The Human Zoo
In the 1990s, a French theme park exhibited musicians from Côte d’Ivoire alongside exotic animals.
MAY 13, 2025
PHOTO: By Yves Forestier/Sygma via Getty Images
In late March 1994, 13-year-old Edith Lago boarded a plane bound for Paris with a troupe of dancers and percussionists known as Djolem. It seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. Growing up in a poor village in western Côte d’Ivoire, she’d looked longingly at the planes that sometimes passed overhead, assuming that they were headed for France; more than three decades after the country had granted Côte d’Ivoire’s independence, it remained a kind of El Dorado in the imagination of many young Ivorians.
Just a few weeks earlier, Djolem had performed at the funeral of Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Yamoussoukro, the country’s capital. In addition to various foreign dignitaries, the ceremony had been attended by a young French entrepreneur named Dany Laurent. Impressed by Djolem, Laurent had approached the troupe’s director, Salif Coulibaly, who agreed to send 14 of its members, including Lago and four other minors, for a six-month stint showcasing their talents and culture on the outskirts of Nantes, in France’s Loire-Atlantique region.
Lago had been scouted in the village where she grew up and moved to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s largest urban center, to join Djolem. “When they said I was coming to France, I felt total joy in my heart,” Lago told me recently. “I was very emotional. I felt as though I had made it.” In a time before mobile phones, her parents would only learn that their daughter had been sent abroad months later.
When they arrived in Nantes, Lago and the other members of the troupe were taken to a zoo built by Laurent in the small commune of Port-Saint-Père. Spanning more than 100 hectares and home to around 1,000 exotic animals, which roamed freely across open plains, Safari Africain had opened its doors to the public two years earlier in a bid to become a premier tourist attraction and boost job creation in the region. Its roughly 80-million-franc budget had been heavily subsidized by the state. “I believe that [Safari Africain] offers a dream day for visitors,” Laurent told a local news crew at the time, comparing the experience to a real Kenyan safari. “In a world full of gloom and stress, our fellow citizens need this kind of magic.” More than 730,000 people visited the park in its first 18 months.
Lago and her fellow Ivorians would be installed in a small, dank bungalow a short distance away from the village, still within the confines of the zoo, where they would spend the next six months performing six 30-minute shows every day, ultimately all for a fraction of France’s minimum wage.
In collaboration with the French biscuit manufacturer St Michel, Laurent created an area dedicated to the mascot of one of their products — a chocolate cookie called Bamboula, whose mascot was a Black boy dressed in a leopard-skin toga. (The word “bamboula,” a pejorative term that originally referred to an African ritual dance, was used to evoke the supposed savagery, sexual depravity and naiveté of Black soldiers in World War I; it suggests that African people are children who need to be civilized.)
The area initially comprised an assortment of restaurants and shops that visitors passed through to get to the exit. But in November 1993, Laurent told local news he would expand “Bamboula’s Village” to include a “real reconstruction” of an authentic African community. He claimed the project would promote tourism to Côte d’Ivoire and that, in return, the country’s ministry of tourism had offered “artisans and a group [of artists] to provide entertainment throughout the season.” The reconstructed village would be the first of its kind in France, and even in Europe. Behind Laurent, a handful of craftsmen from Côte d’Ivoire, who had arrived in Port-Saint-Père some months before Lago and the other members of Djolem, worked away in the bracing winter cold on a series of clay brick huts with conical thatched roofs.
Lago and her fellow Ivorians would be installed in a small, dank bungalow a short distance away from the village, still within the confines of the zoo, where they would spend the next six months performing six 30-minute shows every day, ultimately all for a fraction of France’s minimum wage. For the finale of each of these shows, they were told to perform the N’Goron, a dance from the north of Côte d’Ivoire typically performed topless by young adolescent girls as part of an initiation ritual; Lago and others were made to perform half-naked. Before they left, visitors could purchase a postcard with a picture of a bare-chested Lago from the park’s gift shop.
The whole thing would soon fall apart, but the village's brief existence evokes uncomfortable comparisons to the so-called “human zoos” of the 19th and early 20th century, where colonized peoples were put on display all over Europe; a shocking symbol of the longevity of colonial ideas in a country still reluctant to meaningfully engage with its imperial history.
“As a child, you don’t see the gravity behind what’s going on,” Lago told me. “If someone tells you you have to do something, you just do it. We didn’t know then what it really was.”
The troupe’s passports were held by Laurent for “safekeeping,” while Salif Coulibaly would collect their salaries each month, promising they would be paid on their return to Côte d’Ivoire. They were forbidden from leaving the park. It would take decades before they could share their story.
