Notes from the Human Zoo 3: The Case of Ota Benga

Ota Benga (c. 1883 - 1916)

If any one individual can lay claim to being the face of the human zoo, it's surely the pygmy Ota Benga ...

Purchased from African slave traders by the missionary and anthropologist Samuel Phillips Verner, Benga was taken to the United States and featured in an exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), before, two years later, becoming a popular sensation at the Bronx Zoo.

Although required to report to the monkey house at showtime, Benga was otherwise given the freedom of the zoological grounds. However, often subject to verbal and physical goading from the crowds Benga would sometimes become aggressive, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of Africans as untamed savages, who were, as a New York Times editorial informed its readers, very low in the human scale.

Whilst campaigners who opposed Benga's treatment petitioned the New York City mayor for his release, defenders of his role at the zoo pointed out that he had, in a sense, fulfilled the American dream by becoming something of star. He even had celebrity friends, including the Apache Indian chief Geronimo.

It was a shit life in some respects - but hey, it was still showbiz and Benga initially seemed to delight in his role and was excited to see his name in the newspapers. He also liked the fact that he was able to charge visitors for photographs and collect tips after a performance, thus making him complicit in his own exploitation.*

Alas, moral crusaders are nothing if not tenacious: and so, in late 1906, the mayor ordered that Benga be taken into custody by Reverend James M. Gordon, supervisor of a church-sponsored asylum in Brooklyn for coloured orphans. Gordon argued that Benga should be fully valued as a human being and condemned the exhibit as not only degrading, but an anti-Christian promotion of Darwinism to boot.

Benga spent four years at the orphanage, before Gordon arranged for him to be cared for by a respectable Christian family in Virginia.

Ota was given a nice new wardrobe of western-style clothes and had his teeth - which had been filed into sharp points in his youth in a traditional manner - capped, so as not to frighten the locals. He was also taught English and given a job at a tobacco factory, where his co-workers called him Bingo and rewarded him with sandwiches and bottles of root beer for regaling them with stories about his life.

To paraphrase Henry Hill, Benga became an average nobody who got to live the rest of his life like a schnook. Thus, when plans of returning to Africa were frustrated due to the outbreak of the First World War, it's little wonder that he fell into a deep depression.

On 20 March, 1916, Benga built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps from his teeth, and shot himself through the heart with a stolen pistol. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the negro section of the Old City Cemetery.

* Note: I appreciate this is a controversial claim, but don't see why we should completely strip Benga of his agency and ability to give consent. It's important to note, for example, that prior to taking up his residency at the Bronx Zoo, Benga returned with Verner to the Congo, but quickly discovered he couldn't stand his old way of life and so voluntarily returned to the US. Arguments to do with alienation and false consciousness are interesting, but not entirely convincing (not least of all because, ultimately, I don't subscribe to the fiction of free will). 

Part 1 of this post on the myth of the Great Family of Man can be read by clicking here. 

Part 2 of this post on the case of Sara Baartman (the Hottentot Venus) can be read by clicking here.  

Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo (1906)

Notes from the Human Zoo 2: The Case of Sara Baartman (the Hottentot Venus)

Sara Baartman: adding to the gaiety of nations 
and making the Georgian world go 'round

I.

Although more than one black woman was paraded on the stages and exhibited in the zoos of Europe with a sign around her neck reading Hottentot Venus, undoubtedly the most famous of these was Sara Baartman (or Saartjie, as she was often called) ...

II.

Brought to London in 1810, Baartman was presented in shows all over England as an eroticised human freak due to the substantial levels of adipose tissue in her buttocks and thighs producing a provocatively curvaceous figure (a genetic condition known as steatopygia that is common in women of sub-Saharan African origin, particularly those, like Sara, belonging to the Khoikhoi people).

For just a couple of shillings, you could gaze upon her flesh. Those willing to pay a little extra could even poke her with a finger or a stick, as if to confirm that her body must be jelly, 'cos jam don't shake like that!  

