Ota Benga was a young Central African man, most often described as Mbuti, who was brought to the United States in 1904 and put on show twice: first at the St. Louis World's Fair, then in September 1906 inside the Monkey House of New York's Bronx Zoo. Black ministers forced the zoo to end the display within days. He spent his last years in Lynchburg, Virginia, and took his own life there on 20 March 1916, unable to get home. In July 2020 the organisation that runs the zoo formally apologised.
His story is short, documented in fragments, and still argued over by historians. What is clear is that it sits at the meeting point of colonial violence in the Congo, the American fashion for "human zoos", and the eugenics movement that was gaining respectability in New York at the time.
Who Ota Benga was
Benga was born around 1883 in the Kasai region of what was then the Congo Free State, the territory run as a private possession by King Leopold II of Belgium. Most accounts call him Mbuti, one of the forest peoples of Central Africa; some writers have suggested he was Batwa, and the newspapers and promoters of his day used the labels loosely.
According to the account in Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume's 1992 book Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, his village was attacked by the Force Publique, Leopold's colonial army, while he was away hunting. His wife and two children are said to have been killed. He was later captured by slave traders. Like many people in his region, he had filed his teeth to points as a mark of beauty, a detail that American showmen would exploit as "proof" that he was a cannibal.
We remember our dear brother Ota Benga, An African subjected to the inhumane treatment of "Human Zoos" in the 1900s pic.twitter.com/7u7pc9MChK
— Lady D (@NeferFej) 8 Φεβρουαρίου 2016
From the Congo to the 1904 World's Fair
The man who brought him to America was Samuel Phillips Verner, a South Carolina–born former missionary and adventurer. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis had hired Verner to bring back "pygmies" for an anthropology section meant to show supposed stages of human development. In 1904 he bought Benga from his captors, reportedly for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. Verner himself later told a more flattering story, claiming he had rescued the young man from cannibals.
Benga helped persuade several other men to travel with them, and the group reached St. Louis in the summer of 1904. The fair displayed people from many colonised societies in staged "native villages", and visitors crowded around Benga in particular because of his teeth. Newspapers sold him as a genuine African cannibal.
¿Y si un día váis al zoo y os encontráis a un congoleño allí expuesto? Eso pasó con Ota Benga. http://t.co/BQvwpgXeRj pic.twitter.com/wx1csM2rbj
— Toda una amalgama (@Todaunaamalgama) 4 Φεβρουαρίου 2015
The Instagram post above reproduces a well-known photograph of Benga, second from the left, with other Africans brought to the 1904 fair, credited to the University of South Carolina.
After the fair Verner took the group back to Africa. Benga is said to have remarried there, and to have asked to return to America after his second wife died, reportedly from a snakebite. Those details come largely from Verner's side of the story and are hard to check.
The museum and the Bronx Zoo Monkey House
Back in New York in 1906, Verner was short of money. He arranged for Benga to stay at the American Museum of Natural History while he negotiated with its curator, Hermon Bumpus. Benga was homesick and grew restless, and in one incident he threw a chair that narrowly missed the wife of a wealthy donor. Some retellings name her as Florence Guggenheim; standard reference accounts leave her unnamed.
Ota Benga, with his huntin spear once lived at the Museum of Natural History (and forced to wear a duck costume) pic.twitter.com/iJJiQTffpv
— AFRICAN HISTORY (@africanarchives) 12 Ιανουαρίου 2016
Bumpus suggested the Bronx Zoo. Its director, William Hornaday, at first let Benga help with the animals and wander the grounds. Then the zoo moved his hammock into the Monkey House, gave him a bow and arrows, and set up a target. From 8 September 1906 he was on display beside an orangutan named Dohong, with a sign giving his name, height and weight. Madison Grant, secretary of the New York Zoological Society that ran the zoo, was among those who pushed for the exhibit. Grant later wrote The Passing of the Great Race, a book of "scientific" racism that Adolf Hitler is reported to have praised in a letter to him as his bible.
