Ota Benga

Ota Benga was born around 1883 in Colonial Congo into the Mbuti pygmy tribe. He lived with his tribe in equatorial forests near the Kasai River which was at the time part of the Belgian Congo.

To use the native people as laborers in the rubber supply business in Congo, King Leopold II of Belgium had formed the Force Publique militia, which killed people of Mbuti pygmy tribe including Ota Benga’s wife and two children. Benga survived the massacre as he was out on a hunting expedition when the militia raided his village.

He was subsequently captured by slave traders from the tribe known as the Baschelel. Samuel Phillips Verner found Benga while travelling to a Batwa village in 1904 and released him from the slave traders, exchanging a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth.

Verner had gone to Africa under contract from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis World Fair) to bring back an assortment of pygmies for an exhibition. By displaying people from vastly different cultures, W. J. McGee, a noted scientist, intended to demonstrate the then popular cultural evolution theory to the common people.

Verner took Ota Benga to the Batwa village to recruit more pygmies for the exhibition, but the villagers had become distrustful of muzungu (white people) due to the violent actions of King Leopold II's people. However, Verner, who later claimed to have saved Benga from cannibals, used his help to convince a few villagers to accompany him back to America.

Ota Benga, along with the group of African men, was brought to St. Louis, Missouri in late June 1904 without Verner, who was down with malaria. Immediately upon arrival, the group became the center of attraction in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, with Benga becoming particularly popular among media personalities who extensively reported on him.

Because visitors were eager to see his teeth which were filed to sharp points as ritual decorations early in his youth, the officials promoted him as "the only genuine African cannibal in America". The African tribesmen were instructed to charge money for their photographs and performances, and Benga reportedly charged five cents to show his teeth.

During their performance on July 28, 1904 the African tribals catered to the crowd's preconceived notion of Africans as "savages", which resulted in an overwhelming turnout that had to be controlled by the First Illinois Regiment. They performed in a warlike fashion, imitating American Indians at the Exhibition, following which Benga earned the admiration of the Apache chief Geronimo who gave him one of his arrowheads.

When Verner arrived there a month later, they were already drawing huge crowds that even thwarted their attempts at peaceful congregation in the forest on Sundays. Verner was awarded gold medal in anthropology after the Exhibition ended, but McGee's serious science exhibit was turned into a show.

Ota Benga returned to the Congo along with Verner and the other Africans, and lived among the Batwa for a brief period of time. Despite being free, he decided to accompany Verner on his African adventures, helping him collect artifacts and specimens and procure rubber and ivory for resale.

The American Museum of Natural History contains a life mask and body cast of Ota Benga, which is still labeled as 'Pigmy' despite century-long criticism by Verner and others. After Verner's grandson Phillips Verner Bradford published the book 'Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo' in 1992, his story was revisited by many later authors.