Ota Benga: humiliated and exhibited at the Bronx Zoo, ended with his own life

The hardships were endless among the members of the Batwa ethnic group to which Ota Benga belonged.Racial discrimination made them the target of injustice and cruelty of those who believed themselves superior, so much of their people were razed.

Although Ota Benga managed to make fun of death in one of those encounters, life would give him a thorny destiny, marked by anguish.The young Congolese suffered the greatest humiliations that a human being can experience, leading him without remedy to the dreaded well of despair, from which he would never leave.

This is his sad story...

Ota Benga, the man exhibited at the Bronx Zoo that ended with his life

The nightmare of Ota Benga began when King Leopold II of Belgium sent the Public Force, which functioned as a kind of militia, to control the natives, to the equatorial forests of the Belgian Congo where he resided.The place was an important supply of rubber, so That his people were killed so that they could appropriate the valuable resource.

Ota Benga survived the attack, just because at the time of the massacre he was hunting.However, his wife and two young children could not escape the fatal encounter .Since then, he became a lonely man who would later be captured by slave traders.

Ota Benga: humiliated and exhibited at the Bronx Zoo, ended with his own life

In 1904, the young 23 year old Congolese , along with eight other men, was sold to Samuel Phillips Verner, American researcher and evolutionist, during an expedition with which he intended to recruit Pygmies from Africa to be exhibited at the Saint Louis Universal Exhibition, in the anthropology section.

According to Verner, these men of no more than a meter and a half tall and dark complexion were primitive savages, with a r Very close relationship with the apes.In this way they were presented to the public, Ota Benga being the main attraction.tradition of his tribe in the Congo .However, those who guided the exhibition explained that the teeth were used to devour their victims.

Ota Benga: humiliated and exhibited at the Bronx Zoo, ended with his own life

As part of the show, he was also forced to show his teeth and be savage in order to please the audience.There, from a cage, the "missing link" as they called it, received mockery of the spectators and mistreatment by those who directed the abominable anthropological exhibition.

Two years later, Ota Benga was sent to the Bronx Zoo in New York, where he shared shelter with the chimpanzees. He ate and slept with them.Well, for the director of the place, the evolutionist William T.Hornaday, man was "the oldest ancestor of the human being."

Ota Benga: humiliated and exhibited at the Bronx Zoo, ended with his own life

People enjoyed watching the caretakers give him an animal treatment, even worse.The public also did their part: they hurt him when they could, they let out screams and they rejoiced to contemplate the unfortunate pygmy man being a victim of his humiliations.

Before the absurd, newspapers like the New York Globe and the New York Journal they pronounced and rejected that a human being was exhibited as a wild beast inside a cage.

«Those people who are not at all intelligent or considerate, have been exhibiting in a monkey cage a human being, an African pygmy.Possibly the intention was to instill a deep teaching about evolutionism. But in practice, the only result obtained has been to expose the African race to derision, which deserves at least the benevolence and kindness of the whites of this country after all the brutality that has suffered this pygmy here.”

In 1906, the torture of Ota Benga came to an end when black clergyman James H.Gordon claimed it and I take an orphanage.They fixed their teeth, they taught him to speak English and dressed him in American clothes so he could integrate into society.Even a family took care of him in Virgina, but he never ceased to miss the place and the family that took him away.

Despite the show of kindness he received at the end of his days, his soul had already broken down.It was so difficult to get used to living in the society that had done so much damage to him, that at 33, after suffering a strong depression, stole a gun and shot himself in the chest.

If you liked the article, you may be interested: The story of the man who voluntarily entered a concentration camp

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