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Monday 7 October 2013

Ota Benga - The Horrifying Story Of A Human On Display In A Zoo


Ota Benga - The horrifying story of a human on display in a zoo.

Ota Benga (circa 1883– March 20, 1916) was a Congolese pygmy known for being featured in an anthropology exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904, and in a controversial human zoo exhibit in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo. Benga had been freed from African slave traders by the missionary Samuel Phillips Verner, a businessman recruiting Africans for the Exposition. He traveled with Verner to the United States. At the Bronx Zoo, Benga had free run of the grounds before and after he was "exhibited" in the zoo's Monkey House. 


Displays of non-Western humans as examples of "earlier stages" of human evolution were common in the early 20th century, when racial theories were frequently intertwined with concepts from evolutionary biology. 

Ota shared his cage with an orangutan and was one of the main attractions at the zoo. This picture was not taken in the cage as zoo did not allow Ota to be photographed in the monkey house. Zookeepers scattered bones around him to create an impression that he ate human flesh. A delegation of African-American ministers finally rescued Ota. He remained for another 10 years in US before committing suicide. The despicable fact that another human being could be a portrait and treated as an animal in the 20th Century is horrendous. This part of history should never be repeated again.

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Read more on him : 
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ota_Benga

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