Ota Benga
“Ota Benga” is a documentary that revolves around the life of a man known as Ota Benga at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It follows his life with how he was bought from African slave traders by Samuel Phillips Verner, an anthropologist. This documentary shows how ugly and inhumane mankind can be to another race as it highlights true events that happened in American history at the turn of the century. I had no idea of such events until I watched this documentary and it’s extremely informative about Ota Benga’s life.
Ota Benga was purchased from the congo. Verner was an anthropologist who put him on display twice to support his theory on Darwinism regarding race. Once at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which was an anthropologist exhibit. The group Ota was in got a lot of attention, especially him, due to his physical characteristics of having filed teeth and being short. He was ridiculed and the exhibit made lots of money off of him. Eventually Ota realized their group wasn’t for show and tell, it was for the money and they treated his group like prisoners. A couple years later he was put in display in a zoo. That’s right. A zoo. People were fascinated (once again) by his characteristics. The zoo convinced him (took advantage) to essentially live in the exhibit with monkeys. There’s more details to the story and I was appalled upon learning all of this. For those reasons, I think people should check this out to find out detail for detail what exactly happened with the events. They gradually get worse and it’s baffling.
The amount of information this documentary offers is plenty. The filmmakers have done their research and convey a really compelling and bizarre moment of human behavior. What’s even more interesting is how this relates to society today. Not to the degree of putting people of different races in cages for display, but in the sense of how mentally there’s an effect that has caused racial tensions and the behavior continues in that sense. How they tied this documentary to today surprised me and I wasn’t expecting it to go to that level.
Another thing this documentary never stopped doing was being interesting. The information kept flowing through and at times it felt like a documentary an anthropology class would show to highlight certain behaviors in mankind just in general. Without this documentary, I don’t think I would have been aware of these events in our history. I was curious about some of the information and did some more research on the topic, which led me to an endless rabbit hole of clicking on links to articles and google images.
I would recommend this if you’re looking for something fresh and interesting about how our culture acts towards being “different”. It’s applicable to events in present times and left me scratching my head over why people would act in such a despicable way towards another human being. I enjoyed the movie and can now say I officially learned something new today, albeit a little more depressing and disturbing than hopeful.
