The following comes from the research I have been doing on zoos in conjunction with my attempt (forthcoming) to defend Dale Jamieson’s arguments “against zoos.” Presumably anyone examining the history of zoos will at some point come across the fact that human animals—human beings like you and I—were once exhibited in zoos. To be sure, they may not have been, superficially or by appearance, exactly like you and I (which is impossible in any case, as every human person is unique), but they were no less human for all that. This reminds us of the invaluable significance and democratic importance of Liberalism’s insistence on the notion of human dignity and the corresponding value of human rights, the former central to the latter even if its intrinsic tie or philosophical grounding is not always spelled out in legal terms or human rights instruments. I have added a list of titles on human dignity after the suggested reading on the main topic of our post.
“Alongside his infamous bar-less zoo design … Carl Hagenbeck1 also played a pioneering role—albeit a much less famous one—in the modern zoo’s display of human animals alongside animals. This practice can be traced back to one of the earliest known zoos, that of the emperor Montezuma in Mexico, which exhibited not only a vast collection of animals but also unusual humans, for example, dwarfs, albinos, and hunchbacks. In 1874, Hagenback exhibited Samoan and Sami people as ‘purely natural’ populations. Similarly, both the 1878 and the 1889 Parisian World’s Fair displayed four hundred indigenous people as a major attraction.
Human zoos2 were not only successful in Europe. In 1906, the Bronx Zoo exhibited Ota Benga, a Mbuti pygmy from central Africa, as an example of an emblematic savage from a primitive race. At first, he was free to move around the zoo and help keepers feed and communicate with the animals. Soon, however, he was confined to a cage, with a parrot and an orangutan to keep him company. While this exhibit was fairly controversial [well, at least in some quarters], it is nonetheless illustrative of the debates of the time. It was not simply who was and who was not human that worried westerners at the turn of the century, but ‘who was more human and, finally, who was the most human, that concerned them.’ In this sense, the human zoo of the nineteenth century did not see itself as exhibiting humans per se, but rather as displaying naturalized humans. Such humans were typically represented as still-living examples of the earliest stage in human development, the point of transition between animal and human history. Human zoos were, in effect, exhibitions of the [popular? social-?] Darwinian rhetoric of progress as well as visible demonstrations of colonial power.” — Irus Braverman, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford Law Books/Stanford University Press, 2013): 73.
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Let’s look more closely at the example of Ota Benga mentioned above by Professor Braverman, as it is perhaps the best known case, with several books devoted to his life. I have lightly edited the Wikipedia entry on Benga, which is quite reliable, at least from the perspective of what I have learned to date from other sources. The “suggested reading” list appended at the end of our post is from yours truly.
“Ota Benga (c. 1883 – March 20, 1916) was a Mbuti (Congo pygmy) man, known for being featured in an exhibit at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, and as a human zoo exhibit in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo. Benga had been purchased from African slave traders by the explorer Samuel Phillips Verner, a businessman searching for African people for the exhibition, who took him to the United States. While at the Bronx Zoo, Benga was allowed to walk the grounds before and after he was exhibited in the zoo’s Monkey House. Benga was placed in a cage with an orangutan as a lampoon on Darwinism. To enhance the primitive image and presumably protect himself if need be from the ape he was given a functional bow and arrow. He used this instead to shoot at visitors who mocked him and partially as a result of this the exhibition was ended. Except for a brief visit to Africa with Verner after the close of the St. Louis Fair, Benga lived in the United States, mostly in Virginia, for the rest of his life.
African-American newspapers around the nation published editorials strongly opposing Benga’s treatment. Robert Stuart MacArthur, spokesman for a delegation of black churches, petitioned New York City Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. for his release from the Bronx Zoo. In late 1906, the mayor released Benga to the custody of James M. Gordon, who supervised the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn. In 1910 Gordon arranged for Benga to be cared for in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he paid for his clothes and to have his sharpened teeth capped. This would enable Benga to be more readily accepted in local society. Benga was tutored in English and began to work at a Lynchburg tobacco factory. He tried to return to Africa, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 stopped all ship passenger travel. Benga fell into a depression, and died by suicide in 1916.
As a member of the Mbuti people, Ota Benga lived in equatorial forests near the Kasai River in what was then the Congo Free State. His people were attacked by the Force Publique, established by King Leopold II of Belgium as a militia to control the natives, most of whom were used for labor in order to exploit the large supply of rubber in the Congo. Benga’s wife and two children were murdered; he survived because he was on a hunting expedition when the Force Publique attacked his village. He was later captured by ‘Baschelel’ (Bashilele) slave traders.
