Early Years
Benga left no account of his own life, and so the details of his early years are not known with certainty. What scholars do know is based on multiple conflicting accounts from Samuel Phillips Verner, the former Presbyterian missionary who brought Benga to the United States.
Benga may have been born around 1883. He was raised in the Kasai River region of the Congo, then privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium and called the Congo Free State. A member of the Mbuti people, Benga was of short stature—under five feet tall—and his front teeth were filed to sharp points. Benga’s wife and two children, along with many others in their tribe, were killed in a raid on their camp by the territorial police force sometime around 1903 or 1904. Benga was captured and later sold into slavery.
In March 1904, according to Verner, he discovered Benga for sale at a slave market in Bassongo. Verner, who had been hired to bring people who were then termed “Pygmies” from the Congo to the Saint Louis World’s Fair, purchased Benga’s freedom for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. He said that Benga was largely responsible for convincing eight other Mbuti people to travel to Saint Louis, where in June they became the premier anthropology exhibition.
Bronx Zoo and Howard Colored Orphan Asylum
Ota Benga Exhibited at the Bronx Zoo
That September, tens of thousands of people came to see the famous “pygmy” who shared a cage with an Asian orangutan, several chimpanzees, and a parrot. Zookeepers designed a matinee “exhibit” almost devoid of educational content and heavy on P. T. Barnum–style entertainment. The intense and unrelenting spotlight riled Benga. Jeering spectators constantly ridiculed and teased him, and whenever he ventured outside the Monkey House, he required police protection from the crowds.
The so-called man and monkey show was immediately controversial. The Colored Baptist Ministers Conference of New York City led a campaign against the exhibition. The group’s threat of legal action, combined with the public backlash fomented by the press and Benga’s growing agitation, led to the closing of the exhibition late in September 1906.
On September 27, 1906, Verner delivered Benga to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn. Benga spent the next three years there and at the orphanage’s satellite farm on Long Island, New York. In 1907 Verner offered to take Benga with him back to the Congo, but Benga declined, having decided to make a new life on his own in America.
Final Years in Lynchburg
Virginia Theological Seminary and College
The close-knit seminary community embraced Benga. He lived in the heart of campus, first with widowed store owner Josephine Anderson and later with Mary Rice Hayes, Gregory Hayes’s widow and a former seminary president herself. Benga tried attending elementary classes at the college, but he gradually gave up his formal education for other pursuits. He did chores and odd jobs in exchange for room and board, and earned a modest income as a day laborer and tobacco factory worker.
During his years in Lynchburg, Benga tried to integrate into American culture and adopt local ways of life. When he hunted, he alternated bows and arrows with shotguns or rifles. He had a dentist cap his filed teeth to make his smile less startling. Around the seminary and throughout the city he became known by the less exotic name Otto Bingo.
Benga spent most of his free time in forests and the countryside. He often hunted with a small band of young admirers, including Mary Rice Hayes’s three sons and Chauncey Spencer. He taught them to hunt, fish, and gather wild honey just as he had done in the forests of the Congo. Benga also befriended Chauncey’s mother, Anne Spencer, a poet who taught at the seminary. He and Spencer shared a special affinity for the natural world, and he was a frequent visitor to her renowned garden, Edankraal, on Pierce Street.
Suicide and Burial
Despite his efforts to assimilate, Benga struggled to make a new life in Lynchburg, and he became increasingly hopeless about his future there. He had lost contact with Verner, and, even if he had wanted to return to the Congo, he couldn’t afford the cost of travel on hisown.
On March 20, 1916, Benga died by suicide in a stable behind Josephine Anderson’s house. A coroner’s inquest determined that he died by self-inflicted pistol shot to the left breast. A group described as the “Baptist Ministers Conference, colored” hired a local Black funeral home to oversee Benga’s funeral and burial.
On Wednesday, March 22, Benga’s funeral was held at Diamond Hill Baptist Church in Lynchburg, followed by interment in the Old City Cemetery. Strong and persistent oral history suggests Benga’s body was removed sometime later to Lynchburg’s White Rock Cemetery. No documentation of disinterment or reburial has been found, and no grave marker has survived in either cemetery.
Nearly a century after his death, Ota Benga’s extraordinary life has inspired countless writfrieers, artists, and activists, in both academia and popular culture. Benga is frequently cited by scholars in studies of the evolutionist roots of racism, exploitation of third world cultures, museum theory, and injustices of the African American experience. He was the basis for fictional characters in the 1998 children’s book The Song of the Molimo and the 2008 motion picture The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. An international conference on Benga and modern-day African Pygmies was held at Lynchburg College in October 2007. In 2020, the Wildlife Conservation Society issued an apology for exhibiting Benga at the Bronx Zoo.
