When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain by Giles Milton

Author:Giles Milton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250078780
Publisher: Picador

2

Into the Monkey House

The Bronx Zoo in New York attracted large crowds of visitors whenever newly acquired animals were first put on display. In previous years, it was the elephants and lions that had been the crowd-pullers. Tigers, too, proved extremely popular.

But in September 1906, the zoo’s new addition was altogether more alluring. Ota Benga was a pygmy from the African Congo and he had been locked up in the monkey house.

Ota Benga had been brought to New York by an American businessman-cum-missionary named Samuel Phillips Verner. Verner had travelled to the Belgian Congo in 1904 in order to acquire an assortment of African pygmies for display at the St Louis World Fair.

Verner first met Ota Benga while on an expedition deep into the equatorial rainforest. He managed to barter him for a pound of salt and a roll of cloth. Ota Benga was unwilling to leave Africa on his own and managed to persuade a few companions to join him on an expedition to North America. It was a voyage that was to change their lives.

Ota Benga proved an instant (if controversial) attraction at the world fair. He was put on display with other pygmies in the fair’s anthropology tent.

Part of the attraction was his strange teeth; they had been filed to sharp points when he was a young boy, as part of a Congolese ritualistic ceremony. Newspapers described him as ‘the only genuine African cannibal in America’.

Ota Benga returned briefly to the Congo after the fair but made a second visit to America with Verner in 1906. This time, his treatment was far more injurious. After a brief spell at the American Museum of Natural History, he was moved to Bronx Zoo.

The zoo’s director, William Hornaday, was quick to realize the appeal of a ‘human savage’ on display. Aware that it was controversial, he sought the backing of Madison Grant, the distinguished secretary of the New York Zoological Society.

Grant thought that it was a brilliant idea; Ota Benga was to live in the monkey house, along with a parrot and an orangutan called Dahong. The display panel read: ‘The African Pygmy, Ota Benga. Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September.’

In an article for the Zoological Society’s bulletin, Hornaday wrote enthusiastically about the zoo’s new acquisition: ‘A genuine African Pygmy, belonging to the sub-race commonly miscalled “the dwarfs”. Ota Benga is a well-developed little man, with a good head, bright eyes and a pleasing countenance. He is not hairy, and is not covered by the “downy felt” described by some explorers.’

His presence in the zoo excited controversy from the opening day. Indeed, it was to spark a violent debate about racism, evolution and evolutionary Darwinism.

The New York Times initially defended the decision to put him in the monkey house. ‘We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter,’ declared their editorial.

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