Ota Benga in 1906, when he was put on display in New York. (
)
A century ago, a near-naked man in a loincloth swung from a jungle vine and landed in the pages of the first of two dozen popular jungle adventure novels, and later a slew of Hollywood films.
New Yorkers were enthralled by the feats of “Tarzan of the Apes,” who appeared for the first time in print in 1912, courtesy of novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs.
And New York is the only city ever featured in a Tarzan movie — 1942’s “Tarzan’s New York Adventure,” starring hunky Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, along with Mia Farrow’s mom, Maureen O’Sullivan, as Tarzan’s sexy playmate, Jane, their son, Boy, and a ham of a chimp named Cheetah.
Unfortunately, Tarzan isn’t the only jungle hero who was made popular by New York’s turn of the century fascination with the “savage man.”
In one of the most bizarre episodes in city history, a black man — a 23-year-old, 4-foot, 11-inch tall, 103-pound pygmy from the Belgian Congo by the name of Ota Benga — was displayed in the Bronx Zoo to the delight of thousands of New Yorkers who laughed, teased and taunted him.
“Racism was a part of it,” says Phillips Verner Bradford, whose maternal grandfather, Samuel Phillips Verner, a missionary-explorer, plucked Benga out of Africa and brought him to the US for exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
“My grandfather was interested in finding the Missing Link, and at first he thought pygmies like Ota Benga were an example of a living missing link of evolution,” says Bradford, who co-authored “Ota: The Pygmy in the Zoo,” published in 1992.
“At the time, Darwin’s theory of evolution was being debated and creationists were out there fighting it. As it turned out, Ota Benga represented the worst form of trying to prove there was evolution.”
After the St. Louis fair, Verner and Benga traveled to New York, where Verner deposited him with Herman Carey Bumpus, curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Benga was given a room and instructed to welcome and entertain guests.
Angry and frustrated, he attempted at least one escape and once hurled a chair across a room, nearly injuring a female visitor.
Bumpus advised Verner to take his charge up to The Bronx.
It was the zoo’s eccentric director, William Temple Hornaday, who turned Ota Benga into a P.T. Barnum-style spectacle.
Hornaday firmly believed that Ota Benga was the next step up from the zoo’s chimps and orangutans. To prove his point, he’d have chimpanzees ride tricycles, smoke cigarettes and type gibberish. His goal, according to Bradford, was to depict “higher apes as more human, and humans like Ota Benga as ape-like.”
New York University professor of journalism Pamela Newkirk, who is writing a new book about the Ota Benga affair and its relation to race, says that Hornaday was not acting alone.
“He had the full cooperation of very prominent members of what’s now called the Wildlife Conservation Society. He had a lot of support from influential people across the city,” she says.
“It says a lot about where we were at that moment in time where race was concerned. When people think of New York, they think of this as a progressive city.”
However, the Ota Benga affair, she maintains, “Just shows we were not as progressive as we like to believe.”
Perversely, Benga enjoyed the enormous attention he was generating among New Yorkers and the press, Bradford says.
“As many as 40,000 people a day went to see him, and in his heart of hearts he wanted more than anything in the world to be an entertainer.
“Benga loved entertaining the crowds, singing, dancing and playing his horn, and he wanted to put on skits. Attendance at the zoo was greatest on Mondays, when his loincloth was to be laundered, and he appeared naked. Sadly, he didn’t fully understand that the people were not laughing with him but were laughing at him.”
Soon a delegation of clergy, most from the Colored Baptist Ministers’ Conference, protested the exhibition on grounds of racism and demanded that Benga be freed.
By the end of 1906, Hornaday, weary of the adverse publicity, told reporters, “I have had enough of Ota Benga. Ring up the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum . . . I’m through with him here.”
Benga’s controversial celebrity soon faded and he disappeared from New York, spending most of the next decade in Lynchburg, Va., reportedly working in a tobacco warehouse.
On March 20, 1916, 32-year-old Benga, depressed because he couldn’t raise enough money to return to his homeland, stole a pistol from his landlady, built a bonfire, danced around it, threw off all his clothes, pulled the caps off his pointed teeth and fatally shot himself.
Verner, the explorer who had discovered and befriended him, eulogized Benga as “one of the most determined little fellows that ever breathed. To me he was very human, a brave, shrewd little man who preferred to match himself against civilization . . .”
Jerry Oppenheimer is the author of a forthcoming biography of the Johnson & Johnson dynasty and has written books about the Kennedys, Clintons and Hiltons, among other iconic Americans.