Ota Benga (c.1881 or 1884 – March 20, 1916) was a Congolese pygmy who was featured in a 1906 human zoo exhibit at the Bronx Zoo alongside an orangutan. The exhibit was intended to promote the theory that humans evolved from primates, as well as eugenics, and scientific racism.[1]
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Ota Benga was a member of the Batwa people,[2] and lived in equatorial forests near the Kasai River in what was then the Belgian Congo. Benga had survived the slaughter of much of his village by the Force Publique, an army of King Leopold II of Belgium. He lost his wife and two children in the massacre.[3]
American businessman Samuel Phillips Verner was sent to Africa in 1904 under contract from the St. Louis World's Fair to bring back pygmies for exhibition. Verner met Ota Benga in the Belgian Congo that year and negotiated with a tribal slave trader for the pygmies, returning to the United States with Ota Benga and eight others.
After several months of travel in the U.S., Verner took Ota Benga to the Bronx Zoo in New York City in 1906 to find him a place to live, at the suggestion of Hermon Bumpus. Bumpus was the director of the American Museum of Natural History, and had provided a home for Verner's cargo including, briefly, Benga himself. At the zoo, Benga was allowed to roam the zoo grounds and help feed the animals. The events leading to his "exhibition" were gradual:[3] Benga spent some of his time in the "Monkey House" exhibit, and the zoo encouraged him to hang his hammock there, and to shoot his bow and arrow at a target. The first day of the "exhibit", September 8, 1906, visitors found Benga in the Monkey House.[3] A sign on the exhibit soon read:
The African Pigmy, "Ota Benga."
Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.
Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the
Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Cen-
tral Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Ex-
hibited each afternoon during September.[4]
Bronx Zoo director William Hornaday saw the exhibit as a valuable spectacle for his visitors, and was encouraged by Madison Grant, a prominent scientific racist and eugenicist.
In response to immediate protests from African-American Baptist clergymen, Hornaday had Ota Benga removed from the exhibit. Public arguments were that the exhibit was racist—"Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes," said clergyman James H. Gordon; "We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls."[3] Gordon also considered the exhibition hostile to Christianity, for its promoting Darwinism: "The Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be permitted."[3] Benga was then allowed to roam the grounds of the zoo as a sort of interactive exhibit. In response to his general situation and to verbal and physical prods from the crowds, his behavior became at first mischievous and then somewhat violent.[5]
A September 10, 1906 New York Times story registers some of the uproar over the incident:
| “ | "The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African," said Rev. Dr. R. MacArthur of Calvary Baptist Church. "Instead of making a beast of this little fellow, he should be put in school for the development of such powers as God gave to him. It is too bad that there is not some society like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. We send our missionaries to Africa to Christianize the people, and then we bring one here to brutalize him."[4] | ” |
Toward the end of September 1906, Ota Benga again came under the guardianship of Gordon, who placed him in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum (of which Gordon was the superintendent), a church-sponsored orphanage. In January 1910, Gordon arranged for Benga's relocation to Lynchburg, Virginia.
While in Virginia, Ota Benga's teeth, which he had filed to points in the Congo,[3] were capped, and he was dressed in American-style clothes. He was tutored by Lynchburg poet Anne Spencer and briefly attended classes at the Virginia Theological Seminary and College. He was much more at home discarding his clothes and roaming the nearby woods with his bow and arrow.
He discontinued his formal education and began working at a Lynchburg tobacco factory. Despite his small size, he proved a valuable employee because he could climb up the poles to get the tobacco leaves without having to use a ladder. His fellow workers called him "Bingo" and he would tell his life story in exchange for sandwiches and root beer.
Ota Benga was caught between two worlds, unable to return to Africa, and viewed mainly as a curiosity in the U.S. On March 20, 1916, at the age of 32, he built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps on his teeth, performed a final tribal dance, and shot himself in the heart with a stolen pistol. The death certificate listed his name as "Otto Bingo."
He was buried in an unmarked grave, records show, in the black section of the Old City Cemetery, near his benefactor, Gregory Hayes. At some point, however, both went missing. Local oral history indicates that Hayes and Ota Benga were eventually moved from the Old Cemetery to White Rock Cemetery, a burial ground that fell into disrepair.[citation needed]
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