The creation of a Ghanaian identity through half a century of Modernist paintings (ca 1950s – 1990s)

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.

The reader also learned that “his second wife died from the sting of an African viper, a beautiful snake” (Chicago Tribune, Sept. 23, 1906). I argue in this presentation that it is significant that while Benga is kidnapped and exposed in a monkey’s cage in the United States of America, a snake that is redeemed as beautiful by the Western imagination rhetorically victimizes his wife. The beautiful snake stands in metaphorically as the drive towards the massive and long-lasting dispossession of Africans undertaken under the guise of nature conservation. In 1903, the British Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire came into existence. Africans have been seen displaced from their habitat to provide room for the “darlings of the animal kingdom.” Western NGOS operating in area of the protection of the environment reproduce what I have termed elsewhere the Humanitarian Misunderstanding. In remaining deaf and blind to their colonial genealogies, these NGOS fail to challenge the dubious practices of the eugenics movement, amplifying what some have termed the “greening of hate”. Unlike Ota Benga was displayed in a monkey’s cage at the beginning of the 20th century. In this contemporary moment, radical western ecologists, armed with a dubious ecocentrism, have managed to displace Africans from the wild, making them unfit for the monkey’s cage.