Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo
by Phillips Verner Bradford
and Harvey Blum.
Delta/Bantam, 1992 (out of print).
No one would know even the bit we think we do about Ota Benga had he not so famously been the star display in the monkey house in the Bronx Zoo for three weeks in September 1906. And I would never have tracked down Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blum’s out-of-print book, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, had I not seen the footnote in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, in which Hochschild mentions Benga’s stay in the zoo, and notes that Benga committed suicide. I immediately envisioned a pygmy hanging himself to escape the humiliation of life behind bars, and the drama of the racist story with the violent end piqued my curiosity. I’m not sure why I imagined him hanging except that I associate it with cornered, jailed men.
The brief zoo stay had nasty moments, but it also had some darkly amusing ones—as when, on a hot day, Benga stripped off his clothes, sending his minders into a frenzy. They tried to force him to dress, and he, fed up with his role as costumed curio, pulled a knife. In truth, Benga’s progress is serendipitous even as it seems, in retrospect, inexorable. He was a pragmatic, proud man—resourceful, funny, irritable, observant, curious, remarkably open to experience—it took a lot more than a sojourn in a zoo cage to compound his despair. He was about thirty-two years old in 1916 when, one night, in Lynchburg, Virginia, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Still, Ota Benga’s story is a tale of grotesque racism on two continents; and his self-inflicted death likely did stem from accumulated trauma; and that trauma must have included his experiences of being on display. Or, more precisely, it must have included his weariness at having so long been the object of distortion from many minds, the recipient of too many grossly inaccurate notions that impinged upon him (just as my hanging fantasy misrepresented his death). You cannot say that we only exist as we are held in each other’s minds, but it is also naïve to imagine it completely otherwise—to deny that we are constantly formed and deformed by ideas about us.
“Pygmy” as an epithet for Ota Benga is a handy example of an impingement that must have worn on him. Late-nineteenth-century Americans were excited about Benga partly because white people had recently “discovered” pygmies in Central Africa. The OED notes that pygmy is an old word:
One of a race (or several races) of men of very small size, mentioned in ancient history and tradition as inhabiting parts of Ethiopia or India; in later times generally supposed to be fabulous. In the last quarter of the 19th c. dwarf races were ascertained to exist in equatorial Africa, who may be the Pugmaioi of Homer and Herodotus, and are now commonly spoken of as ‘the Pygmies.’
Pygmies, of a sort, gained a place in Western European minds in 1357 when Sir John Mandeville published his Voiage de Sir John Mandeville. Mandeville’s account of his travels to distant parts of the world (and historians continue to argue about whether Mandeville existed or was a pseudonym for another writer, and about where the author, whoever he was, actually traveled-so perhaps we should say, “Mandeville’s mostly confabulated book”) sold very well, and had a huge influence. Here is his description of pygmies, as quoted in Carlo Ginzburg’s wonderfully interesting The Cheese and the Worms:
They are people short in stature, who are about three spans long: and they are beautiful and graceful, both men and women, because of their smallness. They marry when they are six months of age and beget children when they are two or three years old and generally they do not live beyond six or seven years: and those who live eight years are considered ancient. These Pigmies are extremely skillful and great masters in working with silk and cotton and in everything that there is in the world. And they frequently battle against the birds in their country and are often taken and eaten by them.
Six centuries later, extraordinary curiosity—generated in part by the newspaper dissemination of the evocative proper noun—brought out the vast crowds that gathered at the Bronx Zoo in September 1906. People were eager to see a pygmy—particularly, some newspapers suggested, a cannibal pygmy from darkest Africa. And as many as forty thousand children and adults daily filed past and peered at the small human—said to be humanoid, labeled the “Missing Link.” Sometimes Ota Benga roamed freely through the park, and the crowds chased after him. My impression is that he understood his zoo assignment, and by turns enjoyed and despised it. An official photograph shows him obligingly holding an ape in his arms, as one would hold a child—perhaps mimicking his visitors’ wish for him to resemble their preconceived idea of a pygmy. He was fond of animals and at home with them, as the image implies. But a more haunting pentimento reveals itself when you learn what happened to Benga’s own young children, before he left the Congo. In this sense, the ape not only serves as a prop for a person playing an odd role, but as surrogate for a missing child—and thus a secret, ghostly suggestion of the man’s circumstance.
