page_title: Bronx Zoo
section_title: Ota Benga
hierarchical_section_title: Bronx Zoo / Incidents and controversies / Ota Benga
caption_attribution_description: 1906 photograph of Ota Benga, described as being taken at Bronx Zoo. Author unknown.
context_page_description: The Bronx Zoo is a zoo located within Bronx Park in the Bronx, New York. It is one of the largest zoos in the United States by area, and is the largest metropolitan zoo in the United States by area, comprising 265 acres of park lands and naturalistic habitats separated by the Bronx River. On average, the zoo has 2.15 million visitors each year as of 2009.
  The Bronx Zoo is world-renowned for its large and diverse animal collection, and its award-winning exhibitions. The zoo is part of an integrated system of four zoos and one aquarium managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society, and it is accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
context_section_description: In 1906, a major controversy erupted when Ota Benga, a Mbuti pygmy, was brought to the zoo by the American businessman and explorer Samuel Phillips Verner, and displayed there as an exhibit; though he was allowed to roam the grounds freely. He became fond of an orangutan named Dohong, "the presiding genius of the Monkey House", who had been taught to perform tricks and imitate human behavior. The events leading to his "exhibition" alongside Dohong were gradual. Benga spent some of his time in the Monkey House exhibit, where the zoo encouraged him to hang his hammock and to shoot his bow and arrow at a target. On the first day of the exhibit, September 8, 1906, visitors found Benga in the Monkey House. Soon, a sign on the exhibit read:
  The African Pigmy, "Ota Benga."
  Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.
  
  Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the
  
  Kasai River, Congo Free State, South
  
  Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner.
  
  Exhibited each afternoon during September.
  Hornaday considered the exhibit a valuable spectacle for visitors; he was supported by Madison Grant, secretary of the New York Zoological Society, who lobbied to put Benga on-display alongside apes at the zoo. A decade later, Grant became prominent nationally as a racial anthropologist and eugenicist.
  African-American clergymen immediately protested to zoo officials about the exhibit. James H. Gordon said, "Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes ... We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls." Gordon also thought the exhibit was hostile to Christianity and a promotion of Darwinism: "The Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be permitted." A number of clergymen backed Gordon. In defense of the depiction of Benga as a lesser human, an editorial in  The New York Times suggested:
  We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter ... It is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Benga is suffering. The pygmies ... are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place ... from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.
  After the controversy, Benga was allowed to roam the grounds of the zoo. In response to the situation, as well as verbal and physical prods from the crowds, he became more mischievous and somewhat violent. Around this time, Rev. Dr. R. MacArthur of Calvary Baptist Church, was quoted in The New York Times saying: "It is too bad that there is not some society like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. We send our missionaries to Africa to Christianize the people, and then we bring one here to brutalize him." Soon, the zoo removed Benga from the grounds. Benga committed suicide in 1916 at the age of 32. In 2020, WCS apologized for the zoo's treatment of Benga and promotion of eugenics.
caption: Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. Only five promotional photos exist of Benga's time here, none of them in the Monkey House; cameras were not allowed.[168]:
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