The Epic of Ota Benga

In 1906 a Batwa tribesman from the Congo named Ota Benga was put in a cage and exhibited alongside an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo. The tribesman first arrived in the United States two years earlier in the care of a South Carolina anthropologist named Samuel Phillips Verner, who had been hired by the St. Louis World’s Fair to bring specimens of authentic African “pygmies” for display there. Ota Benga—whose wife and children had been lost during the Belgian government’s brutal rule in the Congo—remained with Verner until the anthropologist went bankrupt and decided to leave him in the care of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Read More

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