Review of: Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, by Phillips Verner Bradford & Harvey Blume

In 1904, the notorious Apache warrior Geronimo, now in his mid-seventies, was a federal prisoner of war on loan to the St. Louis World’s Fair, which belongs to our nation’s uncomfortable collective memory for its numerous ethnographic exhibits of so-called “primitive” humans which included, in addition to Native Americans, the Tlingit, indigenous to Alaska, and the Igorot, an aboriginal population from the Philippines who were billed as “headhunters,” as well as Congolese pygmies. Geronimo developed rapport with one of latter, an amiable nineteen year old Mbuti tribesman named Ota Benga, imaginatively advertised as a “cannibal,” who stood four foot eleven inches and whose smile showcased teeth ceremonially sharpened to fine points. The old medicine man presented him with an arrowhead as a gift; they were, of course, all in this kind of zoo together.

But only two years later that very metaphor materialized for Ota, whom after a brief stay at New York’s American Museum of Natural History found himself on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo, where he hung his hammock, wearing a loincloth and carrying a bow and arrow, or wandering the zoo grounds accompanied by an orangutan he had grown attached to—a captivating if unpaid attraction for amused onlookers. Just after the turn of century, fresh from the imperialist adventure that was the Spanish-American War, which had compelled Filipinos to trade one colonial power for another, “civilized” Americans delighted in the spectacle of gawking at “savages” in various contrived natural habitats—especially, it turned out, in of all places, New York City!

The hapless Ota’s surprising story, from his birth in central Africa through his unlikely travels across the United States, is the subject of Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo [1992], an entertaining if occasionally uneven account by dual authors Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume. It is also, actually, a dual biography, as Ota shares much space in the narrative with Samual Phillips Verner—the grandfather of one of the authors—an eccentric missionary who visited the Congo on a “specimen-gathering mission” for the Fair, and “collected” Ota Benga as one of those “specimens.” There are grander themes to parse, as well, that this set of authors may not have been up to. These run the gamut from the oppression that reigned in the Jim Crow south to the cruelty that characterized the Congo, and—especially—to this particular moment in time when an America now equipped with automobiles and electricity and even manned flight could yet shamelessly put human beings on display to at once juxtapose with and champion their alleged superiors shouldering their “white man’s burden.”

Bradford, an engineer who was inspired to write a biography of his colorful grandfather, recognized that Ota Benga was the hook that would attract readers, and set out to do the research. Blume was brought in to polish the manuscript. Neither were trained historians, which perhaps makes the finished product more readable, if less reliable; more on that later.

This storied grandfather, the aforementioned Samual Phillips Verner, was born in post-Civil War South Carolina to a former slaveholding family and grew up furnished with the deep-seated racism typical to his class and his time. Verner emerges here as an intense, academic prodigy who lingers upon troubling moral quandaries of right and wrong, while suffering from alternating episodes of mental illness—he once insisted he was the Hapsburg Emperor—and religious fervor. Throughout, he takes comfort in the Daniel Defoe novel Robinson Crusoe, as well as the real life adventures of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone in distant, exotic Africa. The sum total of all this was to coalesce in Verner’s calling as a missionary to what was then commonly referred to as the “Dark Continent.” It is in Africa that he demonstrates his intelligence, his charm, his many capabilities, and his propensity for both earning enemies and cementing friendships. He also wrestles with the inherent prejudices he carries from the deep south that come to be challenged by the realities of the human experience. And, as in his boyhood, there are disturbing moral dilemmas to resolve. But what becomes increasingly clear as the pages are turned is that Verner is first and foremost a narcissist, and resolutions for any paradox of morality are always obtained by what suits Verner’s own circumstances most comfortably and most conveniently.

By his own account, Verner’s time in the Congo consisted of remarkable exploits that saw him establish rapport with various native peoples, including pygmies, as well as form an unlikely kind of alliance with a dangerous, otherwise unapproachable tribal king, and a near-fatal episode when he impaled his leg on a poisoned stake set for an animal trap. Along the way, he distinguishes himself by his courage, quick-thinking, and ingenuity—like a character out of Defoe, perhaps. Did it all really happen? Bradford reports Verner’s saga as history, although it is based almost entirely on his grandfather’s own recollections. As such, the reader cannot help but question the reliability of a fellow who once believed himself to be the Hapsburg Emperor!

