The summer of 2020 was originally the most lively time for the zoo, but a zoo in New York published an apology letter, which made the world's attention focus on the object of the apology.
The protagonist of the apology was Ota Benga, a black African who had died 114 years earlier.
Because of his encounter, the pygmies of a dwarf tribe in Africa, which few people know about, reappeared in front of the public.
As for the reason for the apology, it seems strange that the zoo once used to show the diversity of species as a gimmick, bringing Ota Benga back to New York to be locked up with orangutans.
They exhibited the black man as a bizarre animal and charged tickets. It took more than 100 years for the zoo to apologize to Horta Benga, from the Pygmy tribe of the Congo.
So, what the hell is going on? How was this ethnic group discovered?
Horta Benga was used as an exhibit
When it comes to this matter, it has to go back to the last century. In 1904, the standard of living in the United States was not so high, and coupled with the economic crisis, they were all trying to find a way out for their lives.
A famous explorer made a pact with the St. Louis World's Fair at the time, promising to bring the Pygmies back as part of the exhibition, so he embarked on his way to Africa.
The explorer bought Ota Benga, a dwarf, with a few bags of salt and a piece of cloth. Finally, a total of eight young African men were transported to New Orleans as a gimmick for their exhibition to attract tourists.
Benja, who was exhibited at the museum, didn't understand what it was doing.
Because they have different languages, their living habits are also different. And his wife and two children were murdered in an attack in the early 20th century.
He was out hunting, so he escaped. But he did not expect that he had been reborn, but after that, he experienced the most shameful moment of his life.
Benja didn't know when they were standing in the hall in strange costumes. The big posters above their heads read that they were the only true African cannibals in existence in the United States.
For five cents, visitors can see these so-called cannibals showing their teeth, but their teeth are artificially sharpened.
But this was a custom of their ethnic group, and they were willing to grind their teeth into various colors with stones, so explorers felt that their teeth could be used for hype.
In order to let more people know about the "cannibals", he even invited a marketing master to increase their exposure. Benja and the other gnomes were then asked to perform the hunt live.
Explorers provide them with only some basic hunting tools, and they show their ambitions under the gaze of everyone.
For example, how to hunt a white rabbit or other small animals. Such primitive wild actions have stimulated the curiosity of tourists, and explorers have gained fame and fortune.
Ancient Pygmies
So why did they choose pygmies like Benga to make exhibits and painstakingly transport them to the United States for exhibitions?
This has to be mentioned in the World Museum in 1904, when the United States commemorated the louisiana land purchase.
The main purpose of that exhibition was to highlight their idea of the supremacy of white status. In order to highlight their dignity, it is necessary to find people they consider to be the lowest level to compare.
Undoubtedly, the Pygmies of Africa are the best examples, and they consider this to be the lowest rank in human evolution, simply because they are short in stature in addition to their black identity.
As one of the oldest primitive species in Africa, the Pygmies have lived in dense jungles for generations and never even came out before the 20th century.
Until now, they have always nurtured their lives in the forest, they have made the forest a writer, and they regard the forest as their supreme paradise, and some people call the pygmies the children of the forest.
Although Pygmies live in the jungle, they also express their love for nature, respect and love for nature in their own unique way.
Originally a Greek word, the Pygmies initially referred to a race less than one and a half meters tall, but later became a specific term for the Pygmies.
Their ethnic group is indeed very peculiar, and the adult pygmies are only one meter two to one meter four, and there are very few adults who are more than one meter five.
Their facial features are very obvious, such as a particularly large head, short legs, a nose like a garlic nose, and a skin color like a normal black person, but their navel eyes always have a bulge, like an egg-sized meat lump.
Coupled with the fact that their hairstyles were not drastically curly, the Pygmies were recognized as soon as they appeared in the African savannah.
In terms of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, although he is much behind modern people, he is also full of wisdom.
In order to resist various dangers and emergencies in the wild, they will choose to live in groups.
An ethnic group will probably last around 200 to 300 people, and they have always been very committed to monogamy.
In terms of clothing, pygmies men hardly wear clothes, and only women will take some bark, or animal skins, to do some shelter.
Until their presence is discovered later, with the intervention of foreign civilizations, they will also use cloth to cover important parts of their bodies.
Eating is the most important aspect of their survival.
In the wild, although they are isolated from the world, they have long been used to cook on fire. Don't look at their backwardness, their civilization is also a unique and advanced existence.
They don't grow food, but nature's gifts make it enough for them to live simply by the fruits they pick from the forest and the prey they hunt.
It is precisely because of this predation technique that they have developed a body of skills, excellent physical fitness, and are very flexible.
They would use a variety of existing conditions to prepare them for predation, such as weaving large nets out of the rattan of plants or shooting prey with sharpened branches.
In addition to this, when they encounter river water, they will also go into the water to fish.
Life in the jungle for generations has taught them to round up large prey by smearing paralyzing juice on arrows, increasing their round-up efficiency.
While we think they are primitive backwards, the Pygmies are also using their own practical actions to prove their methods and techniques of exploring life.
We don't have to worry at all about whether they will be doing well without the intervention of modern civilization.
Because of the long-term need to hunt to maintain their survival, this allows the Pygmies to have a sense of smell, sight and hearing that we ordinary people do not have.
