Page "Ota Benga" Paragraph 1

Ota Benga ( circa 1883 – March 20, 1916 ) was a Congolese Mbuti pygmy known for being featured with other Africans in an anthropology exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904, and later in a controversial human zoo exhibit in the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

Benga had been freed from slave traders in the Congo by the missionary Samuel Phillips Verner, who had taken him to Missouri.

At the Bronx Zoo, Benga had free run of the grounds before and after he was " exhibited " in the zoo's Monkey House.

Displays of non-Western humans as examples of " earlier stages " of human evolution were common in the early 20th century, when racial theories were frequently intertwined with concepts from evolutionary biology.