Clicko the Clown

A circus clown. Born in South Africa of Korana ancestry and named Franz Taibosh, he somehow ended up as a one of the "Bushmen" (San) from Africa who became exhibits in Western show business. He however became a star performer of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus in the 1920s and 1930s, and saw self-fulfilment as a member of an American show-business family. For three decades he danced and yelled on stage as the "Wild Dancing Bushman" in music halls, circuses and freak-shows, in England and France, Ireland and Cuba, as well as the United States and Canada. When he died in 1940, an obituary in the New York Times called him “the only African bushman ever exhibited in this country”, even though it was not known where he really came from, or how he had come to America – where he was often mistaken for an Australian.

A biography of Clicko by Neil Parsons was published in 2009.

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Parsons, 2009

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