Between 1885 and 1908, Leopold II of Belgium, king and owner of the Congo Free State, forged a fortune based on the exploitation of rubber and ivory through a regime of forced labor and insurgents’ repression by the “Force Publique”, a group of soldiers who murdered and tortured millions of Congolese at the behest of the monarch. In this context Samuel Phillips Verner, a former Presbyterian missionary and American entrepreneur, was sent to the Congo financed by the Universal Exposition of Saint Louis (1904) to search for “pygmies” and “anthropological specimens”. During his trip, Verner bought nine “pygmies” from human traffickers, including Ota Benga, a member of the Batwa ethnic group, whose Mbuti tribe – including his wife and children – had been exterminated by the “Force Publique”. Verner exchanged Benga for a pound of salt and a roll of cloth, and claimed that he had rescued him from a group of cannibals.

“Human zoos” were an epiphenomenon of colonial imperialism that found its greatest acceptance between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States. In them, people considered exotic and “inferior” by the social and scientific standards of the time were exhibited as objects of fair or spectacle. It is estimated that 30,000 people recruited from different parts of the world were exhibited in these places, especially the so-called pygmies who were considered the last step of human evolution. In 1897, for the Brussels Exposition, Leopold II had brought 267 Congolese to represent their way of life and rites to European spectators. In 1904, the Universal Exposition of St. Louis was held where Ota Benga was exhibited, without any care or shelter, together with other Congolese people, Ainu people from Japan, Patagonians, Filipinos and the Apache chief “Geronimo”. Inside the Exposition, Ota Benga was conspicuous for being less than five feet tall and having his teeth ritually sharpened. At the end of the Exposition, Verner took Ota Benga back to Africa, where he remarried. However, upon his second widowhood, Ota Benga returned with Verner to the United States and was taken temporarily to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where his bust was cast and displayed as a specimen of a living savage.

In 1906 Ota Benga was taken to the Bronx Zoo where he was exhibited in the “Monkey House” as part of a show on human evolution, alongside an orangutan named Dohong whom he took a liking to. His cage was decorated with bones to allude to his supposedly “cannibalistic” nature and he had a bow and arrow in it. He was advertised as “the missing link” and received a huge number of visitors who made fun of him and made comments. Its exhibition generated huge profits and was sponsored by Madison Grant, a racist scientist and advocate of eugenics, a theory that encouraged the manipulation of reproductive practices in order to prioritize certain phenotypic traits. 

This situation took place 40 years after the abolition of slavery in the USA and provoked protests from the local Afro-descendant community, thanks to which Benga was allowed to walk around the zoo and even feed the animals. However, this caused more impact and the first day Benga was out of his cage the zoo received 40,000 visitors. His defensive behaviors in the face of visitor harassment were interpreted as violent and increased his reputation as a “savage”.

In 1906, after 20 days of residence at the zoo, Benga’s exhibit was closed due to protests by the African American community, including prominent members of the Church. Ota Benga went into the care of the Reverend James H. Gordon, who gave him sanctuary in his colored orphanage in Brooklyn for three years. In 1910 Ota Benga was taken to Lynchburg (Virginia), where he was dressed in European clothes, his sharp teeth were covered, and he attended formal instruction and the Virginia Theological Seminary. There he befriended its president Gregory W. Hayes, Hayes’ family, and poet Anne Spencer, all of whom had participated in protests against his exhibition. Ota Benga began working in a tobacco factory where he also made friends who called him Bingo and with whom he went hunting in his spare time. He had begun to save to pay for his return to Africa but the war prevented him from doing so. On March 20, 1916, at the age of 32, Ota Benga pulled out his dental implants, prepared a fire around which he danced and finally shot himself in the heart.