Ota Benga was born around 1881 into a tribe of African pygmies. His family lived in the forests along the Kasai River in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
His sad life story is told in the 1992 book, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume.
The authors tell how he survived a raid carried out by the Force Publique, a gang of murderous thugs employed by King Leopold II of Belgium, who claimed the Congo as his personal property. Benga was held captive until he was sold to the missionary and explorer Samuel Phillips Verner, the grandfather of one of the authors of the book cited above.
Samuel Verner had a commission to provide a group of pygmies who would be put on display at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. The pygmies were included in an exhibit the Fair’s publicity department called, “permanent wildmen of the world, the races that had been left behind.”
Pygmy Becomes a Zoo Attraction
In 1906, Ota Benga began living at the Bronx Zoo. At first, he helped the animal keepers and often spent time in the Monkey House. The zoo’s director, William Temple Hornaday, immediately saw the potential for a crowd pleaser. Benga was encouraged to sling his hammock in the Monkey House and hang out with the primates. The visitors flocked to the zoo, spurred on by the sign Hornaday put up which read, “The African Pygmy, ‘Ota Benga.’ Age: 28 years. Height: 4 feet 11 inches. Weight: 103 pounds…Exhibited each afternoon during September.”
The New York Times sent along a reporter. On September 9, 1906 under the headline “Pygmies Rated Low on Human Scale’ ” the following appeared: “The exhibition was that of a human being in a monkey cage. The human being happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale, but to the average nonscientific person in the crowd of sightseers there was something about the display that was unpleasant...It is probably a good thing that Benga doesn’t think very deeply. If he did it isn’t likely that he was very proud of himself when he woke in the morning and found himself under the same roof with the orangutans and monkeys, for that is where he really is.”
Black Churches Free Ota Benga
The news of the exhibit spread quickly and reached the attention of a number of Black preachers. James H. Gordon, Chairman of the Colored Baptist Ministers’ Conference said, “Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes.”
As Mitch Keller related in the August 6, 2006 edition of The New York Times under the title “The Scandal at the Zoo,” “To the black ministers and their allies, the message of the exhibit was clear: The African was meant to be seen as falling somewhere on the evolutionary scale between the apes with which he was housed and the people in the overwhelmingly white crowds who found him so entertaining.”
Within a few days, the Bronx Zoo closed the attraction and Ota Benga passed into the care of African-American churches.
Ota Benga’s Last Days
Doctor Jerry Bergman at the website onehumanrace.com writes that Benga, “was never able to shed his ‘freak’ label. Employed in a tobacco factory in Lynchburg, Virginia, Ota Benga grew increasingly depressed, hostile, irrational, and forlorn. Concluding that he would never be able to return to his native land, in 1916 Benga committed suicide by shooting himself with a borrowed pistol.”
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