December 2, 2008
The Tragic Tale of the Pygmy in the Zoo
In 1904, several Pygmies were brought to live in the anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Two years later, a Congo Pygmy named Ota Benga was housed temporarily at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City—and then exhibited, briefly and controversially, at the Bronx Zoo.
–The Pygmies’ Plight, in the December 2008 issue of Smithsonian magazine
In October, when we were working on “The Pygmies’ Plight”, I found Ota Benga’s sad story and was disappointed we couldn’t fit more of the details into our article, so I thought I would share some of them here. (For those who are interested in reading even more, I recommend Ota: The Pygmy in the Zoo, by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume.)
Ota Benga, a pygmy, was born somewhere in a forest in Congo around 1883. He married young and started a family. One day he returned from elephant hunting to find his village slaughtered, and he was captured and sold into slavery.
Ota Benga at the 1904 World's Fair, via Wikimedia Commons
In March 1904, an American, S.P. Verner, found Ota Benga in a slave market. Verner had come to Africa to collect pygmies for the St. Louis World’s Fair. He bought Ota Benga’s freedom and convinced him and, later, eight other pygmies from a tribe called the Batwa to come to St. Louis. The pygmies took up residence in the anthropology exhibit, next to a group of Native Americans that included the legendary Geronimo.
Verner returned the pygmies to Africa in 1905, and Ota Benga tried to adjust to life with the Batwa, even marrying a Batwa woman. Ota Benga also traveled around Africa with Verner, and after Ota Benga’s second wife died, he asked to return with Verner to America.
But Verner was having money troubles, and when they arrived in New York City, he arranged for Ota Benga to live at the American Museum of Natural History. People aren’t meant to live in museums, though, perhaps particularly pygmies more used to the forest. At a gathering of wealthy donors, Ota Benga flung a chair at the head of Florence Guggenheim.
The museum then arranged to transfer Ota Benga to an even more outrageous home: the Bronx Zoo.
Ota Benga roamed freely, sometimes helping out the keepers with chores. He spent time with the chimpanzees in the Monkey House. And then, after a few weeks, some zoo officials found a chance to make a splash when they hung up the pygmy’s hammock in an empty cage and handed him a bow and arrow.
The pygmy exhibit was immediately controversial. In addition to what we would call a natural aversion to locking up a person as a zoo exhibit, some Christian ministers objected to the “demonstration of the Darwinian theory of evolution.” (And, yes, I think it’s sad that we’re still arguing about evolution a
century later, even though now at least we know that pygmies aren’t a “missing link.”)
The zoo discontinued the exhibit in the Monkey House, but now Ota Benga was hounded by visitors as he walked the zoo’s grounds. An incident with zookeepers in which he apparently threatened them with a knife led to his removal, first to a New York orphan asylum and later to a Lynchburg, Virginia seminary.
In Lynchburg, Ota Benga’s pointed teeth (a form of cosmetic dentistry still practiced by some African pygmies today) were capped and his name changed to Otto Bingo. He briefly worked in a tobacco factory before turning to odd jobs in return for room and board. He made friends, although it was hard to convince people that his impossible story was true. And on March 22, 1916, he shot himself in the heart with a stolen revolver.
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What a coincidence! I just wrote about this story the day before at Laelaps (http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2008/12/when_humans_were_kept_in_the_m.php)
It’s the Smithsonian hive brain. (heehee) I’ve been waiting for the December issue to go online. Ever since I read Ota Benga’s story in October, I’ve wanted to tell it to people. It just haunted me.
This is a great article very well written thank you for sharing this story
I found several parallel aspects between Greg Downey’s “Turning a Blind Eye” of Seed Magazine and Raffaele’s “The Pygmes’ Plight” of Smithsonian Magazine. Whether in the rainforests of Africa or South America, it seems that a major reoccurring theme is profit motive over compassion for life. Many foreigners enter rain forest environments in search of raw materials to extract for their own financial benefit. Examples mentioned in both articles include logging. Downey mentions that the false media information regarding three tribe men who shot arrows at a team of aerial surveyors in search of isolated humans was a reflection of our own ignorance. “But the likely truth is harder to face: The tribe might have threatened the observers precisely because they had encountered some of the worst aspects of our culture before, and suffered grievously.” (Downey) Many indigenous people had been enslaved murdered and tormented during the 19th and 20th century rubber boom. The tribes chose isolation in the forest for safety reasons.
Raffaele’s story describes how the indigenous Pygmy clans in Africa are forced to leave the forest because of the Bantu government’s greed for the profits made by forest resource trade. As a result, Pygmy traditions and culture have changed. They can no longer hunt like they used to in the previous decade because “the Bantu poachers have plundered the jungle.” (Raffaele 74) They can no longer easily support their families. They suffer from malnutrition and various viral and bacterial diseases. They have no land or civil rights and must endure social prejudices by the Bantu’s. Although elephant killing is illegal, Bantu sometimes provide guns to the Pygmies. As a result, the Pygmies get some meat and money and the Bantu’s earn a profit from Asian markets. They also support themselves by growing marijuana crops on borrowed land from the government. They are forced to survive by new means and their lives are threatened by the deforestation movement.
The indigenous humans of the South American rainforests of “Turning a Blind Eye” are forced to change their lifestyle because of the profit motives of loggers. Their hunting and gathering has been altered because of the roads and settlements of those with money motives as well as landing strips made by drug traffickers. “While the loggers may kill Indians, settlers wound the forest itself, making it harder for any survivors to eat.” (Downey)The Indians are also catching new diseases brought in by Westerners. These tribes are forced to find new ways of survival in a world of profits over people.
In sociology I learned about ethnocentrism and I think this is embedded in the destruction of tribes throughout the world. “Given that a particular culture is the basis for each person’s reality, it is no wonder that people everywhere exhibit ethnocentrism, the practice of judging another culture by the standards of one’s own culture.” (Macionis 75) Because of our ignorance, we make decisions that are harmful to those people who may live in an area that we search for goods.
What will it take for all of us humans to respect each other and come to a balance of survival and prosperity for all involved? Maybe a good sociology course and a major paradigm shift on the planet will force us all into a more spiritually evolved direction.
Blog by Katherine December 3, 2008
Greg Downey. “Turning a Blind Eye.” SEED. 19 2008 September
Macionis, John J. Sociology, Twelfth Edition. Upper Saddle River: Pearson. 2008.
Paul Raffaele. The Pygmies’ Plight. Smithsonian. December 2008: 70-77.
[...] And it also reads as a complement to Sarah Zielinski’s post on Ota Benga, one of several pygmies from the Congo taken to America for exhibition at the beginning of the brave new twentieth [...]