Ota Benga
Otto Benga in 1904 Photo: Jessie Tarbox Beals
The St. Louis Fair didn’t just display Filipinos; it also featured an exhibit of Africans, including a Congolese man named Ota Benga. After the St. Louis Fair wrapped up, Benga was taken to New York to become part of an exhibition at the Bronx Zoo. He apparently believed he was being hired to care for the zoo’s elephant.
He was gravely mistaken. Touted as a savage pygmy, Benga quickly became a highlight of the zoo, and was displayed in a monkey house. The card outside the exhibit read:
Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.
Weight 103 pound. Brought from the Kasai River,
Congo Free State, South Central Africa,
By D. Samuel P Verner.
Exhibited each afternoon during September
His teeth were filed to points, as was customary in his tribe, and the floor of his cage was littered with bones placed there by zookeepers to make him look more threatening. He played the role of the savage and in time was displayed in a cage with apes, a move championed by amateur anthropologist Madison Grant, then secretary of the New York Zoological Society, and future prominent eugenicist.
The New York Times heralded the exhibit with the headline: “Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes.” In the body of the article, Benga was identified as “a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale."