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From Africa to Africa: The Return of a Dead Traveller (An Extract from Frank Westerman's ‘El Negro and Me')
(Frank Westerman) The Low Countries - 2006, № 14, pp. 56-57
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December 1983. In a Spanish museum of natural history, nineteen-year-old Frank Westerman finds himself standing face to face with a stuffed African – El Negro. Who is this man? Who stuffed his body? Twenty years later, the author follows El Negro's journey from Paris (1831), via Barcelona (1888) to the Pyrenees, where he was on display until 1997. Along the way he brings El Negro in his book with the same title to life as a commentator on his time: an unknown black man who – nailed to a pedestal – casts a disturbing perspective on European views of slavery, colonialism and racism.
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