Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga
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About this ebook
2016 NAACP Image Award Winner
An award-winning journalist reveals a little-known and shameful episode in American history, when an African man was used as a human zoo exhibit—a shocking story of racial prejudice, science, and tragedy in the early years of the twentieth century in the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Devil in the White City, and Medical Apartheid.
In 1904, Ota Benga, a young Congolese “pygmy”—a person of petite stature—arrived from central Africa and was featured in an anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the slight 103-pound, 4-foot 11-inch tall man with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines from across the nation and Europe.
Spectacle explores the circumstances of Ota Benga’s captivity, the international controversy it inspired, and his efforts to adjust to American life. It also reveals why, decades later, the man most responsible for his exploitation would be hailed as his friend and savior, while those who truly fought for Ota have been banished to the shadows of history. Using primary historical documents, Pamela Newkirk traces Ota’s tragic life, from Africa to St. Louis to New York, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived out the remainder of his short life.
Illuminating this unimaginable event, Spectacle charts the evolution of science and race relations in New York City during the early years of the twentieth century, exploring this racially fraught era for Africa-Americans and the rising tide of political disenfranchisement and social scorn they endured, forty years after the end of the Civil War. Shocking and compelling Spectacle is a masterful work of social history that raises difficult questions about racial prejudice and discrimination that continue to haunt us today.
Pamela Newkirk
Pamela Newkirk is an award-winning journalist and a professor of journalism at New York University. She is the author of Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, which won the National Press Club Award for media criticism, and the editor of Letters from Black America. She lives in New York City.
Read more from Pamela Newkirk
Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Reviews for Spectacle
18 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very interesting story I knew nothing about. Shocking how people can take someone they know nothing about and sell them to be displayed in a zoo. It just shocks me how some people treat others.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heavy read. But worth it. Will recommend for anyone interested in US history.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga by Pamela Newkirk is a horrible book to read but it is full of information about the subject. This has spoilers...Ota Benja was taken by slavers after they killed his wife and two kids. Him and a handful of others from his village were taken for the 1904 St Louis Fair and later he was put in a cage with a chimp in NY, in a zoo in the Bronx. Here he was daily humiliated and taunted. A few black preachers started to put pressure on the owner and it took time but slowly the press started to help his plight. This book is great in going into the politics of the time, the social standing, who was in whose pocket, and the racial unrest at the time. If you are not a big history buff, this may not interest you but it did me. Big names, who was backing who, a sad situation that they let this man suffer for friendship and money. He is finally released and put in an orphanage even though he is an adult. He is taught English. He gets all he wants and asks for a job. He works at a tobacco factory for a while but he is depressed and can't go home due to WWI. He can't get away from what has been done to him. He doesn't look like anyone, he is only 4'11", 103 lbs, misses his family, his life has been nothing but abuse...and he kills himself. If that isn't enough, they make molds of his body and face and display it and they don't even give it his name. It is displayed as Pygmy. This is such a sad period in our history...I just wanted to cry for him all the way through the story. I ached and hurt for the injustice. The president of the US knew this too but his friends were friends of the NY zoo. So very sad.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I wanted to love "Spectacle" but it just fell a little flat. I hadn't heard of Ota Benga in any context and appreciated all the information Newkirk offered and it's clear she did an incredible amount of research for this book. I enjoyed the structure of the story: Newkirk moves back and forth in time and space, offering a broad view and then zeroing in on different aspects of Ota Benga's story and the context around him. Where I lost interest was in some of these contextual pieces Newkirk included. There were times I just wasn't interested in the tangent I was reading. It was almost TOO much information and I definitely felt overloaded. Where Newkirk really excelled was displaying the nuanced complexity of Ota Benga's story and the way narratives are shaped, distorted, and laced with agendas.