#ota benga

[new-bein]

Advert made to promote France’s human zoo that was going to feature Sudanese tribes. Sound familiar?

[reasoningdaily]

The operator of the venerable Bronx Zoo, one of the world's most famous wildlife parks, has apologized for two "unconscionable" racist episodes in its past, including placing an African man on display in a monkey house in 1906.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo in addition to three other zoos and an aquarium in New York City, said in a statement this week that in the "name of equality, transparency, and accountability, we must confront our organization's historic role in promoting racial injustice."

"His name was Ota Benga," the statement said. Bronx Zoo officials "put Ota Benga on display in the zoo’s Monkey House for several days during the week of September 8, 1906 before outrage from local Black ministers quickly brought the disgraceful incident to an end."

One of those ministers, the Rev. James Gordon, "arranged for Ota Benga to stay at an orphanage he directed in Weeksville, Brooklyn," the statement said. "Robbed of his humanity and unable to return home," Ota Benga died by suicide a decade later.

Harvey Blume, who co-authored the 1992 book "Ota Benga: The Pygmy At The Zoo," said the zoo's apology is too little and too late.

"And to whom was this apology? It's a little late for Ota," Blume told NBC News on Friday.

All known records about Ota Benga at the wildlife society are now being made available online as part of an effort to "publicly acknowledge the mistakes of our past," the Wildlife Conservation Society's statement said.

The organization, founded in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society, also denounced the "eugenics-based, pseudoscientific racism, writings, and philosophies" advanced by two of its founders, Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr.

Grant penned an infamous eugenics book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” with a preface by Osborn.

The book was submitted as a defense exhibit for Nazi doctor Karl Brandt, a director of the Third Reich's "euthanasia" program, and other defendants in the Nuremberg trials.

Brandt, who was also Adolf Hitler's personal physician, was convicted by the war crimes tribunal in 1947 and put to death in 1948.

"Back in that day, science and anthropology were based on explicitly racist principles," Blume said. "That there was a hierarchy of races, culminating with the white race on top, looking down."

The role once-respected scholars played in propping up debunked scientific theories to justify white supremacy has been overlooked for far too long, according to the author.

"Madison Grant was one of Hitler's favorite authors," said Blume, who co-authored "Ota Benga: The Pygmy At The Zoo" with the late Phillips Verner Bradford, grandson of the man who purchased Ota Benga in Africa and brought him to America.

"These were not Nazis, but in some ways they were too."

The wildlife society said in its statement, which was first reported by The New York Times, that it is obligated to confront these episodes.

"We deeply regret that many people and generations have been hurt by these actions or by our failure previously to publicly condemn and denounce them," the statement said.

"We recognize that overt and systemic racism persists, and our institution must play a greater role to confront it. As the United States addresses its legacy of anti-Black racism and the brutal killings that have led to mass protests around the world, we reaffirm our commitment to ensuring that social, racial, and environmental justice are deep-rooted in our conservation mission."

The organization also announced it was hiring a diversity officer to help "ensure diverse pools of candidates for recruitment, promotion, and succession planning, including our board and leadership."

"Today we challenge ourselves to do better and to never look away whenever and wherever injustice occurs," the statement said.

[unicorns-green-adventure]

[american-noire]

Ota Benga, 1906

The saddest story you'll ever hear

[blackbackedjackal]

.

[alwaysbewoke]

