Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

The Caged Smile of Ota Benga

By Someone Who's Still Haunted by It

They called him a pygmy. Like a word scraped off a zoology chart and dropped into a crowd. Four feet, eight inches. Teeth filed to points. He arrived in America with a name — Ota Benga — and left with a myth. But the truth? It was always harder to stare at.

It’s September 1906, and New York City is thick with the kind of summer that clings to your ribs. Over in the Bronx Zoo, the monkey house smells like wet straw, mold, and something harder to name. People are pressing up against the iron bars. Giggling. Jostling. A child tugs her mother’s sleeve. “Look! That one’s not an ape.”

She’s right.

Inside the enclosure, among the orangutans and parrots, is a man.

Ota Benga sits crouched, dark eyes scanning the crowd with a simmering, surreal calm. He's wearing a simple linen tunic. Some days, he swings from the low-hanging branches for show. Other days, he just sits. The bars aren’t metaphorical — they’re real.

And so is the shame.

He came from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo — though when Benga was born around 1883, maps were still smudged with the ambitions of colonizers. His people were Mbuti — forest dwellers, semi-nomadic, animist. He hunted. He laughed. He married. He lived.

Then came the Belgians. Or rather, the wrathful hands of King Leopold II, cloaked in missionary excuses and rubber quotas. The same colonization machine that dismembered children for failing to harvest rubber on time also wiped out Ota Benga’s village. His wife and children were slaughtered.

It’s the kind of backstory America likes to forget when the man behind it ends up on display like a misplaced pet.

In 1904, he was “purchased” by Samuel Phillips Verner, an American missionary-explorer hybrid with a bad case of racial condescension and a dash of narcissistic philanthropy. Verner promised Benga freedom in exchange for appearing in the St. Louis World’s Fair. The exhibit? A “human zoo” showcasing the “lowest” stages of civilization. Anthropology with a whip behind its back.

Benga shared a makeshift hut with other Africans. Crowds swarmed. Cameras clicked. Even President Teddy Roosevelt's daughter came to gawk. He was sixteen. Maybe seventeen. No one was counting.

And then — two years later — the Bronx Zoo.

This time, they put him in the monkey house.

It wasn’t some rogue decision by a janitor. This was orchestrated. The zoo’s director, William Hornaday, billed it as a “scientific display.” A living link between man and beast. Ota Benga was never consulted. The newspapers, of course, ate it up. Headlines like “Bushman Shares Cage with Apes” and “Wild Man of Africa Here” flickered across the pages like matches tossed on oil.

And people came. In droves.

He tried to make the best of it. That’s the heartbreak. He smiled for visitors. Gave his bow and arrow a flair. There are photographs — haunting in their casual cruelty — where he’s posing with white children, crouched next to a chimp, lips parted in something between exhaustion and disbelief.

When Black ministers in New York protested — Reverend James Gordon among them — the zoo responded with polite contempt. Hornaday insisted Benga was “perfectly happy.” That he enjoyed being admired.

How do you argue with that kind of blindness?

Eventually, public pressure forced his release. But where does a man go after being treated like a curiosity?

They sent him to an orphanage first. Then to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he was taken in by the Baker family. He found a kind of odd grace there. Southern, sure — but not cruel. Not performative. Not a cage.

He started to teach himself English. Slowly, stubbornly. He’d walk the streets in linen shirts, always barefoot. Smiling, sometimes. He loved to carve. He loved tobacco. He didn’t love talking about the zoo.

He filed down his teeth — trying to erase what had made him spectacle. He joined a Baptist church. He started working at a tobacco plant. Even took the name “Ota Benga” again, after briefly being called Otto Bingo. (As if misnaming him could hide what they'd done.)

And for a while, there was hope. He talked about going back to Congo. About building a home there. Starting over. The American dream, if such a thing could fit a man with his scars.

But World War I made travel impossible. And something inside him — the part that once swung from trees, that once knew love in a forest — started to crack.

By 1916, the forest inside him was gone.

He made a ceremonial fire. Broke apart his bow and arrows. And shot himself in the heart.

The story of Ota Benga didn’t end with a funeral. It went quiet. Which is how America likes its shame. Quiet. Preferably footnoted. Preferably forgotten.

But he resurfaces. In essays. In poems. In the questions we still don’t know how to ask.

He’s a ghost in the Smithsonian archives. A whispered name in the Bronx Zoo’s long shadow. A caution, not a symbol. Because his life wasn’t a metaphor. It was a man’s life.

We say the words “racial injustice” like bumper stickers now. But what do they feel like? Maybe like a four-foot-eight man behind iron bars, surrounded by cameras, wondering if his silence will ever be louder than their laughter.

There are signs of justice. A book here. A play there. Even an opera. Art, trying to stitch dignity back into the wound. In 2020, the Wildlife Conservation Society formally apologized for its role in his exhibition — over a century too late, but necessary.

Still, he’s not quite done with us.

Because every time we commodify a culture, flatten a name, other a face — Ota Benga lingers.

He reminds us that dignity isn’t something you give. It’s something you recognize. Or fail to.

And he reminds us — hauntingly — that what America once caged, it still hasn’t fully released.