New York zoo apologises over 1906 African ‘exhibit’

More than a century after it drew international headlines for exhibiting a young African boy in a monkey house, the Bronx Zoo in New York has finally expressed regret. The Wildlife Conservation Society's apology for its 1906 exhibition of Ota Benga, a Congo native, comes in the wake of global protests prompted by the videotaped police killings of unarmed blacks in the US. BBC News reports that Cristian Samper, the Wildlife Conservation Society's president and CEO, said it was important to reflect on the society's own history, ‘and the persistence of racism in our institution’. He vowed that the society, which runs the Bronx Zoo, would commit itself to full transparency about the episode which inspired breathless headlines across Europe and the US when Benga was exhibited. Outrage from Christian ministers ended his incarceration and he was moved to New York's Howard Coloured Orphan Asylum run by African American Reverend James Gordon. He took his own life a decade later.