Ota Benga was born around 1883, in what is now the Republic of Congo. Theirs was a hunter-gatherer society. When he became a man, his teeth were chipped into sharp points, part of his tribal customs. His world came crashing down when King Leopold II of Belgium (The butcher of Congo) established a colony in the Congo to exploit its valuable resources. The demand for rubber was increasing around the world and Leopold wanted to corner the market. He subdued the native population to force them into laboring on the rubber plantations. In Belgium Congo, women were held hostage until their men returned with enough rubber for the colonizer King Leopold. Some had their hands chopped off for not meeting rubber quotas. Ota was out on a hunting expedition when his village was attacked by the slavers. Whether they were Force Publique or an African group working to collect people to sell to them varies from story to story. He was taken captive. On the other side of the globe, a man named Samuel Verner was preparing exhibits for the 1904 World's Fair. The fair's organizers wanted to do an exhibit showing the progress of mankind “from the dark prime to the highest enlightenment, from savagery to civic organisation" He was given a hefty budget to collect living "specimens" of people from Africa to represent the "savage depths" from which mankind had sprung. The experience of young African men at the 'fair' aka Human Zoo, was not a pleasant one. Billed as cannibals, they shook spears at the crowd and grimaced with their filed teeth, modeling their "war dances" Verner sent Ota to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In 1906, Verner found a new home for Ota: The Bronx Zoo. Ota was put as an "exhibit" A plaque was erected, describing him in the same way an animal would be described and put into a cage in the monkey house. The Minneapolis Journal declared Ota to be the "missing link" between chimps and humans. On March 19, 1916, he stole a revolver gun and shot himself through the heart.

x

[pissvortex]

hey guys, episode is leaving early access tomorrow at 6:30 CST but i would love if you guys supported us on patreon to listen early anyway!

This episode of our series on the Congo is all about the colonial roots of the national park system and the story of Ota Benga, the Mbuti man enslaved and put on display in the Bronx zoo in 1905. really harrowing stuff, and also we found out you can find the address of the gravestone of the guy who enslaved him on Google for free btw

[realjaysumlin]

The Tragic Story of Ota Benga (c.1883-1916) – HistoryVille

https://www.thehistoryville.com/ota-benga/

Kidnapped from his homeland in Africa by Christian missionaries and put into an animal cave in the New York Bronx Zoo where he is put on display and people made fun of him even chased him around like an animal and after a brief history of solitary he took his own life.

This is one of many disheartening stories about innocent Black Indigenous Children were treated as nothingness for the sake of white entertainment no matter how brutal or torturous the suffering may be, simply because they see Black Indigenous People as nothingness.

I wonder how they would feel if someone did the exact same thing to their innocent children? 😭. No human beings should be mistreated especially if they claim to be godly even though Christianity committed the greatest genocides in human history because they are absolutely evil.

[mookymilksims]

Woc don't have higher levels of testosterone than white women lol. That woman is just your typical white female leftist who is just as racist and Anti-black as the 'Terfs' she despises.

Also that is straight up race science. Race is a social construct, not a biological one

Hm.

Ok so I still have not been able to find any science that supports that persons claims that WOC are born with higher levels of T than white women. So you do have a point there. Because the study they sent was talking about hormonal levels in post menopausal women and then expanded on post menopausal women with diabetes. Both effect hormonal levels in the human body, but I agree the study is interesting, it just doesn't back up the claim we have more T than white women.

To your next point, I have no idea who that person was, I just saw someone else in the replies ask the same question I had as far as providing any proof that WOC have more T than white women. I did suspect they were maybe not a black woman, at least, when they claimed that white academia wouldn't post about how black women have higher levels of T in fear of being accused of perpetuating the myth that black women are more hyper-masculine than any other race of women.

I did have to remind them that nothing, and I do mean absolutely nothing, has ever stopped white academia from making any kind of disparaging claims about black bodies not historically nor currently. If they did in fact find any kind of evidence to prove that WOC, especially BW, had higher levels of T than white women, I wouldn't have to spend several hours searching for this information, it would be in the first page of google results, it would be in prestigious scholarly works, cosigned by scientists all over the world, and a known fact until someone else proves otherwise.

This has always been the case, like for instance when the entire world thought black people were the closest relatives to apes, and were by then an extension of apes, this was used to justify our dehumanization, put us in zoo's, with like literal apes.

This reality the poster claims where white science wouldn't post this information on WOC and higher levels of T in fear of retaliation is just not the world we live in. So that part did confuse tf out me I'll be honest.

As far as your race science claim goes, I will have to disagree with you there. We do have racial differences, well to be more technical, genetic traits through evolution, migration, culture, mating practices were widely spread, which you can find more commonly in certain groups of people in comparison.

For example, east Asians have a gene that makes their ear wax dry, and also they tend to not have an odor in their armpits as a result of this.

That's a racial difference. Proven by science. It gets even more fascinating than that. Did you know the genetic trait that causes wider pronounced noses is because of how flat and hot the desert terrain is? Noses stretched out across the face to be able to obtain more oxygen in this environment.

