In 1906, an unusual guest arrived at the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, a brick fortress in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. His name was Ota Benga, he was approximately 23, and he wore a crisp white suit — perfectly tailored to his 4-foot-11 frame.
As he ascended the steps of the asylum — slowly, for Benga was still learning to walk in shoes — a scrum of reporters hollered after him, begging for comment. The face of the orphanage danced with the light of a dozen flash bulbs. At the door, Benga turned and waved, smiling shyly. The press had been following the spectacle surrounding him for years, well before his arrival at the asylum. He had become accustomed to his celebrity, though never wholly comfortable in it.
Benga, an Mbuti pygmy, was born around 1883 in the Congo, not far from the banks of the Kasai River. His wife and two children were slaughtered when Benga was younger by the forces of King Leopold II; he was subsequently captured and sold into slavery. In 1904, Samuel Philips Verner, an American businessman and amateur ethnographer, arrived in the Congo to collect 18 live African tribesmen, for display in the St. Louis World’s Fair. He met Benga, then in his early 20s, in a Batwa village, and paid for his release for a few scraps of cloth and some salt. “The first pygmy has been secured!” Verner trumpeted.
At the World’s Fair, Benga was displayed alongside the Indian chief Geronimo, who gave Ota an arrowhead as a token of affection. So began his career as a human specimen. This would continue in New York, when Verner leased him in 1906 — for the substantial sum of $275 — to the Bronx Zoo. Benga was installed in the Monkey House, alongside a chimpanzee named Dohong. At first, the exhibit was a great success. Thousands of New Yorkers flooded the zoo, arriving by car or the newly constructed elevated trains, young boys and old men and dignified ladies, all jostling for a glimpse of the pygmy. Obligingly, Benga grinned back at the spectators, baring his well-sharpened teeth. He wove mats and shot arrows at a straw target. He frolicked around the enclosure with Dohong. Sometimes he drank soda, which pleased onlookers immensely.
“It is probably a good thing that Benga does not think very deeply,” philosophized the Times. “If he did it isn’t likely that he was very proud of himself when he woke in the morning and found himself under the same roof with the orangutans and the monkeys, for that is where he really is.”
Unsurprisingly, after two weeks in the Monkey House, Benga began to lash back at his captors. On one hot day, he stripped off his clothes, and swung a knife at zoo staff. (“Benga tries to kill,” explained a helpful Times headline.) William Temple Hornaday, the zoo’s director, frantically cabled Verner, begging him to retrieve Ota. “Boy has become unmanageable; also dangerous,” Hornaday wrote. “Please come for him at once. Answer.”
But Verner was down South, in North Carolina, on vacation with his family, apparently stranded on a rural mountaintop, in the midst of a “tremendous equinoctial gale and rain storm.” When he arrived back in New York, several days later, he authorized Benga’s transfer to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum.
On Sept. 27, Reverend H. Gordon, the head of the orphanage, escorted Benga from the Bronx to Crown Heights to live alongside more than 200 local orphans. Gordon was driven by concern for Benga, but he also had a sociopolitical motivation: He believed (perhaps naively) that if he could teach Benga to write and to speak English, he could demonstrate to an American audience that blacks were blessed with the same natural intelligence as whites. “As far as I can see, this little black man is capable of development,” Gordon wrote. “Indeed, he seems bright to me."
Benga spent two years at the Orphan Asylum, during which time he frequently wandered the streets of Brooklyn, an area then still comprised of vast tracts of farmland. He was given a room of his own — he was in his 20s, after all, much older than the other orphans — and tobacco to smoke. In 1910, his English much improved, he was sent by Gordon to Lynchburg, Va., a small tobacco and steel town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There, Ota enrolled at the Baptist Seminary. He took to wearing trousers and button-down shirts, and had his pointed teeth capped by a local dentist.
He befriended Anne Spencer, a well-known Lynchburg poet, and spent many afternoons listening to Spencer recite verse or play ragtime tunes on the piano. He took a job at the local tobacco warehouse, where the other employees called him “Otto Bingo.” Occasionally, though, he would cast off his pants and shirt and prowl through the neighboring woods, bow and arrow in hand, longing to return to the Congo.
Unfortunately, steamship tickets were exorbitant — he could work in the factory for years, and the trip would still remain out of his reach. Verner, who had brought him to America — and who, Benga reasoned, might send him home — had long since abandoned him. He grew increasingly despondent. On a brisk afternoon in March 1916, Benga built a fire outside the carriage house where he often slept. For several hours, clad in a loincloth and clutching a wooden spear, he danced and sang. And then, as afternoon turned to night, he retreated into the carriage house, fished a stolen revolver from its hiding place in a bale of hay, and shot himself through the heart.
Verner received the news of Benga’s death in Panama, where he was then based. “He was one of the most determined little fellows that ever breathed,” Verner told one reporter, with a disingenuousness bordering on cruelty. “A brave, shrewd little man who preferred to match himself against civilization rather than be a slave. All honor to him, even though he died in the attempt!”
Benga was buried in an unmarked grave in Lynchburg. His obituary in the local paper was short. “Pined for native home,” the headline read.
Matthew Shaer is the author of “Among Righteous Men.” He writes regularly for New York magazine.