Application of the chicotte

Sir Henry Morton Stanley ("Dr. Livingstone, I presume?")  was Leopold's agent in acquiring Congo territory.

Leopold II, Proprietor

James H. Gordon

Ota Benga (second from left) and the Batwa in St. Louis

Regarding his daughter's severed hand and foot

Edmund Dene Morel

As a representative of the shipping company Elder Dempster in Antwerp, while observing the export of Congo ivory and rubber and the import of guns, ammunition and manacles, he realized a vast fortune was being made by slave labor.

Ota Benga in 1904

Léon Rom (left), a District Commissioner in the Congo Free State, used the severed heads of natives to decorate the flower beds of his house at Stanley Falls. Rom is thought to be the model for the character Kurtz, as he and Conrad may have met in 1890.

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To learn about the ivory trade and rubber terror in the Congo Free State, a slice (905,000 square miles) of the magnificent cake and the setting for Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, you will want to read King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild (1998). 

To be continued, so stay tuned.

Chiricahua medicine man Geronimo

In 1890 this Polish expatriate served as captain of a Belgian trading company steamer on a Congo River tributary, penning his observations for future publication.

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Samuel P. Verner

Mbye Otabenga, a.k.a. Ota Benga (circa 1883 – March 20, 1916) was a Mbuti (Congo pygmy) man, known for being featured in an exhibit at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, and as a human zoo exhibit in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo. As a member of the Mbuti people, Ota Benga lived in equatorial forests near the Kasai River in what was then the Congo Free State. His people were attacked by the Force Publique, established by King Leopold II of Belgium as a militia to control the natives, most of whom were used for labor in order to exploit the large supply of rubber in the Congo. Ota Benga's wife and two children were murdered; he survived because he was on a hunting expedition when the Force Publique attacked his village. He was later captured by Bashilele slave traders. In 1904, American businessman and explorer Samuel Phillips Verner traveled to Africa, under contract from the St. Louis World Fair, to capture and bring back an assortment of pygmies to be part of an exhibition. Verner discovered Ota Benga while en route to a Batwa pygmy village he previously visited, purchasing Ota Benga from the slavers for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. Verner later claimed he had rescued Ota Benga from cannibals. The two spent several weeks together before reaching the Batwa village. The villagers had developed distrust for the muzungu ("white man") due to the abuses of King Leopold's forces. Verner was unable to recruit any villagers to join him for travel to the United States until Ota Benga said that the muzungu had saved his life, and spoke of the bond that had grown between them and his own curiosity about the world Verner came from. Four Batwa, all male, ultimately decided to accompany them. Verner also recruited other Africans who were not pygmies: five men from the Bakuba, including the son of King Ndombe. The group was taken to St. Louis, Missouri, in late June 1904 but without Verner, as he had been taken ill with malaria. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition had already begun, and the Africans immediately became the center of attention. Ota Benga was particularly popular (his name was reported variously by the press as Artiba, Autobank, Ota Bang and Otabenga). He had an amiable personality, and visitors were eager to see his teeth that had been filed to sharp points in his early youth as ritual decoration. The Africans learned to charge for photographs and performances. One newspaper account promoted Ota Benga as "the only genuine African cannibal in America", and claimed that "his teeth were worth the five cents he charges for them to visitors". When Verner arrived a month later, he realized the pygmies were more prisoners than performers. Their attempts to congregate peacefully in the forest on Sundays were thwarted by the crowds' fascination with them. St. Louis World Fair director of anthropology John McGee's attempts to present a "serious" scientific exhibit were also overturned. On July 28, 1904, the Africans performed to the crowd's preconceived notion that they were "savages", resulting in the First Illinois Regiment being called in to control the mob. Ota Benga and the other Africans eventually performed in a warlike fashion, imitating Native Americans they saw at the Exhibition. The Apache leader Geronimo (featured as "The Human Tiger" – with special dispensation  from the U.S. Department of War to appear) grew to admire Ota Benga, and gave him one of his arrowheads. Ota Benga accompanied Verner when he returned the other Africans to the Congo. He briefly lived among the Batwa while continuing to accompany Verner on his African adventures. He married a Batwa woman who later died of snakebite, and little is known of this second marriage. Not feeling that he belonged with the Batwa, Benga chose to return with Verner to the United States. Verner eventually arranged for Benga to stay in a spare room at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City while he was tending to other business. Verner negotiated with the curator Henry Bumpus over the presentation of his acquisitions from Africa and potential employment. While Bumpus was put off by Verner's request of what he thought was the prohibitively high salary of $175 a month and was not impressed by the man's credentials, he was interested in Ota Benga. Initially enjoying his time at the museum, Ota Benga was given a Southern-style linen suit to wear when he entertained. He became homesick for his own culture. The disaffected Ota Benga attempted to find relief by exploiting his employers' presentation of him as a 'savage'. He tried to slip past the guards as a large crowd was leaving the premises; when asked on one occasion to seat a wealthy donor's wife, he pretended to misunderstand, instead hurling the chair across the room, just missing the woman's head. Meanwhile, Verner was struggling financially and had made little progress in his negotiations with the museum. He soon found another home for Ota Benga. At the suggestion of Bumpus, Verner took Ota Benga to the Bronx Zoo in 1906. William Hornaday, director of the zoo, first enlisted Ota Benga to help maintain the animal habitats. However, Hornaday saw that people took more notice of Ota Benga than the animals at the zoo, and he eventually created an exhibition to feature Ota Benga. At the zoo, the Mbuti man was allowed to roam the grounds, but there is no record that he was ever paid for his work. He became fond of an orangutan named Dohong, "the presiding genius of the Monkey House", who had been taught to perform tricks and imitate human behavior. The events leading to his "exhibition" alongside Dohong were gradual: Ota Benga spent some of his time in the Monkey House exhibit, and the zoo encouraged him to hang his hammock there, and to shoot his bow and arrow at a target. On the first day of the exhibit, September 8, 1906, visitors found Ota Benga in the Monkey House. Soon, a sign on the exhibit read:

