Newkirk - Spectacle : the astonishing life of Ota Benga

While many aspects of the story that follows seem unfathomable, every scene, quotation, and observation is drawn from historical accounts preserved in letters, newspaper articles, diaries, anthropological field notes, and other historical documents. Any conjecture is clearly articulated as such and solely intended to prompt a plausible consideration of matters for which evidence is not available. At times Bengas unrecorded and unrecoverable words and thoughts can be inferred from familiar human actions, gestures, and comportment.

Throughout the text the word pygmy, which some people consider a pejorative name for the small forest dwellers of Central Africa, is set off as here, unless used in a direct quotation, to suggest its loaded meaning.

This is wholly a work of nonfiction intended to chronicle the life and times of a man at the turn of the twentieth century, a period marked by Westerners conquest of Africa and its people, and everywhere, it seemed, by an inversion of the meanings of good and evil, black and white. At the presumed summits of civilization, cruelty was cloaked in civility and a brooding darkness was hailed as light.

New York City

TO THE MEMORY OF
MBYE OTABENGA

PYGMY:

(1) Late fourteenth century, Pigmei, member of a fabulous race of dwarfs, described by Homer and Herodotus and said to inhabit Egypt or Ethiopia and India, from the Latin pygmaei and Greek pygmaios, meaning dwarfish, or of the length of a pygme; a pygme tall. In seventeenth century referred to chimpanzees or orangutans and during mid-nineteenth century applied by Europeans to the equatorial African race.

(2) Chiefly derogatory, a very small person, animal, or thing.

From Online Etymology Dictionary

In 1906 a young man from the Congo known as Ota Benga became the subject of headlines around the world when he was exhibited in a cage with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo Monkey House. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers flocked to the zoo to behold the so-called pygmy, who stood four feet eleven inches and weighed a little over one hundred pounds. That this occurred in a preeminent American city in the twentieth century would seem enough to cause astonishment. But theres far more to the story than meets the eye.

While on the surface this appears to be the saga of one mans degradationof a shocking and shameful spectacleon closer inspection it is also the story of an era, of science, of elite men and institutions, and of racial ideologies that endure today. Benga left no written account of his own, and others have filled the gap with conspiratorial silence, half-truths, and even flagrant deception. As a result, what has been officially recorded and recycled in hundreds of accounts around the globe is a flourishing, ever-expanding fiction. So this book is also a story of secrets, lies, denial, and overdue reclamation.

Through a forensic-type inquiry we can unearth missing chapters from Bengas extraordinary journey and in the process retrieve portions of our past from the waste bin of history. As we retrace Bengas footsteps from Central Africa through Europe and America, we find him in the shadow of a lettered elite. In its correspondence, journals, books, photographs, and other historical documents, he clings to the margins, doggedly asserting his humanity; insisting that his storythat our storybe truthfully told. If we lean in we may hear the muffled voice of a man long thought silenced, and see ever more clearly who we were as the century turned in Americas imperial city.

S aturday, September 8, 1906, was sunny and warm, and New Yorks parks beckoned city dwellers from their cramped apartments and crowded streets. For William Temple Hornaday the agreeable weather was another blessing in a week of good fortune. As director and chief curator of the New York Zoological Gardens, Hornaday had been excited for days over an unexpected acquisition and knew the balmy weather ensured optimum attendance. The exhibit was one that he hoped would enhance his already formidable reputation as the nations foremost authority on zoology and naturalistic displays. As the park gate swung open, the bearded and mustachioed Hornaday, five feet seven inches tall, proudly greeted visitors at the entrance and cheerfully directed them to what he boasted was his best attraction yet.

Since opening in 1899 the New York Zoological Gardens, set on 261 acres in the burgeoning Bronx, had become a crown jewel of the newly constituted Greater New York City.

A year earlier, on a rainy New Years Eve, 100,000 New Yorkers had welcomed the consolidation of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island, and Manhattan with an exuberant celebration in City Hall Park.

Andrew Haskell Green, the civic leader who for three decades had championed the unification, dubbed Greater New York the Imperial City, saying that it was now second only to London in population. Manhattan already had one of the worlds finest ports; the nations greatest concentration of corporations, banks, and retailers; and a larger population than Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia combined. It was a hub of intellectual life, with Columbia and New York universities; the largest book publishing houses and nationally circulated magazines and newspapers; and Greenwich Village, a haven for artists, writers, and rebels. The consolidation merged ninety-six independent governmental units and a multitude of races, ethnicities, and cultures into one teeming city of 3.5 million people that was twice the size of Chicago, its closest rival in the United States.

The Bronx, with its large stretches of farmland, industrial plants, and country estates, was now one of five coequal boroughs, and in 1904 was linked to Manhattan by a gleaming new subway system that halved the time it had taken to commute by elevated steam railroad.

The creation of the New York Zoological Gardens heralded a spiritual and architectural renaissance during which New York imagined itself as more than a municipalityit was now a metropolis, a term coined by Herodotus to describe Athens in the fifth century B.C.

The park design, like that of other ambitious developments sprouting across the city, showed the influence of the neoclassic White City in the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893. Under the direction of Chicagos Daniel Burnham, the nations top architects had created a majestic model city of shimmering white beaux arts buildings, grand boulevards, luxuriant gardens, and imposing statuary evoking ancient Greece. Charles McKim of the prestigious New Yorkbased McKim, Mead, and White was among the team members. He would take what he learned back to New York, and three years later Columbia University moved from its severe Gothic Revival campus at Forty-Ninth Street and Madison Avenue to a thirty-two-acre campus in upper Manhattans Morningside Heights inspired by the agora of ancient Athens.

The soaring ambition of the zoological parks founders and patrons was no less apparent in the opulent design by another New Yorkbased firm, Heins and La Farge, which also looked to ancient Greece for inspiration. George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant La Farge had met as students at M.I.T., the first American university to adopt the neoclassic curriculum of the cole des Beaux-Arts. La Farge, son of the famous artist John La Farge, was also a founding board member of the zoological society, and Heins was the designated New York State architect. With $125,000 from the city and another $250,000 in start-up capital from the likes of John D. Rockefeller, John Pierpont Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie, no expense was spared to create a neoclassic wonderland. Rafael Guastavino of Barcelona was commissioned to install his signature terra-cotta-tiled and domed vaulted ceilings, which graced some of the countrys most elegant buildings. To ornament the facades, artists were brought in to create friezes using the zoos live animals as models. A towering seventeenth-century fountain, adorned with four playful cherubs on unicorns held aloft by mermaids, would be purchased by William Rockefeller and shipped from Rome.