St. Louis World Fair The group was taken to
St. Louis, Missouri, in late June 1904 without Verner, as he had been taken ill with
malaria. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition had already begun, and the Africans immediately became the center of attention. Benga was particularly popular, and his name was reported variously by the press as
Artiba,
Autobank,
Ota Bang, and
Otabenga. He had an amiable personality, and visitors were eager to see his teeth that had been
filed to sharp points in his early youth as ritual decoration. The Africans learned to charge for photographs and performances. One newspaper account promoted Benga as "the only genuine African
cannibal in America", and claimed that "[his teeth were] worth the five cents he charges for showing them to visitors". The
Apache leader
Geronimo (featured as "The Human Tyger" – with special dispensation from the
Department of War)
American Museum of Natural History Benga accompanied Verner when he returned the other Africans to the Congo. He briefly lived amongst the Batwa while continuing to accompany Verner on his African adventures. He married a Batwa woman who later died of snakebite, but little is known of this second marriage. Not feeling that he belonged with the Batwa, Benga chose to return with Verner to the United States. Verner eventually arranged for Benga to stay in a spare room at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York City while he was tending to other business. Verner negotiated with the curator Henry Bumpus over the presentation of his acquisitions from Africa and potential employment. While Bumpus was put off by Verner's request of what he thought was the prohibitively high salary of $175 a month and was not impressed by the man's credentials, he was interested in Benga. Benga initially enjoyed his time at the museum, where he was given a Southern-style linen suit to wear when he entertained, but he became homesick for his own culture. In 1992 the writers Bradford and Blume imagined his feelings: What at first held his attention now made him want to flee. It was maddening to be inside – to be swallowed whole – so long. He had an image of himself, stuffed, behind glass, but somehow still alive, crouching over a fake campfire, feeding meat to a lifeless child. Museum silence became a source of torment, a kind of noise; he needed birdsong, breezes, trees. The disaffected Benga attempted to find relief by exploiting his employers' presentation of him as a 'savage'. He tried to slip past the guards as a large crowd was leaving the premises; when asked on one occasion to seat a wealthy donor's wife, he pretended to misunderstand, instead hurling the chair across the room, just missing the woman's head. Meanwhile, Verner was struggling financially and had made little progress in his negotiations with the museum. He soon found another home for Benga. The events leading to his "exhibition" alongside Dohong were gradual: Soon, a sign on the exhibit read: The African Pygmy, "Ota Benga." Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Cen- tral Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Ex- hibited each afternoon during September. Hornaday considered the exhibit a valuable spectacle for visitors and was supported by
Madison Grant, Secretary of the
New York Zoological Society, who lobbied to put Ota Benga on display alongside apes at the Bronx 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. Said James H. Gordon, 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. 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, an article in the
New York Times quoted
Robert Stuart MacArthur as 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." Toward the end of 1906, Benga was released into Reverend Gordon's custody. ==Later life==