Those who have read The Man Who Laughs remember what wonderful customs reigned in the Middle Ages. Along with the burning of heretics, one of the favorite pastimes of respectable Christians was ridicule of all sorts of crippled people, freaks, and similar unfortunate audiences, on which one could make good money.
It would seem that the Age of Enlightenment put an end to this, but some of its relics survived until the 20th century. And now we are not talking about Adolf, but about countries that, in the minds of the majority, are not associated with fascism, and are even considered an example of democracy - the USA and Great Britain.
To tell the truth, in racism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, hardly all developed peoples, at least European ones, got dirty. But Britain and the United States have been perhaps the best at this.
In fact, the birthplace of the same German Nazism is the "development" of the British racists of the previous centuries. Much of this migrated to the United States, and despite the reforms of Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery, racism as the norm could survive until the middle of the twentieth century. But at times it came to cases that went far beyond racial segregation. About one of them and speech.
When it became clear that there would be no alternative to the Darwinian theory of evolution in the foreseeable future, everyone enthusiastically rushed to apply it to everything in a row, including man, looking for more developed and less developed forms. Any person who could simply not receive the proper education was almost immediately explained by the insufficiently evolved form of sapiens.
There were also those who believed that intermediate man-apes survived to this day and should be looked for (not in England, of course). And so one missionary (Samuel Phillips Werner) got himself a pygmy from the Mbuti tribe, whose name was Ota Benga. According to some sources, he ransomed him from slavery, according to others, he himself into slavery and captured. One way or another, but in 1904, a 23-year-old pygmy became the property of a missionary looking for demi-humans.
Promotional video:
Before that, Ota Benga had a family, children, but during his absence on a hunt, Belgian soldiers killed his entire tribe, including his wife and children - at that time it was not considered a crime.
The missionary was delighted with his acquisition, since he refused to consider the pygmies people, believing that they had not yet become people. In addition, the growth of Ota Benga was only 140 cm, which also elevated Western people in their own eyes.
After that, the missionary sent the pygmy to the World's Fair in Missouri, as an exhibit of the transitional form to modern man. Then he was sent to live at the New York Zoo as an exhibit too. Gorillas and chimpanzees languished in some of the cages, while Ota Benga sat in another.
White people were naturally delighted. Articles were published about Ota Benga, all the miserable meaning of which boiled down to one thing - to pour into the readers another dose of a sense of their own racial superiority. Not without outright lies: since the pygmy had sharpened teeth, he was exposed to the public as a cannibal.
At first, the cheerful and naive pygmy was allowed to walk around the zoo in his free time from sitting in a cage, take care of animals and do some work, but then he was locked in a cage, dressed in skins and given a bow with arrows to give him “wild, cruel and inhumane look."
The most advanced representatives of the African American community came to the aid of the pygmy, who eventually managed to get the person out of the zoo. Ota Benga was placed in an orphanage and taken into custody.
Pygmy very quickly proved that he was able to master new knowledge, and quickly learned to wear Western clothes and speak English. He soon left the orphanage and got a job. Everything would be fine, but he did not want to become part of the best society in the world, dreaming of returning to his native forests. And he was saving money for a ticket to Africa.
But then the First World War began and the cost of returning increased so much that Ota Benga, who had learned not only to read, but also to count, realized that he would not earn a ticket even in his entire life.
And here the depression began, becoming deeper and deeper. Attachment to his home, thoughts of a free life in a world where he would not be subhuman, and the realization of the unattainability of all this ended in 1916, when Ota Benga committed suicide.
The reader will probably draw conclusions from this eloquent story himself.
