Ota Benga

The story of Ota Benga

In 1904, Ota Benga was brought to the United States by the missionary and explorer Samuel Phillips Verner. Verner had been hired by the St. Louis World's Fair to bring back pygmies for one of their ethnographic exhibits.

Verner's story is recounted by his grandson Phillips Verner Bradford in the book ‘Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo’. According to this account, Verner purchased Ota Benga from African slave traders - his wife and children had been killed in a massacre. Verner brought Benga, seven other pygmies and a young Congolese man to St Louis where they proved to be one of the most popular attractions at the fair. The crowds gawked, jeered and at one point threw mud pies at the human exhibit.

From St Louis, the group travelled to New Orleans just in time for Mardi Gras, and finally back to Africa. Benga - expressing a desire to learn to read - asked Verner to take him with him when the explorer returned home.

Verner and Ota Benga arrived in New York in August 1906. Verner, looking for a place for Benga to live, finally brought him to the Bronx Zoo, where, at first, he walked the grounds and helped the workers. But in early September, it was decided to move Benga's hammock into an orang utan's cage, where he was encouraged to play with the orang utan and weave caps out of straw and to shoot his bow and arrow. The zoo was encouraged by prominent eugenicist and head of the New York Zoological Society Madison Grant and a sign 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 Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner.

Exhibited each afternoon during September

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Renowned clergyman Reverend Dr Robert Stuart MacArthur of the Calvary Baptist Church in New York was outraged and was quoted in The New York Times on Sept. 10, 1906 as saying, ‘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 Christianise the people, and then we bring one here to brutalise him.’

African American church leaders also expressed outrage. ‘Our race, we think, is depressed enough without exhibiting one of us with the apes,’ wrote one such minister, James H. Gordon to the mayor of New York. ‘We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.’ Gordon was to become Ota Benga’s guardian after the zoo ultimately bowed to public pressure and had Benga removed.

Ota Benga after Bronx Zoo

Ota Benga came under the guardianship of Gordon, who placed him in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, a church-sponsored orphanage.

In January 1910, Gordon arranged for Benga's relocation to Lynchburg, Virginia. His teeth, which he had filed to points in the Congo, were capped and he was dressed in American-style clothes. His English improved and he eventually 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.

He began to plan a return to Africa but when the First World War broke out, a return to the Congo became impossible, and he became depressed.

On March 20, 1916, at the age of 32, Ota Benga built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps on his teeth and shot himself in the heart with a stolen pistol. The death certificate listed his name as "Otto Bingo."