                                                                            The African Pygmy, "Ota Benga."
                                                                            Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.
                                                                            Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the
                                                                            Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa,  
                                                                            by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. 
                                                                            Exhibited each afternoon during September

Hornaday considered the exhibit a valuable spectacle for visitors; he was supported by Madison Grant, Secretary of the New York Zoological Society, who lobbied to put Ota Benga on display alongside apes at the Bronx Zoo. A decade later, Grant became prominent nationally as a racial anthropologist and eugenicist. African-American clergymen immediately protested to zoo officials about the exhibit. Said James H. Gordon: "Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls." Gordon thought the exhibit was hostile to Christianity and was effectively a promotion of Darwinism: "The Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be permitted." A number of clergymen backed Gordon. In defense of the depiction of Ota Benga as a lesser human, an editorial in The New York Times suggested: "We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter. It is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Ota Benga is suffering. The pygmies are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Ota Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date." After the controversy, Ota Benga was allowed to roam the grounds of the zoo. In response to the situation, as well as verbal and physical prods from the crowds, he became more mischievous and somewhat violent. Around this time, an article in The New York Times quoted Robert Stuart MacArthur, spokesman for a delegation of black churches, as saying: "It is too bad that there is not some society like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. We send our missionaries to Africa to Christianize the people, and then we bring one here to brutalize him."  African-American newspapers around the nation published editorials strongly opposing Ota Benga's treatment. MacArthur petitioned New York City Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. for his release from the Bronx Zoo. Toward the end of 1906, Ota Benga was released into Reverend Gordon's custody. Gordon placed Ota Benga in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, a church-sponsored orphanage in Brooklyn that Gordon supervised. As the unwelcome press attention continued, in January 1910, Gordon arranged for Ota Benga's relocation to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived with the family of Gregory W. Hayes. So that he could more easily be part of local society, Gordon arranged for Ota Benga's teeth to be capped and bought him American-style clothes. He received tutoring from Lynchburg poet Anne Spencer in order to improve his English, and began to attend elementary school at the Baptist Seminary in Lynchburg. Once he felt his English had improved sufficiently, Ota Benga discontinued his formal education. He began working at a Lynchburg tobacco factory, and began to plan a return to Africa. In 1914, when World War I broke out, a return to the Congo became impossible as passenger ship traffic ended. Ota Benga became depressed as his hopes for a return to his homeland faded. On March 20, 1916, at the age of 32 or 33, he built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps on his teeth, and shot himself in the heart with a borrowed pistol. Ota Benga  was buried in an unmarked grave near his benefactor Hayes in the black section of the Old City Cemetery. His remains were later moved to White Rock Hill Cemetery.

Mutilations, gained and lost.