The Black man who was kept in a zoo in New York

     Article by Ohikhuare Isuku

Ota Benga


      The touching story of Ota Benga's ill treatment shall not fall off like skeins of spider in our generation. Like the vast shore, it will survive the harshness of time and spill into several generations yet to come, whistling off till eternity; its magnitude building up as time wears yet a new age.
      Ota Benga is believed to have been born around 1883 in modern day Democratic Republic of Congo. But sadly, 32 years after, he shot himself straight on the chest on March 20th 1916 - exactly 100 years ago.He did not die in Congo Free State, rather he committed suicide in Lynchburg, United States.

      Perhaps Ota Benga would have lived longer than his youthful attainment if he were allowed to stay in his bush country in far away Congo. In 1904, after being brought from the equatorial forest near the Kasai River, in what was then the Congo Free State, he was brought to St Louis, Missouri by an American explorer- Samuel Philips Verner.
     Earlier on, the Louisiana Purchase  Exposition. also known as St Louis World Fair, had given Verner the contract to bring pygmies (very short people) to feature in the exhibition. With the exhibition, the notable Scientist W.J. McGee had wanted to display the representation of all the world's pygmies to the most gigantic peoples, from the darkest blacks to the dominant white, so as to prove what was being speculated then to be a sort of cultural evolution.
     After the exhibition of the dwarf Benga, whose teeth were filed according to his native tradition, he followed Verner back to Africa and again return to America with Verner when his his second marriage failed. Before Verner visited Congo the first time, Ota Benga had been married, but his wife and two children were killed by Force Publique, set up by King Leopaold II of Belgium as a militia  to control the natives for labour in order to exploit the large supply of rubber in Congo.
     When Benga returned with Verner to America for the second time, the later saw it as an opportunity to exploit his victim further by arranging for Benga to live in a spare room at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. But the worst was yet to happen. In 1906, Verner took Benga to Bronx zoo where he was allowed to roam the grounds freely as beasts do.
     It was African-American Pastors who protested against this inhumane treatment of Ota Benga. They told the zoo officials to release him (Benga), that it was humiliating for black race to be treated as such. The zoo official would not have released Ota Benga in the fall of 1906 if there had not been heated criticisms of the churlish act from the media, especially The New York Times.
     In the last decade of Ota Benga's life, he was educated for a short time. He began to speak English. He also worked for in a tobacco factory where he told his life story in exchange for food and drink.When his hope of returning to Congo died off like ember, owning to the start of the first World War in 1914, Ota Benga took his life himself. He died on the 20th of March, 1916.