"They are remarkable mimics ... and ... are fond of
playing… their antics are childish... and... if caught young they are said to make excellent servants”
~ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 26, 1904
I thought I’d try something new here and begin a new
category of posts: Zoo History. Though
we think of them as a modern invention (and the modern zoo as we know it dates
back to the early 1800’s), zoos do have a very long history, longer perhaps
than any other cultural institution.
Captive collections of exotic animals date back thousands of millennia,
appearing in places as varied as Ancient China, Ptolemaic Egypt, and Aztec Mexico.
Ironically, the first post I’ve written for this new series
isn’t about animals – it’s about a man.
Ota Benga was probably born in the 1880s, in what is now the
Democratic Republic of Congo. Even today
the Congo is considered a fairly mysterious place, and back then it was
practically a lost world, with exciting discoveries – the gorilla, the okapi –
emerging all of the time. One of the
most extraordinary discoveries that Europeans and Americans found there was the
Mbuti – the pygmies. Ota Benga was of
these people. The Mbuti were barely
considered human by many people at the time, especially by neighboring tribes,
who captured them and sold them as curiosities.
Ota Benga was taken by slave traders before being rescued by an American,
Samuel Phillips Verner.
Verner’s motives weren’t entirely humanitarian: he had
actually be sent to Africa to recruit “native performers” for an upcoming
exposition in the US. Ota Benga was
recruited, along with several other Mbuti, and left for America. Except for one visit shortly afterwards, he
was never to return to Africa.
Ota Benga performed at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase
exposition in St. Louis, where he was exhibited alongside other indigenous
peoples from around the world (he met and befriended the Apache chief Geronimo
there). At the close of the exposition,
Verner briefly took Benga back to Africa before the pair returned to the United
States. Needing a place for the Mbuti to
stay while he took care of some business, Verner first housed Benga as a living
exhibit the American Museum of Natural History.
When those living arrangements proved unsuitable, Verner sent him to WilliamT. Hornaday of the Bronx Zoo.
Benga roamed the zoo grounds, was encouraged to “act native”
– shoot arrows, build hammocks – and befriended an orangutan. In might have been the later the put the idea
in Hornaday’s head to place the Mbuti on exhibit… in the Monkey House. He was supported in this by the New York
Zoological Society’s president, Madison Grant (who went on to become famous for
his advocacy of eugenics and racial “hygiene”).
Not surprisingly, Benga’s exhibition proved controversial… but not for
the reasons that you might expect. The
main argument against it was it some clergy felt that displaying a “primitive”
human alongside other primates amounted to an endorsement of Darwin’s theory of
evolution. Benga eventually left the
zoo.
Ota Benga never returned to Africa, but his remaining life
in the United States did not improve. He was placed in an orphanage, got a job,
and pined away for home. Return to Africa
was made almost impossible by World War I, and the Mbuti sank into
depression. On March 20, 1916, he took
his life.
Damned terrible story. Sadly, it's not entirely unique.
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