The Disturbing Display of the Ethnographic Exhibits

n                                 In 1803, for reasons we don’tnneed to look into today, Napoleon Bonaparte negotiated the sale of French heldnterritory in America to the US Government, the so-called Louisiana Purchase. 

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nThe centenary celebrations were, in fact, held in 1904, at the LouisiananPurchase Exposition (colloquially known as the St Louis World’s Fair), thenlargest fair of its kind ever held. The Fair opened on April 30^thn1904; 62 foreign nations were represented, together with 43 of the then 45nstates of America, and was visited by over 19 million people. 

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nThe 1904 Olympics games, originally planned for Chicago, were moved to St Louis when thenorganisers threatened to stage their own games in competition to the officialngames. On the massive site (1,200 acres) were agricultural, trade andnscientific exhibitions, presenting the intellectual and technological progressnof Western Civilization to date. 

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nAs part of the illustration of this ‘progress’nthere were exhibits showing the inferiority of other, more ‘primitive’ culturesnfrom around the world, not least the newly acquired territories of Guam, PuertonRica and the Philippines, as America was keen to demonstrate the beneficial andn‘civilizing’ effects of its influence in these areas. 

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nThe Philippines exhibitnwas intended to show the stark contrast of the ‘backward’ culture to that ofnmodern America. The Philippine Reservation covered 40 acres and was peoplednwith 1,000 ‘natives’ in a variety of villages, but the majority of ethnologicalnexhibits were held on ‘The Pike’ – a ‘Polyglot thoroughfare of the world … angalaxy of forty stupendous amusements extend[ing] a distance of one andnone-half miles.’ 

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nHere visitors could enjoy the Tyrolean Alps (with alpinenvillages, a 1,500 seat restaurant and Prussian and Bavarian bands), an IrishnVillage (with sixty ‘Sober Dublin Musicians’, jaunting carts and BlarneynCastle), Paris (All the elements of gay Paris) or the Streets of Sevillen(A Gypsy lane in Barcelona). 

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nNow all this sounds rather like one of ournliving history museums, with colourful folk in period costume going about theirnexotic businesses, which, of course, it was but there was a much darker side tonsome of the exhibits. In a bid to exhibit the variety of humanity, the head ofnanthropology at the Fair, W J McGee, sent out agents to find examples of peoplen‘…  ranging from smallest pygmies tonthe most gigantic peoples, from the darkest blacks to the dominant whites.’ 

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nOne of these agents was the missionary and businessman Samuel Phillips Verner,nwho was contracted to bring back pygmies from Africa. In the Belgian Congo,nVerner rescued a Mbuti tribesman called Ota Benga from slave traders and withnhis help persuaded four male Batwa and five Bakuba, together with other ‘red’nAfricans, to return to St Louis. 

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nThe Force Publique militia of KingnLeopold II had slaughtered Ota Benga’s wife and children, and he feared thatncannibals would eat him if he remained in Africa, so he was happy to accompanynVerner to America. The Africans arrived after the start of the Fair (Verner,nwho was ill with malaria, was not with them), and were an immediate sensation,nwith Benga in particular capturing the public’s imagination. At four feetneleven inches tall and with his filed teeth, he was described in the press asn‘… the only living cannibal in America’, and was pleased to pose fornphotographs at five cents a time. 

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nThe pygmies developed a taste for cigars,nwhich they bought with the money they earned from the photographs, but thisnbehaviour infuriated McGee, who felt that it undermined their ‘authenticity’.nHis intention had been to show how modern humans had evolved from primitivenpeoples, and how a line could be drawn from black tribesmen, through othernbrown, red and yellow men, reaching a zenith with the white man. Such theoriesnwere very popular at the start of the 20^th century, particularly innAmerica, and were a confused amalgam of social, cultural and biologicalnevolutionary theories, unilinealism, progressivism, eugenics and unmitigatednracism. 

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nAttempts to justify this madness under the mantle of respectable scientificntheory resulted in mish-mash of uninformed misinterpretation, unintentionalnmisunderstanding and deliberate misrepresentation parading itself as a rationalnjustification for the subjugation of native populations, the colonisation ofntheir lands and the imperialistic expansionism of Western nations. The ‘HumannZoo’ was one aspect of this attempt, as ‘primitive’ races were exhibited fornthe vicarious amusement of the masses, all the while being described as beingnof ethnographic or anthropological value. 

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nAfter the Fair in St Louis ended,nVerner accompanied Benga back to the Congo, where he re-married (although hisnnew wife died later from a snakebite) and lived with the Batwa although hennever felt truly accepted by them. When Verner returned to the US, Benga wentnwith him and after some negotiations, he took up residence at the Bronx Zoo innNew York. Here he fell under the influence of William Hornaday, the director ofnthe zoo, and Madison Grant, a racial anthropologist and eugenicist (Grant laternwrote The Passing of the Great Race, a work that Adolf Hitler called hisnfavourite book), and was exhibited in the monkey house at the zoo, sharing ancage with an orang-utan, in an attempt to demonstrate the similarities betweenn‘primitive’ races and apes. 

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nA number of African-American clergymen protested atnthe treatment of Benga and after two days the exhibitions ended and Benganeventually passed into the custody of Rev James Gordon. Gordon arranged a placenin the Howard Coloured Orphan Asylum for Benga, from where he passed into thencare of the McCray family in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he began to learnnEnglish and had his teeth capped. He gave up his elementary education when henstarted work in a tobacco factory, and started to save money for his fare backnto Africa but his plans were frustrated by travel restrictions imposed at thenoutbreak of the First World War. On March 20^th 1916, Ota Benga builtna ceremonial fire, removed the caps from his teeth and shot himself through thenheart with a stolen pistol. 

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nHe was buried in an unmarked grave.

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