Human Zoos

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The standard American education system treats slavery and its aftermath like a regrettable chapter that ended with a nice amendment, some Reconstruction, and a March on Washington. Like it consisted only of a little cotton-picking unpleasantness, and a Civil War, and may include a nod to Jim Crow drinking fountains, and then suddenly poof…problem solved. Unfortunately there is a ton of information that that sanitized, whitewashed version leaves out, horrors so grotesque, so casually dehumanizing, it makes the most jaded historian grimace. Not some vestigial abstract oppression or legal technicalities. We’re talking literal human zoos where paying customers tossed coins, gawked, poked, and laughed at living, breathing people displayed like exotic animals for the edification, entertainment, and imperial self-congratulation of polite white society.

Not some fringe underground freak shows in back alleys. This was mainstream, taxpayer-supported, scientifically justified spectacle running well into the 20th century even featured, and justified, in the New York Times.

The sheer scale and normalization should shatter any illusions about “ancient history.” Human zoos, euphemistically called “ethnological expositions” or “native villages”, were something America embraced with particular gusto, blending pseudoscience, empire-building propaganda, and good old-fashioned voyeurism. Textbooks skip this because admitting racism wasn’t just “old laws” or segregated buses, but a full-spectrum entertainment industry complete with props, staging, ticket booths, and souvenir opportunities, would force uncomfortable questions about cultural DNA and collective memory and identity of the nation.

In 1906 we have an example that somehow never gets included in the average high school curriculum. Ota Benga, a Mbuti (often called “pygmy”) man from the Congo Free State. Benga was a survivor of King Leopold II’s personal rubber-powered genocide in the Congo, where estimates run from 1 to 10+ million died through mutilation, forced labor, village razings, disease, and systematic slaughter. Benga’s own parents were among the casualties.

Samuel Phillips Verner a “businessman and missionary”, promised Benga he would bring him to safety but instead trafficked him across the Atlantic Ocean first to the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair, then the to the Bronx Zoo’s Primate House…neither in the “deep south” mind you.

The zoo director William Temple Hornaday, encouraged by eugenicist Madison Grant, imprisoned Benga in a cage with an orangutan named Dohong and chimpanzees. They put up signs labeled him the “African Pygmy” and “Missing Link,” promoting the racist evolutionary theory that Africans were evolutionarily closer to apes than to Europeans. For 25 cents, visitors could watch the “exhibit”, including staged interactions where Benga allegedly fought over rotten fruit. Mainstream outlets like the New York Times framed it as the “lucky savage”, housed and fed by benevolent civilization.

But Benga didn’t play the docile prop.

He withdrew from the gawking mobs, grew agitated, and began to aim his bow and arrow at visitors. Black pastors in Harlem, community leaders, and growing public outrage forced the zoo’s hand after weeks of this circus. Released, he was shuffled to Virginia where he worked in a tobacco factory, adopted the name Otto Bingo in a desperate bid to assimilate, but his real desire was to return to the Congo, unfortunately this was during World War I which made that impossible.

Isolated, depressed, grieving, he never recovered.

In 1916 Ota Benga built a small ceremonial fire, removed the caps that had been forced on him to cover his filed teeth that symbolized his cultural identity, and shot himself in the heart with a revolver.

He was barely in his 30s.

The Bronx Zoo didn’t issue any official acknowledgment or apology until over a century later, in 2020, even then only doing so due to social media and shifting optics making silence untenable.

Ota Benga’s case didn’t appear in a vacuum.

The 1904 fresh from the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, the U.S. needed to justify its new colony to skeptical or indifferent citizens back home, so they decided create the massive 47-acre “Philippine Reservation,” featuring over 1,100 Filipinos from various different ethnic groups, Igorots, Visayans, Moros, Aetas, and more , and force all of them into replica villages.

The propaganda was set that these “natives” are primitive, childlike, savage, and in desperate need of American “uplift.” Igorot performers were prodded to stage daily dog-slaughtering and eating rituals, exaggerated for maximum shock value to white Midwestern crowds. They performed “traditional” life in inadequate clothing through the brutal Missouri winter. Disease, malnutrition, pneumonia, and exposure resulted in the death of at least 17 Filipinos died during the fair, some by suicides and others due to the harsh conditions, all preventable had they been treated, as they should’ve been, as humans.

Babies were born on the reservation, in these same harsh conditions which, some of whom didn’t survive. Millions of fairgoers wandered through, reinforcing every supremacist stereotype while munching newfangled ice cream cones and marveling at electricity.

It was all used as a justification for empire, sold as entertainment.

At this same fair they displayed other ethnic groups, Ainu from Japan, Patagonians, and more Indigenous peoples, all arranged in a human hierarchy with Europeans at the apex.

This isn’t ancient history.

Human zoos didn’t vanish with the Progressive Era.

Belgium’s 1958 Brussels World’s Fair featured a “Congo Village” with Congolese people on display, drawing protests but still operating on the cusp of the Civil Rights era in the U.S. and decolonization waves. Living exhibits continued in various forms into the mid-20th century, with the last notable ones fading around 1958, right around the same time as Rosa Parks.

This seeps into entertainment even to this day, consider something as seemingly innocuous as clown makeup, overdrawn red lips, big noses, wild “afro”-like hair. That archetype traces directly to 19th-century blackface minstrel shows, where white performers caricatured Black speech, dance, mannerisms, and features for cheap laughs. Characters like “Jim Crow” (the shuffling, buffoonish stage persona that later segregation laws got their name from) birthed enduring tropes that infected circuses, cartoons, and early Hollywood.

The U.S. didn’t just extract labor and land on the backs of the oppressed. It built leisure, national identity, and fun on their humiliation.

Textbooks whitewash because the full picture indicts more than a few “bad apples” or outdated laws, it reveals the true systemic entertainment value that has been derived from ritualized cruelty.

All of these tragedies, Ota Benga’s suicide in Virginia, the Filipinos who died in Missouri’s cold, and the Congolese in 1958 Brussels are all part of the true underbelly of how racial hierarchies were normalized, consumed, and profited from even in the recent past.

But the U.S. education system would have us believe their constructed myth of steady, inevitable moral progress that protects contemporary self-image. “We’ve come so far” sounds reassuring until you realize the distance is way shorter, bloodier, and more recent than they admit. Next time someone sighs about “dwelling on the past,” remember the quarter-admission to see a man share a cage with an orangutan, the dog-eating spectacles, and the living villages that outlasted world wars but not quite the Civil Rights Movement.

Image created by author using Dall E-3

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