Ota Benga had the grave misfortune of being born in the Congo Free State around 1884—just in time to live through the Belgium-orchestrated genocide: five to fifteen million Congolese tortured and murdered as part of King Leopold’s quest to extort wealth from “his” colony’s rubber trees and ivory. History careened into Benga one day in 1903 when he was returning to his tiny forest village after successfully hunting and killing an elephant. Maybe nineteen years old, Ota was married and the father of two children. Lean, small, a boylike man and a fine hunter, he had, according to his biographers, just spent a string of days alone in the forest tracking a single elephant, which he had killed with a sharpened wooden lance. Exactly how anyone kills a full-grown bull elephant with a piece of wood stalls out my imagination, and the authors’ description is vague. (When, later, anthropologists in St. Louis measured their Congolese specimen, they recorded that he stood 4 foot 11 and weighed 103 pounds.) But it seems that he landed his lance just so into soft underbelly, and then darted or dived out of the enraged creature’s way until it bled to death. Pygmies, forest people, were said to be adept at disappearing in plain view.
Proud to have food to feed his village, the hunter walked home to announce his coup, and to round up men who could help him haul the dead animal. But the place he’d left a few days earlier no longer existed. While he had stalked the elephant, human beasts had stalked his people. The Force Publique, one of the marauding bands of thugs pilfering ivory for the king, had murdered his wife and children, and many others in his small tribe. It’s difficult to conceive of another moment in his life matching this one for horror, and I suspect ever after some part of his mind remained within it. Can’t we all recall a movie image of a cracked clock, its hands frozen from the impact of an explosion? When a person experiences severe trauma—or so I have observed, working as a psychotherapist—time stops in some part of his mind, while the rest strains forward, pulling dead weight, or slips out of halter and wanders. This temporal disjointedness is a piece of the incommunicable burden many witnesses and victims of atrocity bear.
I’ve tried to imagine the scene Benga saw—intimately known bodies turned into bloodied corpses—but I doubt there is any resemblance between my fantasy and his experience. When I say “Belgian Congo” to myself, I summon a slightly blurred black-and-white photo of jungle. (Jungle? What is jungle? A vestigial word for what we now call “rain forest”? My personal neuro-visual fill-in comes from photographs, paintings, films.) Attempting emotional verisimilitude, I overlay my strange collage with dormant bodies of people I love. Flesh; blood; flies buzzing-grim clichés. My mind resists. It is extremely difficult to picture Benga’s experience more than superficially, not only because of the distance of era and culture, nor simply because of my ignorance, but because of the barely tolerable distress the effort arouses in my mind. I reflexively turn away.
I have no idea how Ota Benga actually bore that moment. At the same time, I suspect the difficulty I and others have with the imaginative acts I’ve just described contributed to his death. Add the absence of living witnesses, or of people in America who spoke his language; add the way his African past was distorted into a parody of itself when he was put on display; add the endless projections he endured—the way pygmy, Africa, missing link, cannibal got fused onto him so that the man disappeared beneath these carapaces. Had other members of Ota Benga’s village lived or traveled with him to America, it might have made a difference for him, because memories resembling his own might have continued to live in proximate minds. A few men and women together could have formed a pocket—like an air pocket for someone trapped under an avalanche. Such a pocket might have let Benga breathe long enough to live out his time. My psychiatrist colleague, Leston Havens, has observed that endangered individuals tend to survive as long as they feel there is one person in their lives who “gets” them. For a while Benga may have felt that kind of feeling about Samuel Phillips Verner, the man who brought him to America. I am not certain.
Who knows why Ota Benga, too, wasn’t murdered that day in the Congo on his return to his village? Perhaps the initial fury—the rage of not finding any ivory—had passed; likely the Force looked to make money selling slaves. Ota and a few other surviving villagers were beaten and taken prisoner, and after some days of forced march he was sold into slavery.