On the contrary, people with thinner sharper noses, developed from humans in, for example, the Caucus Mountains, the birthplace of Caucasians. Where the climate was colder, dryer, much higher up in the literal mountains, and so while the nose was originally wider and flatter (early humans migrated out of Africa, trekked across Asia, and settled in these mountains), evolved over time to become thinner and push out in order to be able to obtain oxygen in areas of the world at higher altitudes = less oxygen.

So you see, we shouldn't shy away from our racial differences. They have fascinating details that is a testament to our survival. When you are someone who only cares about the objective facts you quickly gather there is nothing superior/inferior about these differences, they evolved in a rather innocent manner, our nature recognizes us all as one and helped us adapt to our environment.

It's hard for me, someone who is entranced by science (I wanted to be Einstein when I was a kid), to hear "race is a social construct". Racism is a social construct, race is not. It's just a term we used to describe our origin. Mongoloid = Asian. Caucasoid = White/European. Negroid = Black/African. It's your signifier. We even process the same chemicals in our food slightly differently from each other. We have average height, weight, muscle differences. An average toned white man is different from an average toned black man. And wait until you find out that breaks down according to which region of which continent you predominantly hail from.

So yeah, I'll be frank, I don't think I'm going to find any evidence that woc have higher levels of T than white women, this will become ironic but I believe it is the same white supremacy standards that is causing woc's femininity to constantly be in question that lead this person to this belief that woc somehow have higher levels of T. Firstly, they should've attached those studies to their post, secondly the studies they provided did not prove this claim, in basic terms the studies provided a jump in T just after menopause then levels back out then actually dips lower than white women. So if I am using the posters logic, from this angle, technically it would be white women who have higher levels of T than any other race of women -after menopause-.

Which was the missing context the poster kept leaving out? And when I pointed that out, despite how many times the poster claimed to study women's bodies for a living they just ended the exchange on a "well it's not studied very often so let me know what you find :)"

???

You study women's bodies for a living apparently, educate me. I want to read the name and number of the genetic traits that you claim is affecting woc??? I want to see a graph that directly shows higher levels of T throughout those patients lives, I want that study to track the hormonal levels of it's patients from birth???? If you supposedly study women's bodies for a living you should've been able to completely wash my analysis of the study you linked.

But you don't need to be a scientist to read the study. It said post menopausal and diabetes. And the findings actually went against what the poster claimed when you get to the end of it.

So I mean I guess the take away from all of this is don't just trust people because they had a mostly logical approach to the Olympic boxer incident, and then threw in that very strange claim somewhere in the middle. Think for yourself, ask for sources, read it yourself, and ask the next logical questions, this will lead you to my conclusion: those sources don't back up your claims.

-shrug-

[whitebuddha-viii]

human zoo exhibit committed suicide on this day in 1916

[vinegarextract]

idk where else to write this. im making a video that will be posted during black history month (about Jordan Peele's "Nope", unrelated) and i've been consuming a lot of media about black history and its' effect on the black diaspora. i just finished grabbing clips of those living through slavery in the Democratic Republic of Congo and i'm trying to sit down with how i felt after watching the documentary from Sky News, and compiling media of Ota Benga, human zoos, cotton slavery, cowboy slavery and the only way I can describe how I'm feeling is devastated.

i'm shocked at how the world has and still does treat Africans. I'm fed up and frustrated. From the comfort of my room in a first world country that my parents worked their asses off to get us to, all I can do is make a video. I ask myself not 'how do we fix this' but how can we grieve when there hasn't even been space to breathe?

[reasoningdaily]

Ota Benga was kidnapped from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1904 and taken to the US to be exhibited. Journalist Pamela Newkirk, who has written extensively about the subject, looks at the attempts over the decades to cover up what happened to him.

More than a century after it drew international headlines for exhibiting a young African man in the monkey house, the Bronx Zoo in New York has finally expressed regret.

The Wildlife Conservation Society's apology for its 1906 exhibition of Ota Benga, a native of Congo, comes in the wake of global protests prompted by the videotaped police killing of George Floyd that again shone a bright light on racism in the United States.

