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Ota Benga (c. 1881–1916) was a Congolese pygmy who was featured as an example of "primitive man" in the United States.
Ota Benga was first brought to the United States by Samuel Phillips Verner, a Presbyterian missionary in the Congo, in 1903. He was first put on display at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.
In 1904, socialite and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society, had Ota Benga put on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York City alongside the apes and other animals. Grant, a prominent scientific racist and eugenicist, had meant for the exhibit to illustrate human evolution, and in particular believed that Africans like Ota Benga were closer to apes than were Europeans.
Eventually, protest from African-American clergymen had Ota Benga removed from exhibit—but not on the grounds that the exhibit was racist, but that it too strongly promoted Darwinian evolution.
Ota Benga later lived independently on Long Island and in Virginia. He died in 1916 in an apparent suicide. His body lies in an unmarked grave in Lynchburg, Virginia.
References
- Phillips Verner Bradford (grandson of Samuel Phillips Verner) and Harvey Blume, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York: St. Martins Press, 1992).
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