African pygmies, much like the Khoisan peoples, have an ancient indigenous lineage that are genetically divergent from all other human populations. They may or may not be descendants of paleolithic hunter-gatherers of the central African rainforest. In Ota Benga’s time, the Mbuti, nomadic hunters, ranged within the artificially drawn borders of the Congo Free State, a vast territory that was for a time the personal fiefdom of Belgium’s King Leopold II, a land infamous for the widespread atrocities committed by Leopold’s private army, the dreaded Force Publique, that enforced strict rubber collection quotas through extreme methods of murder and mutilation. A human hand had to be turned in for every bullet issued to prove these were not wasted, so baskets of hands—including children’s hands—became symbolic of Leopold’s “Free State,” a realm of horrors that inspired Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For those who have read Adam Hochschild’s magnificent work, King Leopold’s Ghost, there is nothing new here, but two of its protagonists, black missionary William Sheppard and Irish activist Roger Casement, who campaigned against Leopold’s reign of terror, turn up in this book, as well. Verner, it seems, was surprisingly unmoved by the carnage about him.

Verner contracted malaria. That illness, his leg injury, and the overall dissatisfaction of mission officials with his performance conspired to send him back to America, where he became famous for his reported feats and, based upon his background, won the assignment of procuring pygmies for The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair). So, eight years later he returned on expedition, with the blessings of King Leopold himself, and in an accidental encounter with the Baschilele tribe stumbled upon Ota Benga at a slave market. Apparently Ota, away from his camp on a solo elephant hunt, as pygmies were wont to do, had returned to find piles of corpses, including his wife and children—victims of the Force Publique. He and other survivors were sold into slavery. Verner could not believe his good fortune: he purchased Ota for “a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth.” [p103] He later recruited other more willing volunteers, and set sail for home. The Thirteenth Amendment forbidding chattel slavery was ratified nearly four decades prior, but that proved not to be a barrier to Verner’s transport of Ota to the United States.

That is just the beginning of this fascinating story! There is much more to come, which makes this book, although flawed on some levels, well worth the read. Those who have studied the American Civil War and the antebellum south are familiar with the nuanced relationships that can develop between the enslaved and those who hold them as property. A bond developed between Verner and Ota that was even more complicated than that. Verner may have purchased Ota and dutifully turned him over to the World’s Fair, but he later freely returned him to Africa. Yet, after a time, Ota, widowed once more after losing a second wife to snakebite, found himself with little to hold him there and a taste for the excitement he had found in America. Thus, he made an enthusiastic return to the US with Verner. But things were not destined to go well for either of them.

Verner had visions of grandeur that did not translate into either the wealth or recognition he sought. He seemed to genuinely care about Ota’s welfare, but that fell to neglect as his own fortunes dwindled, and Ota wound up in that degrading display at the Bronx Zoo. He was not there very long. His rescue came from unlikely quarters: African American clergymen, chafing at their own second-class status, were rightly appalled at the humiliating spectacle of Ota at the zoo, which they likewise perceived as advancing Darwinism, an abomination for their Christian faith. Ota went first to an orphanage in the Bronx, and later to Lynchburg, Virginia, where a kindly patron arranged to have his sharpened teeth capped, fitted him out in suitable clothing, sent him to school, and found him work at a tobacco factory, where he was known as Otto Bingo. But Ota, who in his heyday with Verner had been a celebrity of sorts on travels that had once even taken him to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, found himself lonely and alienated. One day in 1916, he pried the caps off his teeth and shot himself. He was about thirty-three years old.

In the end, I longed for more information about Ota and less about Verner. This volume, while enhanced by both wonderful photographs and a thick appendix of press clippings from the day, is conspicuously absent of endnotes—which would be useful for the reader anxious to separate fact from fiction in Verner’s likely embellishments. Still, despite its limitations, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it.

My Review of: King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terrorism and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild

Ota Benga is referenced, with much relevance, in Angela Saini’s fine work, reviewed here:  Superior: The Return of Race Science

Author: stanprager

Book nerd, computer geek, rock music fan, dogmatic skeptic. View all posts by stanprager