Ota Benga - Legacy

Legacy

Phillips Verner Bradford, the grandson of Samuel Phillips Verner, wrote a book on the Congolese entitled Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (1992). During his research for the book, he visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York, 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.

The similarities between Ota Benga and Ishi, the sole remaining member of a Native American tribe, who was displayed in California around the same period – including the subsequent publication of a book on the subject by the descendants of the scientist involved – have been observed. Adams (2001) argues that, rather than "mak racial, national, and species differences culturally intelligible" as the exhibits' creators intended, "the spectators came to question their own place within the hierarchy of human races and the narratives of progress on which that hierarchy relied". Rather than simply exposing the racism of the American public (as members of Ota and Ishi's respective races perceived them), the incidents served to humanize the cultures being displayed. Coincidentally, Ishi died on March 25, 1916, five days after Ota.