His new owners, a people called the Baschilele, were seeking to sell him when an American white man wandered into their village in search of pygmies to display in the St. Louis World’s Fair. Samuel Phillips Verner was unstable in a way I think of as particular to the late nineteenth century. He was eccentric, sometimes outright mad, damaging, brilliant, educated, tender, self-deceived, and filled with enthusiasms. He was unbounded in a style that I’m not sure is as common anymore—or at least it now often seems to lack landscape for full expression: someone whose grandiose fantasies cum psychotic desperation guide him, and who both makes his contribution and wreaks his havoc accordingly. I was about to say Conradian, but since Heart of Darkness had King Leopold and the whole Congo scene in view, there is redundancy in that assertion. (Maybe some of the independent contractors who stampeded into Iraq are our equivalent.) One gets the sense, reading his grandson’s sympathetic biography, that at least Verner did not want to do harm. And perhaps here he fits more within Graham Greene’s appreciation of damage done by people too relentlessly innocent to comprehend their circumstances. I find it hard to tell from the text. Certainly, like so many before and since, the American minister, amateur anthropologist, and entrepreneur overlooked much that was inconvenient to his purposes. (He eagerly did business with, and defended, King Leopold II, a man whom anyone could fairly call evil; and it would appear that Verner accepted hush money for not describing publicly the brutality he’d witnessed in the Congo.)
Phillips Verner, born around 1873 (he claimed not to know for sure), was the first son of an old and proud South Carolina military family, former slave owners, now impoverished and down on their luck. He grew up in the rubble of the Civil War. His own destiny seemed to have been forced upon him early in his life when his mother chose him as the child who would restore the family’s lost glory, a mandate that nearly crushed him. After he finished the University of South Carolina at nineteen with the best academic record the place had seen, his nerves collapsed. Instead of pursuing a brilliant academic or legal or military career, he convalesced as a railroad worker, and then with increasing urgency cast about for a future that would fulfill his and his family’s hunger for redemption.
Verner’s favorite book, when he was a child, was Robinson Crusoe. I have sometimes wondered about the damage reading books can do—at vulnerable moments, or to certain sensibilities, or to all of us occasionally —and Verner’s life may serve as an argument for the prosecution. The wrong books sometimes lend excessive support to the notion of living out one’s fantasies; they invite us to mimic what is not part of the concrete world, and therefore inimitable. The writer’s imaginative distortions are accepted by some readers as faithful recreations that can actually be experienced. Overall, it’s a minuscule price to pay for printed language, but in this context the liability is worth marking. Verner’s biographers give us to understand that he partly believed he could live as Crusoe lived—eventually with Benga as his loyal Friday.
It seems unsurprising that Verner sought salvation in Africa. Using family connections and arguments about how only Caucasians could provide the right moral influence over the minds of the natives, he managed to skip the requisite years of divinity studies. He quickly got himself ordained as a minister, and then headed out to the dark continent. The first missionary trip in 1895–99 was difficult. The twenty-two-year-old Phillips developed malaria, and that illness, together with his mental instability, rendered him—at least periodically—truly mad. But his seems to have been the kind of brilliant madness that is wily and irrepressible. He returned home and wrote two books—one in Tshiluba (Ota Benga’s language), designed to teach Caucasian moral concepts to the few Congolese who survived the genocide; the other in English, called Pioneering in Central Africa. (The preface begins, “The expanding genius of the Caucasian race is the marvel of modern times.”) The second book brought him public recognition and lecturing opportunities in America. In 1902 he wangled a contract to go back to the Congo to gather up pygmies, bring them to the St. Louis World’s Fair, and then return them to the Congo. And with a serendipity worthy of his heroes Livingstone and Stanley, he arrived at the Baschilele village just in time to purchase Ota Benga—and thus to save him from slavery and likely death. Bradford and Blum describe how, before buying him, Verner first parted Benga’s lips. When he saw the small man’s pointed teeth, he knew he’d found a real pygmy.
