A Life On Display: The Story Of Ota Benga

On display at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, along with automobiles and locomotives and giant dynamos, bears and ostriches and exotic carp, were 1,400 human beings.

They were people from about 40 "primitive" tribes around the world, presented in what was billed as their native habitat, rebuilt in Forest Park.

The scientific notion behind these human exhibits, clearly stated by the chief anthropologist of the fair, was to show Caucasians how far they had advanced up the evolutionary tree compared with such "odd peoples" as the "hairy Ainu" from northern Japan, the "giants of Patagonia" and the "warlike Sioux."

Included were a small group of African pygmies, their huts laid out next to the teepees of the Apache and their famous chief, Geronimo. Among the pygmies was a man in his early 20s, a little under 5 feet tall, named Ota Benga.

Ota Benga was not of the same tribe as the other pygmies, and he barely spoke their language. An American explorer who had a contract to supply Africans to the fair had bought him from a slave-trading tribe in the Belgian Congo. The rest of his extended family of about 30 people had been slaughtered by mercenaries of the king of Belgium.

When the seven-month-long fair ended, virtually all the native people went home to stay - except for about 20 Zulus, who disappeared into St. Louis' black community, and Ota Benga.

Ota Benga ended up spending most of the rest of his life in the United States, part of it on display in a cage at the Bronx Zoo. A book about him, "Ota Benga: the Pygmy at the Zoo" (St. Martin's Press) has just been published.

One of the authors, engineer Phillips Verner Bradford, is the grandson and namesake of Samuel Phillips Verner, the missionary-explorer who had purchased Ota Benga (for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth) and brought him to the fair. The co-author is writer Harvey Blume.

"Who was Ota Benga?" the authors ask.

"Elf, dwarf, cannibal, wild man, savage loose in the metropolis, beyond ape but not quite human, stunted, retarded, incomplete, someone to gawk at, tease, put in cages, ridicule - these are among the contemporary descriptions of him.

"Conspicuously absent is the possibility that he was just as evolved as President (Theodore) Roosevelt, say, or Thomas Edison. . . . It was nearly inconceivable that Ota might be just as curious about the anthropologists who bedeviled him as they were about him."

RACIAL STEREOTYPING

Bradford, who heads a technology institute in Denver, did extensive research at the Missouri Historical Society, the main repository of information about the World's Fair. The fair's emphasis on anthropology, he said, was probably the major way it differed from other world's fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ironically, he said, the anthropological exhibits - the human beings with customs different from ours - helped put the lie to some of the racist assumptions they were intended to demonstrate, and to the misreading of evolutionary theory known as "social Darwinism."

The tribal peoples from all over the world were put through extensive tests and physical measurements by W.J. McGee, head of the fair's anthropology department. His intention was to show the complete physical and mental superiority of whites.

"It turned out to be an exercise in futility," Bradford said. "For instance, one of the things McGee and the others were trying to prove was that white people had the biggest brains. But it turned out the biggest brain they measured belonged to an American Indian.

"A positive outcome of all that activity is that it contributed to the decline of that pseudo-scientific philosophy. As far as I'm aware, no world's fair since then has had that sort of display."

LIFE IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Ota Benga and the other pygmies were among the most popular attractions at the fair - although the pygmies were not always happy about their popularity.

"On Sundays," the book explains, "after having put in a six-day week as exhibits, the forest dwellers retreated with Verner to the wooded areas around the fair. Trees! It revitalized them just to be in the presence of branches, leaves and shade, to see New World birds, plants and mammals.

"They rarely escaped for an entire day. Crowds got wind of their whereabouts. People filled the spaces between the trees, bringing with them the lit cigars, the noise, the jabbing fingers . . . Verner had contracted to bring the pygmies safely back to Africa. At times it was a struggle just to keep them from being torn to pieces at the fair."

In the African forest, the pygmies were known as skillful hunters of elephants. They were very talented mimics, an invaluable talent for hunters, making it possible for them to blend into the background until the moment of attack.

They would go so far as to smear themselves with elephant dung in order to disguise their smell when they were stalking an elephant. One observer comments in the book, "You might say you could never understand someone who voluntarily smears himself with elephant dung, but `civilized' people sometimes go to even greater lengths to earn a living."

The World's Fair began at the end of April and lasted until Dec. 1. But no matter how hot or cold, the people on exhibit had to remain in their native outfits.

So when the temperature sank to levels unimaginable to natives of equatorial Africa, the pygmies huddled in their huts, hidden from view. Some fair-goers threw stones and bricks at the huts, trying to get the pygmies to come out and pose for photographs.

Occasionally, the pygmies would become so angry at being molested that they would grab their spears and make mock rushes at the mobs of tourists, leading to such headlines as "Enraged Pygmies Attack Visitor" and "Pygmy Dance Starts Panic in Fair Plaza."

The pygmies hated to have their pictures taken under any conditions.

But Ota Benga and the others came to an accommodation with the tourists. For a nickel, they would pose for photographs with mouths open in wide smiles - displaying the sharpened teeth that led to the titillating rumor that they were cannibals.

The whole notion of putting human beings on display seemed completely bizarre to the pygmies. After the fair, when Verner returned most of them to their homes in Africa, they found it impossible to explain to those who had stayed behind what had gone on in St. Louis. Finally, to demonstrate, the pygmies from the fair built a wooden pen in a clearing, like an animal enclosure. They sat Verner inside it, at a desk piled with books. He smoked his pipe and read and wrote - doing what he normally did, in a replica of his native habitat, observed by strangers on another continent.

The other pygmies laughed at the absurdity of such a thing, but finally they understood what their friends and relatives had been doing in America.

A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

Ota Benga went along with Verner on that trip back to Africa, but he refused to stay. Tragically, as it turned out, he was still curious about the white man's world.

So Verner brought Ota Benga back to New York and eventually arranged for him to live at the Bronx Zoo, which included several hundred acres of forest where he could wander and, in competition with some of the city's other immigrants, hunt small creatures. He befriended an orangutan, who reminded him of the monkeys at home. The zoo director came up with the notion of having the two on display together in the orangutan's cage.

Within a couple of weeks, the combined outrage of a black minister's group and The New York Times editorial page had forced a halt to the display.

In 1910, Ota Benga left New York and was adopted by a black seminary in Lynchburg, Va. The upward-striving seminarians had his teeth capped and tried to get him to dress like an educated, middle-class American, but he kept taking his clothes off and slipping into the forest, where he would put on a bark loincloth and teach the local children how to hunt with a bow and arrow.

Finally, early in 1916, he went into the forest for the last time, alone, carrying a stolen pistol. Apparently he had realized he would always be a lonely misfit in America, and there was no chance that he could ever return to Africa. He told the children whom he had befriended that he wanted to go home.

He had already broken the caps off his teeth. He built a fire and danced around it, singing a song.

Then he put the pistol to his chest and killed himself with a single bullet to the heart.