On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo’s house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death.
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Via Midwestern Transport, an article about a Congolese man displayed in the Bronx Zoo with the monkeys in 1906:
The new resident of the Monkey House was, indeed, a man, a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga. The next day, a sign was posted that gave Ota Benga’s height as 4 feet 11 inches, his weight as 103 pounds and his age as 23. The sign concluded, “Exhibited each afternoon during September.”
Visitors to the Monkey House that second day got an even better show. Ota Benga and an orangutan frolicked together, hugging and wrestling and playing tricks on each other. The crowd loved it. To enhance the jungle effect, a parrot was put in the cage and bones had been strewn around it. The crowd laughed as the pygmy sat staring at a pair of canvas shoes he had been given. “Few expressed audible objection to the sight of a human being in a cage with monkeys as companions,” The New York Times wrote the next day, “and there could be no doubt that to the majority the joint man-and-monkey exhibition was the most interesting sight in Bronx Park.”
These human exhibits were not a usual feature of zoos, but they were very common in traveling sideshows and circuses. The performers in them were black Americans or (as frequently) white Americans posing as black. Their exhibits closely resembled Benga’s. They were exhibited in cages, in “savage” dress that was usually a mishmash of fake “African” costume, and their ad copy described them as cannibals and evolutionary curiosities who spoke an alien language and practiced alien customs. They ate raw meat and live animals in staged performances, shrieked and growled at the audience, and pretended to wallow in filth. Whether they were black or not, they were usually made up in blackface so as to fit better into the cartoon of the “savage.” Zip the Pinhead, aka William Henry Johnson, is one such example of a performer marketed as a savage from the dark continent:
Zip’s early performances were set against a background story. It was told to the audience that a tribe of “missing links” had been discovered in Africa, and that Zip was one of these. It was further explained that the “wild man”, the “What-Is-It”, subsisted on raw meat, nuts, and fruit, but was learning to eat more civilized fare such as bread and cake.
As the New York Times article suggests, “wild man,” “missing link,” “ape,” “savage,” “African,” and “Black” were largely interchangeable for the people who paid to look at Ota and Zip:
The next day, word was out. The headline in The New York Times read: “Bushman Shares a Cage With Bronx Park Apes.” Thousands went to the zoo that day to see the new attraction, to watch him carry on so amusingly, often arm in arm, with Dohong the orangutan.
But the end came quickly. Confronted with the protests of the Colored Baptist Ministers’ Conference, Mr. Hornaday suspended the exhibit that Monday afternoon.
To the black ministers and their allies, the message of the exhibit was clear: The African was meant to be seen as falling somewhere on the evolutionary scale between the apes with which he was housed and the people in the overwhelmingly white crowds who found him so entertaining.
Even contemporary sources who did not formally link Benga to the animals he cared for did not seem terribly sure that he was different from them:
As for the press, The Evening Post reported that Ota Benga, according to the zoo’s animal keepers, “has a great influence with the beasts — even with the larger kind, including the orang-outang with whom he plays as though one of them, rolling around the floor of the cages in wild wrestling matches and chattering to them in his own guttural tongue, which they seem to understand.”
The Bronx Zoo was not the first place Benga was exhibited:
[Benga] was in the slave market when his deliverance appeared one day in the form of Samuel Phillips Verner, 30, an Africa-obsessed explorer, anthropologist and missionary from South Carolina (and a grandfather of Dr. Bradford, the author).
Mr. Verner had been hired to take some pygmies and other Africans back to St. Louis for the extensive “anthropology exhibit” at the 1904 World’s Fair. There, for the edification of American fairgoers, they and representatives of other aboriginal peoples, like Eskimos, American Indians and Filipino tribesmen, would live in replicas of their traditional dwellings and villages.
Anthropological exhibits at fairs began to be commonplace in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; they were made famous at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878, although the Smithsonian started its “ethnological” displays a few years prior. They usually consisted of small models of villages and homes, replete with what the audience was meant to see as an authentic collection of tools, furniture, and foodstuffs, and stocked with the people themselves. The tableaux were meant both as education and entertainment, but they were also a kind of white-supremacist morality play: these were the humble origins of mankind, and the white Western audience represented its leading edge. Although cages were not commonplace, the people were exhibited, without voice or privacy.
After the exhibit, Benga moved to Lynchburg and shot himself in the heart:
Toward the end of September, arrangements were made for Ota Benga to live at the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. Eventually he was sent to the asylum’s facility in eastern Long Island. Then, in January 1910, Mr. Gordon arranged for the pygmy to move to Lynchburg, where he had already spent a semester at a Baptist seminary.
In Lynchburg, Ota Benga had his teeth capped and became known as Otto Bingo. He spent a lot of time in the woods, hunting with bow and arrow, and gathering plants and herbs. He did odd jobs and worked in a tobacco factory. He became friendly with the poet Anne Spencer, who lived in Lynchburg, and through her met both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.
No one can be absolutely sure why Ota Benga killed himself that afternoon in March 1916. Dr. Dibinga, the Congolese who wants to return the pygmy’s remains to Congo, agrees with the view expressed in a Lynchburg newspaper report of the time: “For a long time the young negro pined for his African relations, and grew morose when he realized that such a trip was out of the question because of the lack of resources.” Mr. Verner himself wrote that Ota Benga “probably succumbed only after the feeling of utter inassimilability overwhelmed his brave little heart.”