To celebrate the great St. Louis World’s Fair, and more particularly the hundredth anniversary of the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, Benga and other Congolese from different tribes were eventually placed in a quasi-diorama African village, right next to the nearly eighty-year-old Geronimo, who occupied a quasi-diorama Indian dwelling—all of them on display as examples of men less evolved than the white race. The dark-skinned specimens were studied and measured by white anthropologists, who found ways to confirm their prejudices that the pygmies manifest “the lowest degree of human development.” A St. Louis newspaper proclaimed in headlines, “Cannibals will sing and dance.”
The authors of the book about Benga describe how Geronimo and Benga, though housed next to each other, could speak only through interpreters. On one occasion, the aged Apache gave his young neighbor an arrowhead as a gift. How to picture the moment? Two supremely dislocated men, one old, the other young, with no common language, in this most bizarre circumstance. Was Ota Benga ever told that Geronimo, when young, had returned home one day to find that Mexicans had massacred his three children, his wife, and his mother? Was their common trauma a coincidence? A more faithful representation of the Fair would likely reveal an unstated subtext: the victors display their captives. The exhibits’ public education goal—to broaden people’s anthropological understanding of the world—seems to have co-existed with something fiercer.
Cannibalism is a recurrent leitmotif of anthropological history, occasionally recording real practices but more often expressing the existential terror of strangers meeting: Will you eat me? The American press made much of the idea (as far as I can tell, not based in fact) that Ota Benga’s journey to America had saved him from being the victim of another tribe’s cannibalism. At the same time, rumor had it that Ota Benga’s teeth were filed to sharp points so that he could better consume human flesh. Meanwhile, Geronimo apparently had the same terror of white people and, through an interpreter, warned the pygmies to be vigilant lest the white visitors to the Fair, whom he deemed hungry as well as rude, eat them. Phillips Verner told the press various fabricated, genocide-obscuring versions of his time in Africa, and of Benga’s history. With an insensitivity hard now to fathom, a newspaper story joked that fellow cannibals ate Benga’s wife. “His first wife excited the hunger of the rest of the tribe, and one day when Ota returned from hunting he learned that there was not so much as a sparerib for him.” In a similar vein, Verner, apparently looking to sell copy, spun their relationship to one reporter: “I saved him from the pot, he saved me from the poison darts, and we have been good friends for a long time.”
After the St. Louis Exposition, Verner sailed with Benga back to the Congo. They traveled together for over a year while Verner (now licensed by Belgium to deal in rubber and ivory, and meanwhile fantasizing that he would build a hospital for the Congolese) mostly collected specimens and artifacts for another American anthropologist. Verner also spent time with one or more Congolese mistresses, and fathered at least one child. (He had married in 1902, but his American wife did not accompany him on his travels.) His behavior suggests he possessed a robust sense of Caucasian entitlement—to raw materials, servants, sex, the imposition of philanthropy—and that he wielded his power to serve his purposes. One extraordinary image from this trip is Verner’s use of an early recording device to inflate his control by frightening the Congolese. He surreptitiously recorded the voices of tribal leaders he met and then played the cylinders back, mystifying and cowing his interlocutors. Rumor quickly spread that Verner was able to capture souls-a view which, when you think about it, may accurately describe the mental tyranny imposed by missionaries and other colonial conquerors.
Ota assisted him with this con. Their relationship is difficult to plumb, but one gets the sense that the pygmy protected his owner in the jungle and helped him collect and plunder. What did it mean to Benga that Verner had purchased him? His life after the slaughter held few tolerable choices, so helping the Caucasian may have been merely pragmatic. On the other hand, it may have come from some sense of debt or loyalty. Perhaps both, as well as other sentiments like pleasure in reflected power, loneliness, and, for a while, an intense wish to survive. According to Bradford and Blum, Benga studied Verner all the while he served him, and he was said to have brilliantly mimicked Verner’s physical gestures.
For his part, Verner acknowledged that although he spoke Tshiluba, and spent months with Benga, he did not know him fully. We can speculate to what degree Verner’s prejudices blinded him to his companion’s reality, and to what degree Benga resisted being known. How did he use language to express or to hide himself? Perhaps his grief led him to encase all that was meaningful to him in silence. Perhaps the lives they lived before they met had simply been too different to allow them to comprehend each other more than slightly.
