| abstract
| - Ota Benga is exorcist and ex-priest who is an acquaintance ofProfessor Trevor Bruttenholm and his uncle.
- Ota Benga was a pygmy man who was dehumanized by Darwinian racism and was placed on display alongside an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. This incident is considered to reveal the racism and the horrors of the theory of evolution propagated by Charles Darwin. Ota Benga lived in the Kasai region in Congo, but lost his family in a mishap. A businessman named Samuel Phillips Verner, who was influenced by the theories of Charles Darwin, went to Africa in 1904 to bring pygmies for exhibition where he found Ota. In 1904, Ota along with several other pygmies were shipped across the Atlantic and were displayed by evolutionist scientists at a World's Fair in Saint Louis, Missouri. Evolutionist scientists described him as "the closest transitional link to man". The fair was successful for its organizers and the pygmies were shipped back to Africa where Verner collected many artifacts with the help of Ota. He returned to the United States in the summer of 1906 along with Ota Benga. Ota was handed over to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and was later transported to the Bronx Zoo. The evolutionist director of the zoo Dr William Temple Hornaday displayed Ota in a cage at the Monkey House with an orangutan named Dohung under the denomination of "ancient ancestors of man". A sign was placed in the front of the cage which stated Ota's name, height, weight etc. as in the case of animals in a zoo. Black clergies protested against this display and ultimately the exhibition was closed. On September 27, 1906, Ota was transferred to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, a church-sponsored orphanage. Clergyman James H. Gordon condemned this exhibition, which was aimed for promoting Darwinism, and called the dehumanization of Ota Benga hostile to Christianity. On March 20, 1916, Ota committed suicide by shooting himself with a stolen revolver.
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