The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [415]
Ota Benga. (Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History)
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.
That September the tabloids ran stories about Ota Benga—some sympathetic, others mocking. Facts came out: the Bronx Zoo hadn’t purchased the pygmy; he was on loan, so the charge of slavery was a guffaw. The New York Evening News condescendingly noted that while Benga was black, he wasn’t coal-black—he wasn’t actually on the bottom rung of the descent of man. That rung was occupied by more dark-skinned blacks. A spirited debate also ensued about whether Benga was a real pygmy or a dwarf or midget. There was great interest also in his sharply filed teeth, which led speculations about cannibalism. Schoolchildren visiting the zoo goaded Benga to rip at raw meat hurled at him by keepers. Benga’s nickname was “Bi,” and kids taunted him with it until he waved at them. One afternoon Benga, refusing to wear strange clothes, broke away from his keeper. When he was eventually apprehended he was brandishing a knife; quickly, the zookeepers disarmed him.55 “We are taking excellent care of the little fellow,” Hornaday said in the Bronx Zoo’s defense. “He has one of the best rooms in the primate house.”56
A few courageous Baptist ministers kept coming to the zoo to protest the incarceration of Ota Benga. Although there is no record of President Roosevelt’s getting involved in the controversy, Hornaday nevertheless started feeling pressure to reverse course. Charges of zoological quackery were starting to arise. “I do not wish to offend my colored brothers’ feelings or the feelings of any one for that matter,” Hornaday said. “I am giving the exhibitions purely as an ethnological exhibit. It is my duty to interest visitors to the park, and what I have done in exhibiting Benga is in pursuance of this. I am a believer in the Darwinian theory.” However, he insisted that Darwinism wasn’t the main reason for displaying the pygmy. Hornaday was a Nebraskan, raised on the frontier, and Ota was his counterpart to Geronimo in the Wild West show. After all, Buffalo Bill had received accolades for parading Apache performers around dusty fairgrounds. Why should Hornaday get pummeled in the press over a Congolese pygmy? Such criticism was selective and hypocritical. Exasperated, and tired of fierce criticism from newspapers and ministers, Hornaday went on to explain that Benga slept in the primate house because it was the most obvious and most “comfortable” place for him to bed down at the zoo.57 What was Hornaday supposed to do? Have him sleep with the zebras?
On Sunday, September 16, more than 40,000 visitors came to the zoo and went to the monkey house to see Ota Benga. As a special attraction, Bi had been let out of the cage and was free to wander around the zoological park, though with a keeper at his side. “They chased him about the grounds all day, howling, jeering and yelling,” the New York Times reported of the spectators. “Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him.” Fearing for the pygmy’s life, the keeper put Benga back in his cage. “Me no like America,” Benga said. “Me like St. Louis.”58
Eventually, unable to shake off the criticism, Hornaday cracked. Arriving at work on Monday, with a pack of newsmen firing questions at him, Hornaday threw in the towel. “Enough!” he said. “Enough! I have had enough of Ota Benga, the African pigmy. Ring up the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. Tell them that they can get busy tinkering with his intellect. I’m through with him here.”59
Benga was shunted off to the orphan asylum, supposedly as a free man. But he really wasn’t free. In 1900, Governor Roosevelt had signed into law an act banning discrimination in public schools; yet, oddly, it wasn’t applicable in orphanages.60 Dressed in a white suit, Benga was kept as a sort of mascot at Howard. He