Hoping to resettle in the Congo in spite of being unable to find living members of his tribe, Benga married a woman from another tribe. But his misfortune was unabating: she was bitten by a snake and died. Overwhelmed by circumstance, and likely by rage and grief, Benga threatened to commit suicide if left in the Congo, and pleaded with Verner to take him back to America, which Verner did.
But what to do in New York City with a forest-dwelling pygmy whose English is rudimentary—a man toward whom you feel fondness and obligation, yet who has also observed all your lapses: of character, judgment, health, sanity? Such a person makes at best an awkward dependent. In 1906, Verner placed Benga temporarily in the Museum of Natural History while he—unemployed, increasingly desperate, writing bad checks—tried to fabricate a future. (The Museum of Natural History had already served as home for six Eskimos on display from Greenland, four of whom, lacking immunity to the New York City viruses, died there.) Ota tolerated the cavernous stone building for awhile, roaming the exhibits at will, but eventually became bored and irascible, and ended his residency when he threw a chair at the head of Florence Guggenheim, the wife of Daniel Guggenheim, a major benefactor of the place. (Daniel Guggen-heim also had a contract with King Leopold II to import ivory and rubber from the Congo Free State.)
Scrambling for another way to house Benga, Verner arranged to move the pygmy over to the Bronx Zoological Garden, where he briefly sojourned in the Monkey House. Whereas in St. Louis Benga had been one of many, here he was without peers, and his singularity altered the experience for him and for viewers. Gawked at and bossed around, he seems to have become more enraged, and the director quickly found him troublesome. The controversial exhibit attracted enormous newspaper attention—articles, editorials, letters. A group of black ministers expressed outrage. They arranged care for Benga at the Howard Colored Orphan Society in Brooklyn, and after three weeks on display, he left the zoo.
Benga promptly alienated his new rescuers by manifesting only mild interest in studying, and considerably more interest in the attractive female orphans. He flirted with the girls, much to the distress of the staff. After he was caught doing something unnamed but clearly unacceptable with—or to—a young woman named Creola, he was spirited off to a rural work-farm on Long Island. In 1910, he departed for a Baptist seminary in Virginia, where he’d once visited briefly, and from there went to work in a tobacco factory.
It was around 1909 that the protean Verner traveled to Panama to work as a medical officer for a company digging the Panama Canal. He seems to have sought to distance himself from his Congolese adventures (the world was beginning to grasp King Leopold’s malevolence). And he abandoned his pygmy companion along with the rest of that compromised past. Maybe he felt he’d discharged his duty. Maybe he was focused on his own survival. To the lonely, isolated Congolese, Verner’s disappearance seems to have felt like the last hope gone. His biographers suggest that Benga’s despair grew as he realized that with Verner so far away, he had once and for all lost his way home. But a six-year gap stands between Verner’s migration and Benga’s death, so I imagine there must have been more local disappointments as well.
On March 20, 1916, Ota Benga shot himself. Someone he met in his travels, apparently trying to help him assimilate, had capped his teeth. His biographers tell us that he removed the caps before he pulled the trigger. An unusual detail, and perhaps the least mediated glimpse of Benga we have. Try to create for yourself an image of a diminutive Congolese man with a gun, outdoors, alone, beside a fire he has built, removing caps from his teeth. He is about to end his life, and yet he performs this labor. Why? We do not know, but I imagine he sought to repossess himself. Benga’s American experience commenced when Verner, in the centuries-old tradition of slave-buyers, parted his lips. And Verner, together with the American press and public, fetishized Benga and his teeth as part of a fiction which sought both to transform a Congolese forest-dwelling hunter into a cannibal-missing-link-pygmy, and to obscure a genocide. In the hour of his death, Benga asserted his terms: he corrected the record and made the kill.
Janna Malamud Smith’s latest book is My Father Is a Book, a memoir of Bernard Malamud.
