A century later, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s apology for the 1906 exhibition of Congolese Ota Benga comes after the global protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, which shines a bright light on racism in the US again.
To understand once again how cruel and ignorant racism is, let’s take a closer look at the heartbreaking story of Ota Benga.
Ota Benga was a member of a colony of 15-20 people.
Benga was born in the Ituri Forest in the Free State of Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1883. He was born in the Mbuti Pygmy colony, one of many small groups of large family groups of 15 to 20 people. These colonies were nomads who moved from temporary village or camp to another.
At the 1885 Berlin Conference that divided Africa, King of Belgium II. Leopold captured the Free Congo State. To make his ownership profitable, Leopold began exploiting the area’s resources, including rubber, and inflicted forced labor on residents, including the Mbuti Pygmies, reinforced by beatings, mutilation, and murder.
When Benga returned from the hunt, his whole world had been shattered and his life would be very different from before.
When Benga, a teenager, returns from an elephant hunt, he learns that his entire family and village have been slaughtered by King Leopold’s private army, the Force Publique. Now alone and defenseless, Benga was kidnapped by slave traders and put to work as a laborer in a farming village.
It was released in 1904 by Samuel Phillips Verner, an American missionary and amateur anthropologist who had a contract with the Louisiana Purchase Exhibit to bring back the dwarves to be part of a human exhibit at the fair.
Benga went on display with monkeys at the zoo.
Benga wanted to return to the United States with the anthropologist in 1906. Verner initially took Benga to the Bronx Zoo, where he was kept for help. However, zoo officials began displaying it in the monkey house, which again attracted large crowds. The Benga exhibition attracted tens of thousands of visitors.
It caused a backlash among black ministers. A group of black New York clergy led by Reverend James H. Gordon demanded his release. At the end of 1906, 23-year-old Benga was placed in the care of Reverend Gordon, who placed him in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in New York City.
The boy’s life was becoming more and more hopeless.
In 1910, Gordon had the boy move to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he received his first formal and religious education. Benga started working at a local tobacco factory to cover the expenses of the return trip to Central Africa.
Despite her efforts to adapt, she became increasingly hopeless about her new life in Lynchburg and her future there. He had lost contact with Verner, and even if he wanted to return to Congo, he could not afford the travel expenses on his own.
Ota Benga went down in history as an example of how toxic racism is.
Ota Benga committed suicide on March 20, 1916, in Lynchburg, Virginia. The coroner’s investigation determined that he killed himself by shooting a pistol in his left chest. He was only 33 years old when he committed suicide.
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