of person that would pay £20 a pop to see black humans exhibited in cages? Do the proponents of this kind of “art” have a history of making common cause with the very real struggles against racist imperialism globally — not least in Bailey’s native South Africa —  or would they prefer to engage in masturbating their guilt away by seeing black bodies tied in bonds, broken and powerless? 

Power is the crux of the matter. Many will actually get a sadistic kick from inert black bodies so pornographically disempowered. It’s all meant to “provoke discussion” yet Bailey’s show is in my view racist propaganda.

As for the minds of the black people allowing their bodies to be used in this way, there’s a whole revelatory literature out there on the subject worth checking out, starting with Frantz Fanon.

Of course, art is supposed to be about free expression but that is always bounded by the political realities of the day. If a German artist for example were ever to be given a platform as large as the Barbican to make money from displaying real-live Jewish bodies piled on one another in a mock gas chamber, would this be considered art? 

Those who think that comparison exaggerated are either ignorant of historical facts or think African lives are worth less. If this exhibition is about promoting a discussion of colonial history why not include “strung-out-on-opium” Chinese people? That won’t happen because contemporary Chinese power would render any attempt to display Chinese people as lifeless victims quite laughable and thus not offer the same cheap kicks.

“Exhibit B,” Brett Bailey informs us, “is not a piece about black histories made for white audiences. It is a piece about humanity, about a system of dehumanisation that affects everybody within society, regardless of skin colour, ethnic or cultural background, that scours the humanity from the ‘looker’ and the ‘looked at.’” So it’s not about black-white relations at all, then, it’s about the “looker and the looked at.” 

If artists like Bailey really want to be provocative and create discussion around the subjects of European colonialism and genocidal white supremacy, why doesn’t the Barbican consider an exhibition with live white people used as dummies to pose as the many thousands of slave masters and overseers hacked to death during the Haitian revolution? 

Or how about one marking the Indian independence struggle which recognises the role played by Bhagat Singh, Queen Rani and others who used the colonisers’ favourite tool of violence against them in their search for freedom?

How liberating would it be — especially for some white liberals — to be forced to viscerally engage with the reality that the freedoms black and brown people enjoy today did not come as a result of Abraham Lincoln, William Wilberforce or WWII but rather from the blood shed fighting Europeans with significantly greater military might, as well as their own domestic oppressors and collaborators. 

We did not, contrary to Hollywood’s view, sit around waiting for white saviours.

Dream on, perhaps, because images that do not reinforce white power do not seem to float the boat of “liberal” types. 

Maybe they are not content with the still globally dominant images of Africa as a disease-ridden, war-torn wasteland inhabited by lifeless black skins, the mass incarceration of blacks that serves to privilege them or the black bodies being gunned down by police on a weekly basis in the US and elsewhere. 

Perhaps they just need to take it one step further and have niggers back where they really belong, in cages and chains?

The bottom line is this. The Barbican, publicly funded, has a remit to serve the public good. If you agree that this proposed exhibition oversteps that remit, will have absolutely no useful outcomes and will certainly not empower the millions of descendants of victims of European colonisation living in Britain, then please sign the petition and let Bailey take his foolishness back to where he came from. 

The petition is at change.org/p/withdraw-the-racist-exhibition-exhibition-b-the-human-zoo. 

Akala is a Mobo award-winning hip-hop artist and founder of the Hip-hop Shakespeare Company facebook.com/akalamusic. The full version of this article is available at illastate.posthaven.com/the-human-zoo-and-the-masturbation-of-white-guilt.