“Town of God”: Ota Benga, the Batetela Boys, and the Promise of Black America

Abstract

This article tells a story of black identity, race, and colonialism in the turn of the twentieth-century Atlantic world by imagining how African men encountered black Americans both in Africa and in the United States. Ota Benga’s life is most often told in the context of then prevalent US social Darwinism; he is best known as a man brought from King Leopold’s Congo to be put on display at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, only to end up later caged in the Bronx Zoo. This article considers Benga alongside fellow continental Africans who also suffered under Europe’s regimes and traveled the landscape of American Jim Crow. Situating Benga’s story amid new scholarship on Africa and black America, this article highlights how much a diversity of Africans began to articulate a race-based identity as they encountered the work of black American missionaries on both sides of the Atlantic.