The Curse of the Ubangis: Race, Spectacle, and the American Circus Myth
In 1930, eight women from Central Africa were shipped to the United States and paraded under the false label of “Ubangi savages” in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Their most striking feature—large lip plates—was treated not as cultural expression but as monstrous deformity. But the racism didn’t stop at the freak show. When a series of accidents and tragedies began to plague the circus, a new fiction emerged: the so-called Curse of the Ubangis. This wasn’t just mythmaking—it was a grotesque act of racial deflection, blaming African women for a legacy of greed, cruelty, and chaos under the American Big Top.
A Sideshow Story Built on Lies
The women were not Ubangi. That name was misapplied by circus promoters who lumped various Central African ethnic groups under one exotic-sounding label. The real region, near the Ubangi River in the Belgian Congo, had no connection to the women’s origin or culture. In truth, they were part of an exploitative arrangement between Ringling’s circus agents and colonial officials in the Congo. The women were selected for their stretched lips and then marketed in the United States as “Congo savages” who had supposedly volunteered to be exhibited for money and adventure. In reality, they had little agency and were forced into a spectacle that treated their bodies as punchlines and props.
The Curse as Cover Story
The myth of the curse gained traction after a fire in Hartford, Connecticut in 1944 killed nearly 170 circus goers. Over time, circus folk and tabloid writers blamed a string of disasters—rampaging elephants, dead trainers, acrobat accidents, financial collapse—on the “Ubangi curse.” They claimed the women had placed a hex on the circus after being mocked, mistreated, and denied passage home. One magazine went so far as to print a full chant supposedly spoken by the women in a Brooklyn lot before vanishing. The story read like pulp horror: Black women with stretched lips summoning destruction in broken English and jungle incantations. The real horror was how easily the public believed it.
What They Really Endured
Circus audiences jeered. Sideshow performers bullied them. News reporters and Broadway jokesters circulated stories about drunken encounters, misplaced fear, and grotesque misunderstandings. Some of the women were reportedly “sold” by Belgian colonial agents to Ringling, and others came under pressure from village elders. Even mainstream press coverage, like a 1930 New York Times article, reduced them to spectacle, quoting them as saying they liked skyscrapers and chewing gum. There was no interest in their names, languages, or lives. The circus never made efforts to repatriate them. Their story ended not with a curse, but with silence.
From Curiosity to Curse to Cultural Amnesia
The myth of the Ubangi curse lived on in cheap paperbacks and sideshow lore, reinforced by racism and sensationalism. But the underlying truth is clear: Black women were blamed for everything except the violence done to them. The curse was never theirs. It belonged to the circus itself—a system that devoured difference, dehumanized Black bodies, and then blamed the fallout on the very people it exploited.
Even now, the image of the plate-lipped woman lingers as visual shorthand for “primitive,” “tribal,” or “other.” Rarely is it placed in context as a deeply symbolic and ceremonial practice within specific African cultures. Instead, it’s remembered as a freak show relic, tied to a fake curse that allowed an empire of exploitation to escape accountability.
t’s important to recognize that the Barnum and Bailey Circus, like many traveling shows of its time, built its empire on the exploitation of marginalized people—particularly Black and Indigenous performers, individuals with disabilities, and people from colonized regions. Marketed as “curiosities” or “freaks,” these individuals were often dehumanized and misrepresented for profit. The so-called “Ubangis,” like others, were not only fictionalized but stripped of context, culture, and autonomy.
Legacy and Reckoning
The story of the so-called Ubangi women is not one of curses or magic, but one of erasure and spectacle. Their bodies were branded exotic. Their voices were lost in translation. Their pain became plot. Yet their presence marked a turning point in American circus history—the moment when the hunger for racialized spectacle began to fracture under its own weight.
We should remember them not as cursed women, but as survivors of a system that turned culture into commodity and turned women into warnings. The real curse was believing the lie.
Further Reading
“Ubangis in Circus Pleased with City.” The New York Times, April 14, 1930.
A historical article capturing how the women were presented in American media—exoticized, infantilized, and flattened for mass entertainment.
Roach, Joseph. “Human Zoos, Freak Shows, and the Performance of Difference.” Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Issue 1 (2019).
An academic exploration of race, spectacle, and the commodification of human bodies through public performance.
“Curse of the Ubangis.” Jet Magazine, November 15, 1951, p. 16.
A brief feature in a Black-owned magazine that documents how the myth of the Ubangi curse entered popular circulation, reflecting how racial spectacle was processed across different communities.