 of fairgoers could gawk at indigenous tribespeople from around the globe in replica villages, where they conducted native ceremonies, made crafts, and so on. (One star of the show was Geronimo, the legendary Apache chief, then in his 70s.) The typical fairgoer evidently being but little removed from the swamps himself, Ota and several other Pygmies exhibited with him were subjected to ridicule and abuse — poking them with lighted cigars was reputedly a common experiment. Nonetheless all the Pygmies survived the ordeal and were returned to their homeland. (Most of these details are found in Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, 1992.)
Not long afterward Ota's second wife died of a snakebite, and in 1906 he decided to return to the U.S. in the company of the man who'd first brought him over, an eccentric adventurer named Samuel Verner. Down on his luck after arriving in New York, Verner turned Ota over to the Bronx Zoo, whose equally eccentric director, William Hornaday, decided to put the Pygmy on exhibit at the monkey house — with bones scattered about the enclosure, the better to suggest his bestial nature. (Ota's sharpened teeth also provoked repeated false claims of Pygmy cannibalism.) The young man drew tens of thousands of visitors, who were encouraged to think of him as the missing link between apes and humans. Among other things he was asked to play with an orangutan, a task he apparently enjoyed.
This racist display, passed off as a vindication of Darwinism, incensed the black community, and a delegation of ministers demanded that the exhibition be stopped. Zoo officials compromised, letting Ota have the run of the park during the day, but after he got tired of being mobbed and brandished a stolen knife, Hornaday caved and turned him over to a black orphanage. Ota, by then in his late 20s, learned to speak and read English but otherwise showed little interest in schooling. After a few years he was sent to live in Lynchburg, Virginia, the site of a Baptist seminary where he occasionally took classes. He supported himself with odd jobs and tobacco-factory work, hunting in his off hours and becoming quite a favorite of the local youth.
In 1916, though, homesickness overcame him. Despite the new caps on his teeth, he didn't fit in. After learning that the trip back to Africa was beyond his means, Ota borrowed a revolver and shot himself fatally in the heart. Not to traffic in the obvious, but given his experiences with so-called civilized folk you have to ask: Who here was the savage?