The African Pygmy, "Ota Benga."
Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.
Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the
Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner.
Benga was exhibited in the afternoons during September. Zoo officials clothed him in animal skins for viewers to gawk In youth his teeth had been filed to sharp points as was the custom of his people. Many New Yorkers thought they were for eating human flesh and called him a cannibal. Chimpanzees were put in the cage to suggest a comparison between him and them. Nearly a quarter million people saw him--fathers holding children high to see over the shoulders of those in front, women standing in front of the cage so a picture could be taken of them with Ota Benga safely behind the background bars. Zoo attendance in September doubled over the previous year. "Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes," read a New York Times headline, which declared that "the human being happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale."
The boyish-looking Benga sat on a stool in silence. In the first week Benga seemed resigned to his fate. The next week he kicked, bit, or hit attendants as they tried to put him in the cage. By Sunday September 16th, Benga was allowed to roam the park while watched by park rangers. 40,000 people visited the zoo that day. Hordes followed him. The rowdies chased him. They cornered him, poking him in the ribs or tripping him. Others laughed at his fright. He struck back at them. But he wouldn't go back to the monkey house. Three rangers had to force him back.
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Zoo director William Temple Hornaday wrote to the man who brought him, Samuel P. Verner, on Monday September 17th: “I regret to say that Ota Benga has become quite unmanageable.” Hornady lamented that “He has been so fully exploited in the newspapers, and so much in the public eye, it is quite inadvisable for us to punish him; for should we do so, we would immediately be accused of cruelty, coercion, etc., etc. I am sure you will appreciate this point.”
James H. Gordon went home to write, "Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes." Other clergymen backed him.
Ota Benga became caged in the zoo because of a series of events beginning with history and imperialism. As a member of the Mbuti people he lived in equatorial forests of Congo Free State. Thereby hangs a tale. (Congo Free State was captured as metaphor in Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.) The Congo was by no means free. It was created by Belgian King Leopold II in order to plunder it, principally for rubber and ivory. British consul Roger Casement brought home from the Congo confirmation of mass atrocities under Leopold’s rule. Men had come to Casement with missing hands. Casement said the rampant practice of mutilation “is amply proved by the Kodak.” Photographs showed at least two dozen mutilated victims. Congolese were chained by their necks and forced to work for the "free" State. Leopold created the Force Publique in order to enslave and control the people. Benga's people were attacked by the Force. Ota returned from a hunting expedition to find his wife and two children murdered. Later he was captured by slave traders.
As Verner tells it, Benga agreed to return to America with him and encouraged a group of Batwa tribesmen to accompany them. They did not trust Verner, a white man, because of atrocities committed by King Leopold's Force Publique. Benga told them Verner had saved his life and that they had developed a bond. Four Batwa males as well as other Africans accompanied them to St Louis.
At the World Fair, Apache chief Geronimo, on exhibit also, came to admire Benga and gave him an arrowhead.
Verner returned Benga and the other Africans to the Congo, where Benga married a Batwa woman who died of snakebite. Without his Mbuti people, Benga did not feel he belonged with the Batwa and returned with Verner to the states.
While tending other business, Verner negotiated with curator Henry Bumpus for Benga to stay at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Benga was given a linen suit to wear but became homesick for his own culture. He was inside all the time, when outside he was in a big city. The museum itself was silent with hard, barren surfaces. Outside was concrete without birds, breeze, anything to hunt. He was presented as a savage. The museum was a prison. Guards kept him inside and he tried to slip past them in the large crowds at the entrance. Once he was asked to seat a wealthy donor's wife. He pretended to misunderstand and threw a chair, barely missing her head. One can only imagine him thinking, "So here's the savage you want." Verner found him another home.
It was the Bronx Zoo, where this story began. William Hornaday, zoo director, had Benga help maintain animal habitats. But people noticed Benga more than they did the animals. Hornaday eventually featured Benga in an exhibition. We know how that ended.
The African-American clergyman who protested the treatment of Benga re-enters this narrative here. James H. Gordon put Benga in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, a church-sponsored orphanage in Brooklyn, which Gordon supervised. At the Orphan Asylum 1906 wore into 1910 and the press was relentless in pestering Benga and Gordon for stories about the pygmy.
Gordon arranged with the McCray family in Lynchburg, Virginia, for Benga to move there. He bought him American clothes and had Benga's filed teeth capped so that he could better fit in. Anne Spencer, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, tutored him in English. He attended elementary school at the Baptist Seminary in Lynchburg.
At the time Lynchburg was a city of nearly 30,000 people. Benga would have ridden on its electric street cars, at the back of course, and traveled its cobbled streets. He lived with Mary Hayes Allen and her seven children in a yellow house across the road from the seminary. Allen was widow of the Seminar seminary's former president.
Benga found the forest near the house as something reminiscent of home. In it he taught neighborhood boys how to make bows from vines, how to hunt wild turkeys and squirrels. He told of his days hunting elephants.
He went to work at a tobacco factory. For a sandwich and root beer he told people his life story. The sandwich, the root beer, and the life story suggests he might have become settled by then and leads to the question, Was he happy by then? Had he adjusted to a way of life far from the forest, the animals, the people, and the culture he grew up in?
As he grew older he lost interest in teaching neighborhood boys the ways of a hunter. He wanted to go back to Africa.
He would have gone too, except for the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Serbia, which would grind up men as cannon fodder. In !914 World War I began and Germany launched submarine warfare. Passenger ship were only one more target for torpedoes.
A largely European war kept an African man from his native equatorial forests
Old men recalled those war years and themselves as boys listening to Benga sing a song he learned at the Theological Seminary, “I believe I’ll go home / Lordy, won’t you help me."
The old men remembered the late afternoon of 19 March 1916, as they watched Benga gather wood to build a fire in the field. They watched him dance around the fire. He chanted and moaned. It was about a world he lost, they knew that, but he had done it before.
They went to sleep. In the still night with cicadas chirping, Ota Benga crept into a shed near the yellow house. Before daybreak they heard a loud shot. He had hidden a gun there and fired one bullet through his heart.
Ota Benga, 1883-1916
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