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Bamboula’s Village was officially inaugurated on a cold, gray afternoon on April 13, 1994. In addition to the local political figures in attendance, an Ivorian delegation had flown in for the occasion, including then Prime Minister Daniel Kablan Duncan, who cut the ceremonial ribbon next to a smiling Laurent.
Around the same time, 35-year-old Eugenie Bamba, an Ivorian who had left her country for the French capital as a student and now lived in Nantes, had begun to notice a series of adverts for Safari Africain appearing around the city. “They were these big posters of a young topless African girl in the jungle,” she recalled. The same ad, promising an “incredible journey” at Safari Africain, also featured on the front pages of local newspapers.
Bamba had recently been elected as director of the Nantes chapter of the Human Rights League, one of France’s oldest NGOs. Over the next couple of weeks, people started showing up at her office to complain about Safari Africain. “These people were obviously offended,” Bamba told me. “They were going into the park through the same gate where you saw all the animals, then after seeing the animals, you went to see the Ivorian artists.”
“Everyone had had their passports taken away. None of them had seen a doctor; a park veterinarian attended to them if they were sick … They didn’t even have the right to leave the park.”
But when Bamba went to the park to investigate further, she was shocked to find a largely enthusiastic public; most people appeared oblivious to the racism and exploitation inherent to the spectacle. Much of the early local media coverage of Bamboula’s Village, which quickly became one of Safari Africain’s most popular attractions, was similarly effusive, extolling an exciting “first for France” and a “showcase” for Côte d’Ivoire that would “inspire wanderlust.” To Bamba, the public reception was all the more astounding given nearby Nantes’ history as France’s principal transatlantic slave trading port; the city had just hosted a major exhibition on the slave trade in Europe. Bamba couldn’t help but feel that certain aspects of that history were now repeating themselves.
A few days after the inauguration, Bamba approached the park to request direct access to the Ivorians to further assess their situation. Laurent denied her request. “He was all-powerful. He completely shut the door on us,” she told me. “The only option was to go to the press.”
The Human Rights League joined forces with other labor and human rights associations in Nantes, forming a collective called “No to the Human Reserve.” The collective wrote op-eds and published pamphlets decrying the “neo-colonial” project. Local papers started to pay closer attention and ran a series of reports about the controversy, asking whether the shows were an “original cultural spectacle or clandestine labor exploitation”; soon enough, even national papers started covering the story.
Under pressure from the press, Laurent eventually relented and allowed Bamba to visit the troupe toward the end of April. She was shocked by what she found. The 14 members of Djolem shared two cramped rooms, where they slept on thin mattresses on the hard floor. It was barely spring in the cold northwest of France, yet “the women were all in light African fabrics with bare feet,” Bamba recalled. “Everyone had had their passports taken away. None of them had seen a doctor; a park veterinarian attended to them if they were sick … They didn’t even have the right to leave the park.”
In early media interviews, Laurent insisted that the Ivorians were not directly employed by the park, nor even subject to French law, as they were “under the authority” of the Côte d’Ivoire’s International Tourism and Hotel Organization and, therefore, Ivorian legislation. All of this, Laurent added, had been signed off with the relevant local authorities in Loire-Atlantique. The park was “sure that everything was above board,” said Phillipe Gautier, another leading member of No to the Human Reserve.
Even in the Ivorians’ absence, the court was ultimately able to collect enough evidence of human rights violations to prosecute Laurent and Safari Africain. On July 1, 1997, it ruled that the park had committed offenses “against human dignity” and broken fundamental labor laws including the right to “come and go.”
Even the Ivorian Prime Minister Daniel Kablan Duncan sought to downplay the initial pushback in an interview with local media shortly after the inauguration, saying: “Indeed, one might be shocked to see this African safari on French soil. But if we go back a little, a few centuries ago, there were houses with thatched roofs here too. It is, in a certain sense, a sort of fair return of things.”
When the collective threatened to take the park to court at the end of April, Laurent sought to diffuse the situation. He hired a teacher to provide basic schooling on-site to Lago and the other minors in the troupe. He also agreed to raise everyone’s salary to meet the French minimum wage at the time, although he subtracted around 30 percent for food and lodging.
But conditions didn’t significantly improve. Even as the troupe’s members started to understand that something was not right, they couldn’t speak to anyone or go anywhere. Lassina Coulibaly (of no relation to the troupe’s director), a gifted percussionist and, at 20, one of Djolem’s oldest members, recalled that Laurent told them that should anyone “ask if you are OK here, you have to say yes. If you say you are not OK, we will make you return to your country.”
Djolem had been signed up to return for the summer season in 1995. But a few weeks before its initial six-month contract was set to run out, in mid-September 1994, things came to a brusque end.
