Ota Benga lived in a cage at the Bronx Zoo with the monkeys in 1906 and became a hugely popular exhibit as proof of evolution. Ota was a Pygmy from the Congo when the Congo was the playground and money making property of King Leopold of Belgium.
The pygmies were competitors in the ivory trade and were systematically killed off; the rationale being that the pygmies, so small and stupid, were obviously just one evolutionary tick away from the little monkeys. Darwin once wrote: “The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” No biggie. Science was the new religion–minus the love and compassion.
Ota came to America after he was purchased by a noted American explorer from South Carolina, Phillips Verner, who planned to exhibit him at the 1904 World’s Fair. Falling on hard times, Verner searched for someone to take Ota off his hands. In New York Herman Bumpus the director of the Natural History Museum gave him a home with the stipulation that he’d have to entertain the richie riches when they came for lunch. When Ota threw a chair at Florence Guggenheim Bumpus was like, ” I’m so done with you.”
Off Ota was sent to the Bronx Zoo. When Christians (especially southern black ones) protested that evolution was at best an unproven theory and at worst an invitation for race extermination The New York Times retorted: “It is most amusing to note that one colored brother objects to the curious exhibition on the grounds that it is an impious effort to lend credibility to Darwin’s dreadful theories . . . The reverend colored brother should be told that evolution, in one form or another, is now taught in the textbooks of all the schools, and that it is no more debatable than the multiplication table.” And: “As for Benga himself, he is probably enjoying himself as well as he could anywhere in his country, and it is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation he is suffering.”
Eventually Ota was freed. He went to see how much it would cost him to sail back home and shot himself in the chest.
http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/30/otabenga.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/nyregion/thecity/06zoo.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Story retold from The Political Gene by Dennis Sewell
Author Adrienne Morris 
12 responses to “Play Date at the Zoo; The Sad Tale of Ota Benga”
Jesus, what a tale. An awful story with a terrible ending. I really liked this. What a world.
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Whenever someone says we’re just animals or even worse than animals I get scared because that sort of thinking is not going to lead us to anything beautiful or good. For whatever reason we have minds that create and destroy. Saying we’re just a bunch of steps on an evolutionary journey frees us from responsibility and meaning. Who cares if we kill? Survival of the fittest!
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I think that explains the opinion that we only function using 10 % of our brain capacity. If that is true, I suspect the missing 90 % would allow us to see things in a universal sense. Therein also lies morality, priorities, and consciousness for the collective good. I don’t know that we will have time to evolve given the likelihood of our own destruction, by climactic ruin, disease, wars, lunatics, and flaccid governments.
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That is so sad!!! Poor Oto.
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His entire family was killed before he came to America. The Congo was a very violent place.
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Very sad!
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Being able to scientifically “prove” that pygmies were less than human really freed men to ignore God’s command to love others. If we see some people as just animals, then who cares?
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Exactly. This kind of thinking was also the rationale for slavery: the people were “property.” As my father used to say, “Man’s inhumanity to man.” 😦
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Dreadful, dreadful.
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Humans can be very callous in the name of agendas.
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That’s so sad.
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I wouldn’t mind living in a zoo if it were with puppies 🙂 But I don’t think that would prove evolution in any way.
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