In 1867, at the age of thirteen, Elisabeth Moendi was brought to Suriname from Calcutta as an indentured laborer.

 In 1867, at the age of thirteen, Elisabeth Moendi was brought to Suriname from Calcutta as an indentured laborer.

 

In 1867, at the age of thirteen, Elisabeth Moendi was brought to Suriname from  Calcutta as an indentured laborer. 

 Suriname was then a Dutch colony, and it had a sugar plantation economy that, following the abolition of slavery in 1863, depended heavily on indentured servants. 

Elisabeth later married a man who was a descendant of Suriname's indigenous people. In 1883, she and her one-and-a-half-old daughter Henriette were taken to Amsterdam and displayed in a human zoo at the World's Fair. In fact, an entire Surinamese village was recreated, featuring a group of 28 inhabitants from various ethnicities, including Creoles, Caraïbes, Arowaks, and Marrons. For six months, they pretended to demonstrate their daily lives and work at the zoo. The front and side portraits of Elisabeth, as well as the photograph of her with her daughter, were taken during the World Fair where she was one of the residents of the Surinamese village. In these photos, she is twenty-three years old. 

Over a million people had attended the fair. This was the first human zoo before the concept spread across the Western world, taking root in various spaces such as fairs, theaters, circuses, acclimatization gardens, cabarets, universal or colonial exhibitions, and itinerant villages. 

In 2017, after discovering that Elisabeth Moendi was his great-grandmother, Amsterdam-based artist Nelson Carrilho created an altar in her honor (last photo).

Source: Rijksmuseum

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