Two months earlier, No to the Human Reserve had lodged a formal complaint against Safari Africain with the Judicial Court of Nantes. A judge ordered a thorough investigation of the conditions under which the Ivorians were being held, and a labor expert contacted Laurent to schedule a visit. The following day, September 14, Laurent told the Ivorians to back their bags. “They didn’t tell us why we were leaving, but we noticed that people were begging to ask questions,” Lago said. They were hustled out of the park and promptly put on a plane home. When the labor expert arrived to conduct her inspection two days later, she found the village empty.
Even in the Ivorians’ absence, the court was ultimately able to collect enough evidence of human rights violations to prosecute Laurent and Safari Africain. On July 1, 1997, it ruled that the park had committed offenses “against human dignity” and broken fundamental labor laws including the right to “come and go.” Laurent was ordered to pay a symbolic franc to each of the five associations that sued, including Bamba’s Human Rights League, and 4,000 francs (about 1,000 euros today) in damages to cover their legal costs.
By the time the case came to court, Bamboula’s Village had been razed. St Michel, meanwhile, had been bought out by a German company called Bahlsen. Eager to distance itself from the controversy, Bahlsen promptly ceased production of Bamboula cookies. In 1998, still under Laurent’s leadership, Safari Africain was rebranded as Planète Sauvage, which remains open today. (Laurent, who died at the age of 62 in 2014, never spoke about the debacle publicly after the court case.)
Lago, Coulibaly and others ultimately received only a fraction of the earnings they were owed by their director. None of the troupe members received any compensation for their mistreatment by Laurent and Safari Africain.
The current management of Planète Sauvage declined to comment for this story, as did the former mayors of Port-Saint-Père and Nantes.
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After the artists returned to Côte d’Ivoire, the troupe dispersed. In 1995, Lassina Coulibaly, the percussionist, formed his own group, called Yelemba, and brought along Lago and six other artists who had performed at Bamboula’s Village. Toward the end of his time in Port-Saint-Père, Coulibaly had started to occasionally sneak out of the park at night, escaping under the fence to meet up with local musicians. Among them was a man named Benoît Le Péchon, a professor of percussion at the Nantes Conservatory, who would go on to help Coulibaly establish Yelemba and schedule gigs around the world. In September 2002, while they Yelemba was on tour in France, there was an attempted military coup d’état in Côte d’Ivoire. Unable to go home, they started to lay down roots in France.
In the 1990s in France, there was “a kind of grand illusion” that the issue of racism had been settled, de Montgrand told me.
Lago, who quit Yelemba in 2002, now lives in Paris’ 17th arrondissement with her four children; she works as a preschool assistant. Coulibaly moved to a small village just outside of Nantes, where he lives with his French partner and their two children, though he still frequently returns to Côte d’Ivoire. For many Ivorians, whatever the challenges, France is still seen as the place to pursue a better life, just as it was for Lago and Coulibaly when they were young. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, there were some 143,000 Ivorian emigrants living in France in 2020.
Meanwhile, memories of Bamboula’s Village had mostly receded from their minds. Then, in 2022, an explosive documentary by French filmmakers Yoann de Montgrand and François Tchernia made them impossible to ignore. The film, narrated by Jean-Pascal Zadi, a well-known actor with Ivorian roots, was aired on national television and sparked renewed media interest in their story, with a slew of articles appearing in prominent French outlets including Le Parisien and l’Humanité.
In the 1990s in France, there was “a kind of grand illusion” that the issue of racism had been settled, de Montgrand told me. Any such illusion has been shattered in recent years, as France has faced repeated waves of mass protests over racial injustice and police brutality, particularly against minorities from France’s former African colonies. Many of these countries, including Côte d’Ivoire, have sought increasing sovereignty from France’s persisting sphere of postcolonial influence.
Bamboula’s Village could not have happened today, Montgrand argued. “It was a time that was full of absolutely disgusting postcolonial thoughts that we couldn’t yet identify as a society … Today, fortunately, many of these things would be considered intolerable.” By the same token, much of the media coverage of the documentary also noted French society’s persisting reluctance to look its colonial history squarely in the eye.
For Lago, it was only upon watching the film that she says she “really understood the gravity of the whole thing.” She told me that she wants to take legal action against the park and the local authorities who authorized Bamboula’s Village. “I see now that they didn’t give a damn about our lives,” she said.
Coulibaly is more forgiving. He does not want to be reduced to a victim, he said. “I am well aware that they took advantage of us, but I also think that it’s part of life,” he told me. “I always say that we take a path to get to another path. Our time at Safari Africain is part of who we are today.”
✺ Published in “Issue 28: Spectacle” of The Dial
