‘spectacle: The Astonishing Life Of Ota Benga,’ By Pamela Newkirk

Pamela Newkirk has done just that in an important new book that retells the little-known and devastating tale of a young man who, only a century ago, was captured in the Congo and put on display — like an animal — in the Bronx Zoo Monkey House. For years, Benga’s story was told by men who benefited from making him an attraction: his captor, zoo officials and a media too happy to serve up lies about “the little African savage” who supposedly wanted to be held captive in this country. A professor of journalism at New York University, Newkirk researched far and wide for her book, drawing on letters, diaries, anthropological field notes and other documents and seamlessly weaving them all into an engrossing account. “In one account,” Newkirk writes, Verner, once again casting himself in the role of Benga’s savior, claimed that Benga threatened to kill himself if he didn’t bring him along. Newkirk adds, “Three decades after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Verner [the son of a wealthy slaveholding family from South Carolina] continued to see potential in Africans as ‘the great coming laboring class of the world.’” In a newspaper account bearing the headline “An Untold Chapter of My Adventures While Hunting Pygmies in Africa,” Verner (described as a “queer fellow” and “crank” by one man who knew him), says he obtained Benga for $5 worth of goods. Racist headlines set the tone for the arrival of Benga and his fellow Africans in St.