Abstract:
Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Congo recruited for the Saint-Louis of 1904 and subsequently exhibited at the Fair and the Bronx Zoological Park in New York City, symbolizes the tragic fate of Africans targeted by conquering Western States in search of new resources and territory. The body of Ota Benga was literally and symbolically caught in the network of the colonial machinery that speaks both the language of raw exploitation and humanitarianism. Ota Benga, the “dark skin stranger from 10.000 miles away” (New York Tribune, October 7, 1906), “represents the missing links between the higher man and the chimpanzee” (Chicago Tribune, Sept. 23, 1906). Benga eventually killed himself with a gun in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was in 1916. His tragic fate writes the story of the vanquished pre-colonial African State, the moral legitimation of the Imperialist European State, but also prefigures the future failed State of the Postcolonial Age. Dr. Philip Verner brought Ota Benga from the Congo to the United States. He subsequently invented many fictions to explain and justify his association with Ota Benga. Out of these fictions stood the story of rescuing Benga, with the help of Belgian army officers, from a death at the hands of cannibals.