During a national moment of reckoning, Cristian Samper, the Wildlife Conservation Society's president and CEO, said it was important "to reflect on WCS's own history, and the persistence of racism in our institution".

He vowed that the society, which runs the Bronx Zoo, would commit itself to full transparency about the episode which inspired breathless headlines across Europe and the United States from 9 September 1906 - a day after Ota Benga was first exhibited - until he was released from the zoo on 28 September 1906.

But the belated apology follows years of stonewalling.

'He was a zoo employee'

Instead of capitalising on the episode as a teachable moment, the Wildlife Conservation Society engaged in a century-long cover-up during which it actively perpetuated or failed to correct misleading stories about what had actually occurred.

As early as 1906 a letter in the zoo archives reveals that officials, in the wake of growing criticism, discussed concocting a story that Ota Benga had actually been a zoo employee. Remarkably, for decades, the ruse worked.

Who was Ota Benga?

Captured in March 1904 by US trader Samuel Verner from what was then Belgian Congo. His age is not known, he may have been 12 or 13

Taken by ship to New Orleans to be shown later that year at World's Fair in St Louis with eight other young males

The fair continued into the winter months where the group was kept without adequate clothing or shelter

In September 1906 he was exhibited for 20 days in New York's Bronx Zoo, attracting huge crowds

Outrage from Christian ministers ended his incarceration and he was moved to New York's Howard Coloured Orphan Asylum run by African American Reverend James H Gordon

In January 1910 he went to live at the Lynchburg Theological Seminary and College for black students in Virginia

There he taught neighbourhood boys how to hunt and fish and told stories of his adventures back home

He later reportedly became depressed with his longing for home and in March 1916 shot himself with a gun he had hidden. He was thought to be aged around 25.

Source: Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga

In 1916, following Ota Benga's death, a New York Times article dismissed as urban legend tales of his exhibition.

"It was this employment that gave rise to the unfounded report that he was being held in the park as one of the exhibits in the monkey cage," the article said.

Ota Benga (R) pictured at the World's Fair in 1904 where he and others were exhibited as "pygmies"

The account, of course, contradicted the numerous articles that a decade earlier had appeared in newspapers across the country and in Europe.

The New York Times alone had published a dozen articles on the affair, the first under the 9 September 1906 headline: "Bushman Shares A Cage With Bronx Park Apes".

Then, in 1974, William Bridges, the zoo's curator emeritus claimed that what actually occurred could not be known.

In his book The Gathering of Animals, he rhetorically asked: "Was Ota Benga 'exhibited' - like some strange, rare animal?" a question that he, as the man who presided over the zoo archives, would know best how to answer.

"That he was locked behind bars in a bare cage to be stared at during certain hours seems unlikely," he continued, patently ignoring mountains of evidence in the zoological society archives that reveal just that.

An article about the exhibition, written by the zoo director, had in fact appeared in the zoological society's own publication.

Nonetheless, Bridges wrote: "At this distance in time that is about all that can be said for sure, except that it was all done with the best of intentions, for Ota Benga was interesting to the New York public."

'Friendship between captor and captive'

Compounding these deceptive narratives was a book published in 1992 and co-authored by the grandson of Samuel Verner, the man who went to Congo heavily armed to capture Ota Benga and others to exhibit at the 1904 St Louis World's Fair.

The book was absurdly characterised as the story of friendship between Verner and Ota Benga.

In at least one newspaper account since the book's publication, the younger Verner also claimed that Ota Benga - who had vigorously resisted his captivity - had enjoyed performing for New Yorkers.

So for more than a century, the very institution and men who had so ruthlessly exploited Ota Benga, and their descendants, contaminated the historical record with untrue narratives that circulated around the world.

Even now, Mr Samper has apologised for exhibiting Ota Benga for "several days", and not for the three weeks he was held captive in the monkey house.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs Bronx Zoo, said it condemned certain dishonourable chapters in its history

The zoo has now posted online digitised documents it holds of the episode, among them letters that detail the daily activities of Ota Benga and the men who caged him.

Many of those letters are already cited in my book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, published in 2015.

