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It was, the posters said, a rare chance to see a “little known but interesting people”: a live display of 57 Somali men, women and children who cooked, weaved and danced for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of Edwardians who flocked to Yorkshire to see them.
More than 120 years later, this controversial – and, in its time, incredibly popular – show will be revisited in a new exhibition in Bradford that will put Britain’s colonial legacy under the spotlight.
The Somali village is thought to have been one of the most popular and profitable of the attractions at Bradford’s Great Exhibition in 1904, drawing more than 350,000 visitors and helping to fund Cartwright Hall’s civic art collection for decades.
In the original display, a village of Somalis – described as Bradford’s first Muslim community – were observed from May to October as they went about daily life, slaughtering sheep for meals, attending school and learning Arabic and the Qur’an.
Yet curators of the new exhibition, which opens on Saturday, believe a modern view of the village masks its complicated reality. Abira Hussein, guest curator, avoided describing the village as a “human zoo”, because while the phrase captures the violence of colonial display, it can flatten “the conditions of recruitment, labour and negotiation that shaped the Somali village”.
Members of the Somali troupe, namely leader and broker Sultan Ali, negotiated contracts and wages, sold crafts to visitors and, according to researchers, staged a protest in the park after receiving compensation of £15 – equivalent to just over £1,600 in today’s money – which they believed was inadequate after a fire that destroyed four huts in the village. Some in the village chose not to continue working and travelled back to their home country, while others continued on other tours in Germany, the rest of Europe and North America.
The project is not about recreating the spectacle. Instead, it attempts to centre the lives and experiences of the Somali people, and confronts how empire shaped Bradford’s cultural institutions and wealth.
“This is not a redisplay,” said Hussein. “It’s about thinking critically about why this display happened in the first place, how these people were framed, and the wider colonial systems that made it possible.”
Similar touring exhibitions appeared across Europe and North America during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, including the 1895 African Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London.
Hussein said the story of the Somali village is often treated as an unusual footnote in the region’s history: “Yorkshire’s involvement in colonialism is not something that has been fully discussed or acknowledged.”
Yahya Birt, another guest curator who discovered his grandmother attended the exhibition in 1904, echoes this sentiment: “When people talk about colonialism in Britain, they often focus on cotton. But the story of wool as a colonial commodity, and the wealth it generated in Yorkshire, is largely untold.”
The exhibition also identifies specific artworks that were funded by profits from the Somali village in the Great Exhibition, including a 1906 marble bust of Lister, referred to as Baron Masham, and a 1907 children’s book, The Magic Carpet by Arthur Rackham.
“It’s about us, as an organisation, recognising our role in history,” said Lizzie Cartwright, collections manager at Bradford District Museums and Galleries. “And, the relevance of the Somali village as the first Muslim community in Bradford.”
Part of the exhibition examines how postcards and photography shaped what Birt and Hussein describe as the “white gaze” during the Edwardian era. “People had to be acculturated into seeing other people in this particular way,” Birt said.
The new exhibition brings together season tickets, commemorative badges, postcards sold during the exhibition and archaeological finds uncovered in Lister Park alongside Somali textile cloth, mats, fans and baskets loaned by Culture House and Koor Archives, many of which have never been displayed in a British institution. “We’re not trying to paint a rosy picture,” Birt said.
Hussein added: “There was exploitation and unequal power, but there was also resistance and negotiation.”
The exhibition also explores the stories of Halimo Abdi Badal and Khadija Yorkshire, who are believed to have been the first recorded Muslim burial and birth in Bradford respectively, highlighting one of the oldest Black and Muslim communities in the region.
Researches are now hoping descendants of those who lived in the village may eventually come forward. “We know there’s still more history to uncover,” Hussein said. “People may still have memories, photographs, stories or poetry passed down through oral history.”
