Ota Benga
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Ota Benga (c. 1884 – March 20, 1916) was a Congolese pygmy who was featured in a 1906 exhibit at the Bronx Zoo alongside an orangutan as an example of the evolutionary "missing link" between humans and apes.
Biography
American missionary Samuel Phillips Verner met Ota Benga in 1904, in what was then the Belgian Congo. Ota Benga was a member of the Chirichiri people, and had lived in equatorial forests near the Kasai River. Benga's village had been wiped out by a group of mercenaries working for the Belgian government and he had been sold into slavery. Verner had been sent to Africa under contract from the St. Louis World's Fair to bring back pygmies for exhibition. He negotiated with a tribal slave trader and returned to the U.S. with Ota Benga and eight others.
After the fair, Verner returned 20-year-old Benga and the others to the Congo, but Ota Benga's time in the white world had tainted him among the scattered remnants of his tribe. After his second wife died from a snake bite, he agreed to return to America with his benefactor.
After several months of travel in the U.S., Verner took Ota Benga to the Bronx Zoo in New York City in 1906 in hopes of finding him a place to live. At first, the young man was allowed to roam the grounds and help feed the animals. Then, socialite and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society, had Ota Benga put on display at the zoo alongside the apes and other animals. Zoo director W.H. Hornaday decided to use Ota Benga as a public attraction. At the behest of Grant, a prominent scientific racist and eugenicist, Hornaday placed Ota Benga in a cage with an orangutan and labeled him "the missing link" in an attempt to illustrate human evolution, and in particular that Africans like Ota Benga were closer to apes than were Europeans.
Eventually, protest from African-American Baptist clergymen had Ota Benga removed from exhibit. The arguments were not only that the exhibit was racist—"Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes," said James H. Gordon, clergyman—but that it too strongly promoted Darwinian evolution. Ota was eventually allowed to roam the grounds of the zoo as a sort of interactive exhibit. In response to his general situation and to prods from the crowds, his behavior became at first mischievous and then somewhat violent.
Hornaday capitulated and released Ota Benga to Gordon, who placed him in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, of which Gordon was the superintendent, and which was sponsored by the church. When that didn't work out, Moses—a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary and College in Lynchburg—arranged with then-Seminary president Gregory Hayes to bring Ota Benga there.
While in Virginia, Ota Benga's teeth, which he had filed to points in the Congo, were capped, and he was dressed in American-style clothes. He was tutored by Lynchburg poet Anne Spencer and briefly attended classes at the Seminary. 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 was measured at one point at 4-foot-11, 103 pounds) 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 of 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 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 turned up 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.
References
- — a book by grandson of Samuel Phillips Verner
- ISBN 0-922233-20-9.
See also
- Human zoo: zoo exhibitions of human beings alongside apes and other animals at the end of the 19th century until the mid-20th century.
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