Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga

Name: Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga
Author: Pamela Newkirk
ISBN: 9780062201003

by Pamela Newkirk

2016 NAACP Image Award Winner Winner of the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction 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.…

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NPR Books We Love

"There’s just no other way to say it: Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga by Pamela Newkirk is required reading. In 1906, Ota Benga, a young man from the Congo, was put on display in a cage at the Bronx Zoo — with an orangutan. Based on years of research, Newkirk masterfully explores the circumstances that culminated in Benga’s horrifying ordeal and then goes a step further to unpack the layers of racism, wealth and imperialism that made this racist spectacle possible."

NPR Books We Love — 2015 · apps.npr.org

John Waters

"'Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga,' by Pamela Newkirk. The true story of a Congolese man who is held captive and exhibited next to an orangutan in the Bronx Zoo in the early 1900s."

By the Book: John Waters · nytimes.com