Ota Benga, Bronx Zoo, 1906. pic.twitter.com/mADk705Zts
— Humans Photography (@humansphoto) 16 Μαρτίου 2016
True story: Ota Benga, the Congo pygmy kidnapped + caged in the Bronx Zoo by @ptnewkirk https://t.co/gQuLfvAfTV pic.twitter.com/fVpihFaVxC
— Mark Elliott (@markmobility) 22 Δεκεμβρίου 2015
Thousands of New Yorkers came to look. The zoo treated it as entertainment, and some of the press played along. The New York Times defended the display in an editorial and dismissed talk of humiliation as exaggerated. Benga was never paid, even though the zoo described him as an employee.
The protest that ended the exhibit
The loudest objections came from Black clergy. Reverend James H. Gordon, who ran the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, led a delegation of ministers to City Hall. He summed up their anger in one line: "Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes." Letters to New York newspapers, including some from white readers, also called the display a disgrace.
Within days Benga was taken out of the cage, although he stayed at the zoo for a while, followed and taunted by visitors. Later in 1906 the mayor's office released him into Gordon's care, and he moved into the orphanage in Brooklyn.
Trust me, it's so f***ed up! read how they dehumanised Ota Benga and drove him to commit suicide in the 1900s. Smh https://t.co/k3ExWv8Pma
— Lady D (@NeferFej) 4 Μαρτίου 2016
His last years in Lynchburg, Virginia
In January 1910 Gordon arranged for Benga to move to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived with the family of the late Gregory W. Hayes, a Black educator who had headed the Virginia Theological Seminary and College. His teeth were capped so that he would draw less attention, he wore American clothes, and locals reportedly knew him by the nickname "Otto Bingo". The poet Anne Spencer helped him with his English, and he attended classes for a time at a local seminary before taking a job in a tobacco factory.
He is remembered as a favourite of the neighbourhood children, whom he took into the woods to hunt and gather. But he never stopped wanting to go home. When the First World War broke out in 1914, transatlantic passenger travel became almost impossible and his savings plan collapsed.
On 20 March 1916, aged about 32, he built a ceremonial fire, removed the caps from his teeth and shot himself in the heart with a borrowed pistol. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Lynchburg's Old City Cemetery; local tradition holds that his remains were later moved, but that has not been confirmed. Lynchburg put up a historic marker for him in 2017.
Exactly 100 years ago on March 20, 1916, Ota Benga returned home, but not to his homeland, when he died in... https://t.co/3GfT4JSooK
— Jannette Mugisha (@Nyirabusizori) 19 Μαρτίου 2016
The 2020 apology and why the story still matters
More than a century passed before the zoo's owners faced the episode directly. In July 2020, during a summer of nationwide protests against racism, the Wildlife Conservation Society issued a statement signed by its president, Cristián Samper. It said: "We deeply regret that many people and generations have been hurt by these actions." The society also condemned the eugenics promoted by two of its founders, Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, both of whom helped found the American Eugenics Society in 1926, and promised to open its records on Benga to the public.
Two books are the main routes into his life. Bradford and Blume's 1992 account revived interest in him but leaned heavily on Verner's papers (Bradford was Verner's grandson). Pamela Newkirk's Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (2015) went back to the archives and the press coverage and is more critical of the men who profited from him.
His story is a reminder that "human zoos" were not a fringe curiosity. They were staged by respected institutions, defended by leading newspapers and justified with the language of science. The people who stopped the Bronx Zoo display were not scientists or officials, but ministers who refused to accept that one of their brothers could be shown as an animal.
For readers who want to go further, the Lynchburg marker, Newkirk's book and the society's 2020 statement are good starting points. Our related article on human zoos in Europe and America shows how common such exhibits were in the same period.
Sources: Wikipedia: Ota Benga (citing Bradford and Blume, 1992, and Newkirk, 2015); CNN, 30 July 2020: Bronx Zoo apologizes for displaying an African man in its Monkey House in 1906; Wikipedia: Madison Grant; earlier coverage by RT via The Free Thought Project; tweets and Instagram post embedded from their original authors.
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