Not surprisingly, abolitionists were outraged - particularly as this was taking place shortly after the passing of the Slave Trade Act (1807). They called for her freedom and argued that Baartman's performance was not only indecent, but coerced. The courts, however, found otherwise and it was decided that she was as entitled to earn a living as any other freak.*

Ironically, publicity from the case only increased Baartman's popularity as an exhibit.


III.

In 1814, Baartman was sold and taken to Paris where she amused onlookers in the Palais-Royale. She was also examined by scientists from the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, including Georges Cuvier, the famous professor of comparative anatomy, who was not only searching for proof of a missing link between man and ape, but hoping to find an elongated labia, which earlier French naturalists had observed in Khoisan women.

Sadly, as Baartman's biographers note, her life in Paris was really quite wretched. Not only did she experience extreme poverty, but she was literally treated like an animal (there is some evidence to suggest that at one point a collar was placed around her neck). It's perhaps fortunate, therefore, that she died prematurely the following year, from an undetermined inflammatory disease.

Prior to being dissected, a plaster cast was made of Saarjie's body and this was put on public display at the Musée de l'Homme for over 150 years, along with her skeleton and preserved brain and sexual organs.**  

IV.

It's interesting to note in closing how Baartman lives on in the porno-cultural imagination. In a sense, she's still being exhibited in artworks, scholarly papers and across the media and the exploitation of her body (as symbol and artefact) continues.

The obsession with exaggerated female forms also continues. Bootylicious black performers twerk their hips and arses and trade on their wild or primitive sexuality, whilst Kim Kardashian knowingly celebrates (thereby endorsing) myths of black femininity by balancing a champagne glass on her extended bottom, as if inviting viewers to get love drunk off her hump.

In sum: it's radically mistaken to believe we closed down the human zoos, or that racial and sexual stereotypes are no longer tolerated within our society. The latter remain systemic and, whether we like to admit it or not, they continue to give a great many people pleasure.        

Notes

*According to Baartman's testimony, she was acting of her own free will and subject neither to sexual abuse nor false imprisonment. Some historians have cast doubt on the veracity and independence of this statement, however.

**Readers to whom this kind of thing matters, will be pleased to note that Baartman's remains were finally returned to South Africa for burial in 2002 and she has attained iconic status in the land of her birth.

See: Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, (Princeton University Press 2009).

Part 1 of this post on the myth of the Great Family of Man can be read by clicking here.

Part 3 of this post on the case of Ota Benga can be read by clicking here.

Notes from the Human Zoo 1: The Myth of the Great Family of Man

Today, along with freak shows, bear pits, and public executions, ethnological expositions - aka human zoos - have pretty much been consigned to the shameful past on the grounds that they are cruel, degrading, and racist.

Far be it from me to dispute or deny this; for it's true that the displays often emphasized the ethno-cultural superiority of white Europeans over non-white, non-European peoples deemed to be primitive and inferior, if not, indeed, subhuman. But it seems to me that the contemporary myth of universal humanism that posits a single Great Family of Man sharing a unified history is equally pernicious and, in fact, shares a similar logic.     

Roland Barthes explains how this moralised and sentimentalised myth functions in two stages:

"first the difference between human morphologies is asserted, exoticism [or what we now like to term otherness] is insistently stressed, the infinite variations of the species, the diversity in skins, skulls and customs are made manifest [just as in the human zoo exhibitions] ... Then, from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced: man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way; and if there still remains in these actions some ethnic peculiarity, at least one hints that there is underlying each one an identical 'nature', that their diversity is formal and does not belie the existence of a common mould ... a human essence ..."

This is the lyrical neutralisation of men and women and the suppression of a history wherein we find not merely colourful, superficial differences, but stark injustices.

Thus, whilst it might seem to be an advance to be accorded equality and granted legal rights - it's certainly prefarable to being exhibited in the monkey house - one still needs to exercise caution and constantly look for signs of the ancient imposture exposed by Barthes.

The human zoos may have closed - but the system of values that opened them continues to operate.   

See: Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Noonday Press, 1991), p. 100. A pdf of this book can be read online by clicking here. 

For part 2 of this post on the case of Sara Baartman, click here. 

For part 3 of this post on the case of Ota Benga, click here.