In the five years since its publication, zoo officials had inexplicably refused to express regret or even respond to media inquiries.

And while I had the opportunity to visit the primate house where Ota Benga was exhibited and housed, the building has since been shuttered to the public.

'Best room in the monkey house'

Now, Mr Samper says: "We deeply regret that many people and generations have been hurt by these actions or by our failure previously to publicly condemn and denounce them."

He also denounced founding members Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, both ardent eugenicists who played a direct role in Ota Benga's exhibition.

Grant went on to write The Passing of The Great Race, a book steeped in racist pseudo-science that was praised by Osborn and hailed by Adolf Hitler.

A return to Congo would have been prohibitively expensive for Ota Benga

Osborn went on to lead for 25 years the American Museum of Natural History where in 1921 he hosted the second International Eugenics Congress.

Curiously, Mr Samper did not mention William Hornaday, the zoo's founding director who was also the nation's foremost zoologist and founding director of the National Zoo in Washington, DC.

Hornaday had littered the cage housing Ota Benga with bones to suggest cannibalism and had brazenly boasted that Ota Benga had "the best room in the monkey house".

Some feel the conservation society now needs to follow its incomplete apology with rigorous truth-telling befitting a leading educational institution.

The episode offers the zoological society the opportunity to educate the public about the history of the conservation movement and its ties to eugenics.

The Bronx Zoo's founding principals were among the most influential disseminators of specious racial inferiority theories that resonate still.

One suggestion has been that the society might also consider naming its education centre for Ota Benga, whose tragic life and legacy is inextricably bound to the Bronx Zoo's.

[unicorns-green-adventure]

[indragonsaur]

Demontober 2023 Day 2: Marquis Andras

Meet Andras the demon knight and brother of Stolas and Amon.

Andras is the sixty-third demon spirit that was summoned by King Solomon that was added in the Ars Goetia. He is depicted as a humanoid with an angel's wings and an owl's head, riding a strong black wolf and holding a gleaming bright sharp sword. Only a strong enough summoner is able to call Andras, who manifests as a near-naked elf with an owl's head riding a giant wolf and carrying a greatsword.

History

Andras was once an angel residing in Heaven although much of his activities in Heaven was unknown. What is known is that he joined Lucifer's rebellion and warred against the Heavenly Host and the Almighty only to be cast out like the rest of his fellow fallen cohorts. Andras recalls, like most other fallen angels, that his fall and awakening were highly unpleasant and took part in the construction of the newly established Hell.

Slowly but surely, Andras began to build up his reputation and power in the newly-formed hierarchy of the Ars Goetia. He was appointed as a Great Marquis of Hell with thirty legions of demons under his command wand hose only directive is to hunt and kill men. Andras served for centuries as first a paladin and then a blackguard.

His skills with the sword and ferocity in combat were quite known among the legions of Hell. At some point in time, Andras revealed that he even sparred against the Legendary Dark Knight himself but each time he would be defeated much to his chagrin, though this sparked a sort of friendly rivalry between him and Sparda. In fact, Andras further revealed that his code as a warrior was in thanks to Sparda's teachings.

In the modern days of humanity, Andras was possessing a girl in East Africa in the year 1890. A priest named Ota Benga was called in to perform an exorcism, but he decided that the demon should not return to Hell either. Instead he imprisoned the creature in his own body.

Andras was confined within the body of Benga for over a century, until he was visited by B.P.R.D. agent Ashley Strode. Strode was contacted by Sybacco, one of Andras' servants, who wanted to release his master in order to stabilize the hierarchy of Hell. The demon revealed that he held the soul of a young boy hostage, and threatened to drag the child's soul to the Inferno if his demands were not met.

At first seeing that there were no other options, Benga and Strode instead made a plan on how to at least banish the Marquis as killing him would be almost impossible. Benga and Strode traveled to the Spiritual Plane, where they battled Andras with extreme difficulty, managing to drive him out Benga's old body by the skin of their teeth. Andras possessed a goat which was then killed by Strode forcing him back to Hell.

[long-peace]

Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. Only five promotional photos exist of Benga's time here, none of them in the "Monkey House"; cameras were not allowed.

(via Ota Benga - Wikipedia)