In 1904, American businessman and explorer Samuel Phillips Verner traveled to Africa, under contract from the St. Louis World Fair, to capture and bring back an assortment of pygmies to be part of an exhibition. Verner discovered Benga while en route to a Batwa pygmy village visited previously; he purchased Benga from the slave traders for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. Verner later claimed he had rescued Benga from cannibals. The two spent several weeks together before reaching the Batwa village. The villagers had developed a racial prejudice against the muzungu (‘white man’). Verner was unable to recruit any villagers to join him for travel to the United States until Benga said that the muzungu had saved his life, and spoke of the bond that had grown between them and his own curiosity about the world Verner came from. Four Batwa, all males, ultimately decided to accompany them. Verner also recruited other Africans who were not pygmies: five men from the Bakuba, including the son of King Ndombe, ruler of the Bakuba; and other related peoples.
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.’
When Verner arrived a month later, he realized the pygmies were more prisoners than performers. Their attempts to congregate peacefully in the forest on Sundays were thwarted by the crowds’ fascination with them. McGee’s attempts to present a ‘serious’ scientific exhibit were also overturned. On July 28, 1904, the Africans performed to the crowd’s preconceived notion that they were ‘savages,’ resulting in the First Illinois Regiment being called in to control the mob. Benga and the other Africans eventually performed in a warlike fashion, imitating Native Americans they saw at the Exhibition. The Apache chief Geronimo (featured as ‘The Human Tyger’ – with special dispensation from the Department of War) grew to admire Benga, and gave him one of his arrowheads.
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, and 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. He became homesick for his own culture. 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. At the suggestion of Bumpus, Verner took Benga to the Bronx Zoo in 1906. William Hornaday, director of the zoo, initially enlisted Benga to help maintain the animal habitats. However, Hornaday saw that people took more notice of Benga than the animals at the zoo, and he eventually created an exhibition to feature Benga. At the zoo, the Mbuti man was allowed to roam the grounds, but there is no record that he was ever paid for his work. 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, and the zoo encouraged him to hang his hammock there, 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. Only five promotional photos exist of Benga’s time here, none of them in the ‘Monkey House;’ cameras were not allowed. 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
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 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.’ Gordon thought the exhibit was hostile to Christianity and was effectively 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, 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.’ The zoo finally removed Benga from the grounds. Verner was unsuccessful in his continued search for employment, but he occasionally spoke to Benga. The two had agreed that it was in Benga’s best interests to remain in the United States despite the unwelcome spotlight at the zoo. Toward the end of 1906, Benga was released into Reverend Gordon’s custody. Gordon placed Benga in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, a church-sponsored orphanage in Brooklyn that Gordon supervised. As the unwelcome press attention continued, in January 1910, Gordon arranged for Benga’s relocation to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived with the family of Gregory W. Hayes.
So that he could more easily be part of local society, Gordon arranged for Benga’s teeth to be capped and bought him American-style clothes. He received tutoring from Lynchburg poet Anne Spencer in order to improve his English, and began to attend elementary school at the Baptist Seminary in Lynchburg. Once he felt his English had improved sufficiently, Benga discontinued his formal education. He began working at a Lynchburg tobacco factory, and began to plan a return to Africa.
In 1914, when World War I broke out, a return to the Congo became impossible as passenger ship traffic ended. Benga became depressed as his hopes for a return to his homeland faded. On March 20, 1916, at the age of 32 or 33, he built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps on his teeth, and shot himself in the heart with a borrowed pistol.
He was buried in an unmarked grave in the Black section of the Old City Cemetery, near his benefactor, Gregory Hayes. At some point, the remains of both men went missing. Local oral history indicates that Hayes and Benga were eventually moved from the Old Cemetery to White Rock Hill Cemetery, a burial ground that later fell into disrepair. Benga received a historic marker in Lynchburg in 2017.
Phillips Verner Bradford, the grandson of Samuel Phillips Verner, wrote a book on the Mbuti man, entitled Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (1992). During his research for the book, Bradford visited the American Museum of Natural History, which holds a life mask and body cast of Ota Benga. The display is still labeled ‘Pygmy,’ rather than indicating Benga’s name, despite objections beginning a century ago from Verner and repeated by others. Publication of Bradford’s book in 1992 inspired widespread interest in Ota Benga’s story and stimulated creation of many other works, both fictional and non-fiction…. [….]
