On March 20, 1916, Ota Benga took his own life, broken by a world that had treated him as an exotic curiosity. Exhibited at the Bronx Zoo in 1906 after being torn from his native Congo, he symbolizes the devastation wrought by scientific racism and colonialism. His tragic and instructive story reminds us of the urgent need to preserve erased memories.
Ota Benga’s journey through human zoos
There are stories that haunt History. Stories too painful to be fully told, too shameful to be fully acknowledged. Ota Benga is one of those names we would rather leave in the shadows, where the unspeakable does not have to be confronted. But shadows are nothing more than a suspended place of memory. And today, Ota Benga is still looking at us.
Born on the fringes of the Congo around 1883, he was a man, a hunter, a Mbuti. He was made for the forest, for the rustle of leaves beneath the silent steps of his people, for the filtered light of the undergrowth where his ancestors had survived and thrived. But History—the kind written with the violence of those who take without asking—decided to uproot him, strip him of everything, and display him like a trophy.
We are at the beginning of the 20th century. The world is industrializing, and the great powers are redrawing the map of continents with the blood of conquered peoples. The Congo, then under Belgian rule, is an open wound. King Leopold II reigns over this territory like an insatiable ogre, exploiting its natural and human riches with a barbarity that still chills us today. It is in this context that the Force Publique, the armed wing of this colonial machine, destroys Ota Benga’s village. His wife and children are massacred. He is not there that day. His absence saves his life. But what kind of life remains after that?
He is captured and sold into slavery by a rival tribe. And it is another man, an American named Samuel Phillips Verner, who will take him under his wing—or rather, under his yoke. Verner is commissioned by the organizers of the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 to bring back Pygmies from Africa. “Specimens,” as they call them.
In St. Louis, visitors come in droves to see these men whom they do not regard as their equals. Europe and America, fed on colonial propaganda, have learned to view Black peoples as beings halfway between human and animal, and the World’s Fair only reinforces this idea. Ota Benga is there, in this sordid staging where his filed, pointed teeth cause a sensation. People pay to see him smile, to touch his skin, to observe his body as a biological phenomenon rather than as a human being.
The fair ends, but his ordeal continues. He is taken to the Bronx Zoo in New York, placed in a cage with an orangutan. A Black man behind bars, among the apes. A Black man used to illustrate racist theories meant to prove the inferiority of his people. A Black man, with a bow and arrows in his hands, to further underscore the “savagery” they want to assign to him.
isitors laugh. They point. They hurl insults.
But Ota Benga’s suffering cannot be contained within the walls of that cage. He becomes aggressive, elusive. He fights back in his own way, firing arrows at those who humiliate him. He has to be removed. Too many eyes are fixed on this aberration. Too many voices rise up, particularly those of Black American leaders who refuse to see one of their own reduced to a sideshow beast.
He is placed under the care of Reverend James Gordon and sent to Lynchburg, Virginia. They try to adapt him, to “civilize” him. His teeth are filed down. He is given the clothes of a white man. He is taught English. He tries to blend into a society that looks at him only with pity or condescension.
But America will never be his home.
Ota Benga constantly dreams of Africa, of returning to the land that saw him born and from which he was torn with unimaginable brutality. He tries to leave. But the First World War breaks out and puts an end to any possibility of travel. He is trapped in a country that never wanted him as anything other than an exotic curiosity.
So he gives up.
On March 20, 1916, he lights a ritual fire and removes the prosthetics that replaced his filed teeth. Then he takes a gun and shoots himself through the heart. He is 32 years old.
The land of his ancestors will never see him again.
A legacy of silence and struggle
The name Ota Benga could have disappeared into the limbo of history, like so many other stories of violence and oppression. But silence cannot forever cover injustice.
More than a century later, in 2020, the Wildlife Conservation Society, which manages the Bronx Zoo, issued an official apology for the treatment inflicted on Ota Benga. A belated gesture, of course. But perhaps a necessary one. For it reminds us that memory is a responsibility, that the wrongs of the past must be acknowledged so they are not repeated.
In Africa, organizations campaign for the recognition of Indigenous peoples, from the Mbuti to the San, whose history has been marked by centuries of exploitation and contempt. In the West, artists and intellectuals continue to tell his story, refusing to let his name fade.
Ota Benga was not a sideshow curiosity. He was not living proof of any racial hierarchy. He was a man. A man broken by the gaze of the world.
Today, it is up to us to adopt a different gaze. One that does not reduce, that does not freeze, that does not dehumanize. A gaze that recognizes, that repairs, that delivers justice.
Because History must no longer be written by those who look, but by those who live.
