A little known fact. Or is it?
I found this via the website concreteloop.com and thought it was an interesting read. Note--it is beyond sad and disappointing but it's a good bit of history I didn't know. Tell me what you think.BLACK HISTORY SPOTLIGHT: OTA BENGA
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Ota Benga (ca. 1881-1916) was a 23-year-old Congolese who was featured in a 1906 human zoo exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, which was intended to promote the theory that humans evolved from primates and scientific racism.
Ota Benga (or Bi, which means ‘friend’ in his language) was born around 1881 in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the time, the area was under control of the Belgians, who plundered the land for ivory and rubber. Upon returning from gathering ivory one day, Ota Benga found that his village had been destroyed and his wife and two children murdered.
Sold in the slave market, Ota Benga was purchased by Samuel Phillips Verner, who had agreed to buy Twa for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Following the World’s Fair, Verner kept his promise to return Ota Benga and others to their country. But all of the members of Ota Benga’s tribe had been annihilated during his time away and he asked Verner to take him back to the United States.
Verner took Ota Benga to the Bronx Zoo in New York in 1906 to find him a place to live. Ota Benga was allowed to roam the zoo grounds and help feed the animals. He 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.
September 8, 1906, marked the first day of the exhibit. A sign on the exhibit 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.
Black Baptist ministers protested the exhibit and Ota Benga was removed from the exhibit. James H. Gordon said, “Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes.” Dr. R. MacArthur added, “The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African.”
“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.”
After the exhibit ended, the ministers’ group moved Ota Benga to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn where he stayed for a short time before relocating to Lynchburg, Virginia, where his teeth, which he had filed to points in the Congo, were capped and he dressed in American-style clothes. Ota Benga briefly attended classes at the Virginia Theological Seminary and College, but he was more at home discarding his clothes and roaming the woods with his bow and arrow.
He discontinued his formal education and began working at a Lynchburg tobacco factory. His small size proved a valuable asset because he could climb the poles to get the tobacco leaves without having to use a ladder. He became known as ‘Otto Bingo’ and would tell his life story in exchange for sandwiches and root beer.
On March 20, 1916, Ota Benga built a fire, broke the caps off his teeth, performed a final tribal dance and then shot himself in the heart. The death certificate listed his name as ‘Otto Bingo’. However, his final resting place remains a mystery.
Posted by Candace Jarrett on 04/03 at 01:12 PM
Interesting, indeed.
It is very sad. He was given an opportunity to improve himself but chose not to take it. Sound familiar?