1920s Enslaved African Man Ota Benga & Chimp NYC Zoo Press Photo

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1920s Enslaved African Man Ota Benga & Chimp NYC Zoo Press Photo:
$1000.00

Despite his circumstances, a kind and compelling portrait here w/ Polly the Chimpanzee at New York City’s Bronx Zoo. The original was likely taken in 1906, the accompanying press caption here is dated 1922.

8 x 10” w/ wear primarily to edges and corners including corner loss, edge tears and staining with some wrinkling from moisture.

Had Ota Benga not been on a hunting trip, he likely would have been slaughtered at a very young age with his first wife and children, who fell to a siege by King Leopold’s militia sometime near 1900 during the rubber industry boom / occupation.

Instead he was sold on the slave market to Samuel Philips Verner, an American who called himself both an explorer and a missionary, for public exhibition in the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair. Displays like this and pseudo scientists like Verner hid their racism and violence against non European cultures behind pursuits like Ethnography and Social Darwinism which laid the foundation for the later field of Eugenics.

Benga learned to behave ‘savagely’ for the crowds from his quick friend Apache Chief Geronimo, himself an American Prisoner

of War held at Fort Sill and ‘loaned’ for public exhibition. As was often reported throughout Benga’s life, he was a warm companion and quick witted prankster.

After the fair, Verner’s contacts housed Benga in Manhattan’s American Natural History Museum before his final public exhibition at New York City’s Bronx Zoo under the direction of William Temple Hornaday. It was here that Benga received the cruelest public abuse and was for a short while made to sleep in the Monkey House in 1906.

The African American community intervened to save him from further mistreatment, first sheltering him at the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn though the public persisted to harass him within city limits. He was offered placement with the family of an influential Baptist ministers family in Lynchburg Virginia in 1910 where he was formally educated and entered the work force.

When his benefactor unexpectedly died, Benga longed for his home in Africa but was denied travel because of the outbreak of World War I. At only the age of 33, Ota Benga lit a ceremonial fire, removed the caps covering his filed teeth and shot himself through the heart. It is impossible to justify the misery that a so called civilized society inflicted upon him in such short years.