According to one report, the pygmies' senses are so developed that if a bee flies ten meters away from the pygmies, they can even tell exactly what kind of bee the bee is, male or female, through hearing and vision.
Such an ability is almost impossible for modern man to attain.
Where they live, they are smarter and wiser.
Pygmies will continue to migrate with the seasons and environmental factors, so their houses are not completely fixed in one place, but every time they go to a place, they build new houses.
They would build the houses of the entire ethnic group in the same area. The existing materials around them became the tools for them to weave their houses, whether it was banana leaves or palm branches, they could become tools for them to build houses.
Because of their height, their huts are not particularly tall, presumably an oval hemisphere 1.5 meters high.
Each family will build a hut, and finally they will form a circle, and the leader of the group will be in the middle.
The furnishings in the house are also very simple, without beds, they will sleep on thatch or animal skins. Usually there will be a stone in the middle of the house to make a fire.
In addition, they are some of the tools for their livelihood, such as bows and arrows, ivory.
The last one is to travel, in fact, the Pygmies do not go very far, so most of them still rely on walking, or tame some more docile animals as their mounts.
So they also have their own way of taming animals.
However, in our opinion, such a smart and self-reliant primitive group has many problems that plague them in the future.
It may be because of the body and development, resulting in their development speed is particularly fast, seven or eight years old to reach maturity, the average pygmy people have stopped the development of height around the age of nine.
So by the time they're nine or ten, they may have started working for the next generation.
However, living in the primitive jungle, their sanitation and nutrition are not improved in time, so although their population has strong reproductive ability, the survival rate is not high, and only less than 30% of babies can grow up healthy.
Their excessive precocious puberty also leads to a short lifespan, usually a pygmy is about 35 years.
Natural selection, survival of the fittest
Therefore, after they were exposed, many people were also wondering what the reason for their behavior was.
First of all, geographically speaking, they are located near the equator, and after tens of thousands of years, hundreds of millions of years of evolution, they have developed into the natural environment as they are today.
Their small bodies allow them to dissipate heat well, allowing them to easily run around the dense forest and catch more prey.
Tropical rainforest forests are relatively dense and block a lot of ultraviolet rays, but ultraviolet rays are necessary for human growth. Without ultraviolet rays, the absorption and conversion of calcium in the human body will be very small.
This may cause their height to no longer develop.
This was followed by the current genetic technology. Many people have discovered important reasons for their short stature.
It turned out that their third chromosome had mutated, which caused them to be unable to secrete growth hormone normally.
They stop secreting at the age of eight or nine, which leads to their short stature.
In addition, their genetic sequence has an extra period of antibodies that produce resistance to some tropical viruses than other black Africans, which may also be the reason for their physical strength.
As for the cause of genetic variation, it is most likely because of the local environment. The survival of the fittest is on full display here.
In addition to this part of the objective reasons, some subjective reasons also make life very difficult for such people.
Pygmies not only have to resist the weather, the environment, food and other restrictive factors, some gossip is also the most powerful weapon.
Some blacks were influenced by rumors that they could be physically fit by eating the sexual organs of the Pygmies. As a result, in the early 20th century, many Pygmies were tortured and killed by blacks.
In addition, there are many people who treat them as outliers, and even smuggle them around the world to be exhibited as exhibits. So today's Pygmies are on the brink of extinction.
Horta Benga is just a mirror of thought
Ota Benga, who originally had a stable and stable life, was sent to the United States, and after the profiteers made a lot of money, he was sent to various places for exhibition.
Most egregiously, he was sent to a zoo in New York. He was exhibited inside the cage like an animal, and even next to him there was a sign with details about him, which said his name, height, weight and age.
In the United States at the time, visiting Ben added became something every family had to do on the weekend.
You can see a human who is a little older than a monkey at the zoo, dressed in modern costumes, jumping around in a cage barefoot.
Although he looks like a human, he lives with animals. He would perform inside cages, weave hammocks, perform bows and arrows and hunt.
He was like a true primate, and some even called him a descendant of cannibals. Because of Benga's peculiarity, the zoo also asks Benga to live with orangutans, hug, fight and wrestle.
In the end, Benja even had to live in the jungle created for him by humans, living in cages with parrots and monkeys. In order to increase Benja's gimmick of being a cannibal, a lot of white bones were deliberately placed around the cage.
Everyone regarded Benja as a strange animal, and some even threw stones at him and threw food at him.
It was then that Benja realized what a desperate situation he had fallen into. He couldn't understand as he watched others throw stones at him and laugh loudly.
And once Benja resisted, he would be published in the newspapers, and some even called him such a disobedient barbarian.
Fortunately, as Benja became more and more famous, some well-meaning people would also speak up for him, so under the pressure of public opinion, Benja was also released and finally sent to an orphanage.
Benja, who had returned to his normal life, even learned English and had to work in a factory, thinking that his life had begun a new journey.
But society would not accept such a human being, and it was a black man whom they considered to be the lowest level. In this way, after six years, Benja finally became depressed and shot himself.
He ended his short life with his own suicide, but Benja's suicide did not change the discrimination of Americans against black people.
So-called racism does not weaken because of laws and regulations, or even some things that seem to us to be unconscionable, but continues to develop.
The speed and efficiency of an apology letter, forced to be sent more than 100 years after Benja's death, proves what they really thought.
The world should be inclusive and colorful, and everyone should not look down on any kind of person because of their skin color and lifestyle.