Similarities have been observed between the treatment of Ota Benga and Ishi. The latter was the sole remaining member of the Yahi Native American tribe, and he was displayed in California around the same period. Ishi died on March 25, 1916, five days after Ota.”
Notes
- “Human zoos (also called ‘ethnological expositions’ or ‘Negro villages’) were 19th and 20th century public exhibits of human beings usually in their ‘natural’ or ‘primitive’ state. They were most prominent during the 19th and 20th centuries. These displays often emphasized the supposed inferiority of the exhibits’ culture, and implied the superiority of ‘Western society.’ Throughout their existence such exhibitions garnered controversy over their demeaning, derogatory, and dehumanizing nature. They began as a part of circuses and ‘freak shows’ which displayed exotic humans in a manner akin to a caricature which exaggerated their differences. They then developed into independent displays emphasizing the exhibits’ inferiority to western culture and providing further justification for their subjugation. Such displays featured in multiple world fairs and then transitioned into sections of animal zoos.”
- “Carl Hagenbeck (June 10, 1844 – April 14, 1913) was a German merchant of wild animals who supplied many European zoos, as well as P. T. Barnum. He created the modern zoo with animal enclosures without bars that were closer to their natural habitat. The transformation of the zoo architecture initiated by him is known as the Hagenbeck revolution. Hagenbeck founded Germany’s most successful privately owned zoo, the Tierpark Hagenbeck, which moved to its present location in Hamburg’s Stellingen district in 1907. He was also an ethnography showman and a pioneer in displaying humans next to animals in human zoos.”
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Suggested Reading
- Baratay, Eric and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier. A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (Reaktion Books, 2002).
- Bradford, Phillips Verner and Harvey Blume. Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (St. Martin’s Press, 1992)
- Braverman, Irus. Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford Law Books/ Stanford University Press, 2013).
- Gray, Jenny. Zoo Ethics: The Challenges of Compassionate Conservation (Comstock Publishing Associates/Cornell University Press, 2017).
- Hancocks, David. A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future (University of California Press, 2001).
- Jamieson, Dale. Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Clarendon Press, 2002).
- Kroeber, Theodora. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (University of California Press, 2002 [1961]).
- Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Indiana University Press/David Philip Publishers [South Africa], 1999).
- Minteer, Ben A., Jane Maienschein, and James P. Collins, eds. The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
- Mullan, Robert and Garry Marvin. Zoo Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1998).
- Newkirk, Pamela. Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2015).
- Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Human Dignity (and human rights)
- Besson, Samantha and John Tasioulas, eds. The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2010).
- Buchanan, Allan E. The Heart of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Capps, Patrick. Human Dignity and the Foundations of International Law (Hart Publishing, 2010).
- Carozza, Paolo G. “Human Rights, Human Dignity, and Human Experience,” in Christopher McCrudden, ed. Understanding Human Dignity (2011): 615-629.
- Daly, Erin. Dignity Rights: Courts, Constitutions, and the Worth of the Human Person (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
- Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 3rd ed., 2013).
- Düwell, Marcus, et al., eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- Hill, Thomas E., Jr. Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Cornell University Press, 1992).
- Hill, Thomas E., Jr. “In Defense of Human Dignity: Comments on Kant and Rosen,” in Christopher McCrudden, ed. Understanding Human Dignity (2011): 313-325.
- Kateb, George. Human Dignity (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
- Kraynak, Robert and Glenn Tinder, eds., In Defense of Human Dignity: Essays for Our Times (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).
- Luban, David. Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- McCrudden, Christopher, ed. Understanding Human Dignity (Oxford University Press, 2014).
- Morsink, Johannes. Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
- Peffer, R.G. Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton University Press, 1990).
- Rachels, James. The Elements of Moral Philosophy (McGraw-Hill, 4th ed., 2003): 130-140.
- Rosen, Michael. Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Harvard University Press, 2012).
- Steiner, Henry J. and Philip Alston. International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals (Text and Materials) (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2000).
- Waldron, Jeremy (et al.) Dignity, Rank and Rights (Berkeley Tanner Lectures, 2009) (Oxford University Press, 2015).
- Wood, Allen W. Kantian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
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