Contextualizing the Ordeal of Ota Benga

 

In and Around Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Hugh Walpole’s Portrait of a Man with Red Hair and Roger Casement’s Report to the British Parliament on Atrocities in the Free State of the Congo:

Contextualizing the Ordeal of Ota Benga and Giving him a Voice.

 

Norman Simms

 

     In Hugh Walpole’s novel or “candlelight book”, the protagonist visits a small, out-of-the-way Cornish village, where they celebrate an annual night-time festival, “when they dance around the town—something as old as the hill on which the town is built” (Portrait of a Man with Red Hair: A Romantic Macabre He also calls it a “candlelight book”, which, he tells us, is one whose “scenes are flickering, uncertain illumination which creates a shadow for everything, behind everything, and the shadow is more important than the reality” (p. 5). The dance is more alluded to than described but represents the subdued horrors and insane dreams that occur. Unlike horror and ghost tales (e.g., Thomas Hardy and Sheridan Le Fanu) of the same period at the close of the nineteenth century, where the folk dancers shift ritually and fantastically through diverse mimetic levels from ordinary villagers to ghosts, phantoms and other supernatural beings, Hugh Walpole’s dancers are only the shadows of the strange villains of his novel. The malevolent character is “a little man”, grotesque in size and shape, with devilishly red hair, and obsessed with taking revenge on the society that sees him as ugly and intrusive.

     When Herrick Harkness, the hero of Walpole’s Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, is seduced and kidnapped, mesmerized by the smooth-talking but grotesquely ugly elder Crispin and then warned that he would suffer great pain and eventually be murdered in revenge for humiliations inflicted on the older man’s hideous appearance, he steps out of the automobile that has taken him to the mysterious White Tower:

“Here we are!” he cried. “Out you get, Herrick.” And as Harkness stepped out of the car something deep within him whispered: “I am going to be hurt. Pain is coming—“

Before him swung a cavern of light. It swung because on his stepping from the car he was dizzy, dizzy with a kind of poignant thick scent in the soul’s nostrils, deep deep down as though he were at the edge of being spiritually anæsthetized.[1].[2]

Then, in order to seduce the young man further into his powers, they look at the older man’s collection of Renaissance and modern prints and drawings, particularly those of demonic beings. Crispin suddenly begins to recount to Harkness the details of his abusive childhood and, in so doing, the little old man’s emotions rise and he set forth his belief that, like Mr. Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness, he will become an all-powerful deity:

My father beat me one night terribly, beat me so that I could not move for pain. For no reason, simply because he said, he wished that I should understand life, and first to understand life one must learn to suffer pain, and that then, if one could suffer pain enough, one could be as God—perhaps greater than God.[3]

While Joseph Conrad’s descriptions, often obliquely, of the torments and tortures carried out in the Free State of the Congo in his short novel The Heart of Darkness, the official reports sent to London by special consul Roger Casement on conditions in that personal fiefdom of King Leopold II take us further into the heart of darkness:

Notes in the Case of VV, a Native of LL* in the Mantumba District, both of whose hands have been hacked or beaten off, and with reference to other     similar cases of Mutilation in that District.[4]

In another place Casement reports:

While the suppression of an open form of slave dealing has been an undoub-ted gain, much that was not reprehensible in native life has disappeared        along with it. The trade in ivory has to-day entirely passed from the hands of the natives of the Upper Congo, and neither fish nor any other outcome of     local industry now changes hands on an extensive scale or at any distance         from home.

Slavery, exploitation, rape and punishment by mutilation and torture, as well as large-scale murder ratchet up scenes of pure horror beyond even Conrad’s pen. In this context, the specifics of the terror in Africa written in careful literary terms by authors like Conrad[5] and in the official style of Parliamentary Reports by Casement, we can see more deeply into the mentality of Walpole’s insane figure of Crispin who attributes his madness to his abusive father

It was to that night in the Bloomsbury house that I owe everything, I was fifteen years of age. He stripped me naked and made me bleed. It was terribly cold, and I can in that bare room right in the very heart of life, into the heart of the heart, where true meaning is at last revealed—and the true meaning—[6]

Another connection of Walpole’s novel to the discussions that comes into focus when we look more closely at criminal and terrorist events, and with the life-histories of people whose humiliations include being exhibited in freak shows, human zoos, world’s fair displays of indigenous and other exotic and supposedly savage nations, natural history museums and wild west extravaganzas.

When Harkness in Walpole’s Portrait of a Red Haired Man awakens from his first series of torments in the White Tower, he imagines himself in the condition of someone like the maligned Pygmy named Ota Benga. He is forced to be in the same metaphorical cage as the mad older man Crispin whose humanity—reason, logic, empathy—diminishes his moral stature even further:

Suddenly he sprang up and began to walk the room. The effect on Harkness was strange—it was as though he were suddenly shut in there with an animal. So often in zoological gardens he had seen that haunting monotonous movement, that encounter with the bars of the cage and the indifferent acceptance of their inevitability, indifferent only because of endless repetition. [7]

As much as Harkness fears this entrapment and the threatened tortures to come, he recognizes in his tormentor and for the moment master the image of something that will not outlast his own sanity and courage in bearing up to pain, just as Ota Benga, in his conferences with other indigenous people at the World’s Fair in Saint Louis, came to realize that in this crazy upside down world it is the mad people who run the insane asylums and the normal; natural patients are kept prisoner. Ota Benga is hardly ever allowed to speak in his own voice, usually his words come through the filter of journalistic bigotry, as when he supposedly says “:Me no like America.”  It is through literary discourses and poetic metaphors that what he felt and thought breaks into the consciousness of the empathetic reader. But also we can take with more than a grain of salt, what his supposed friend, rescuer and guide James Verner records. Ota Benga on his return from the first trip to America and the World’s Fair in Saint Louis,  in order to explain to the other pygmies what had happened to him and several Congolese companions in America,

…they built a diorama in a wooded pen and installed within it Verner (or Fwela, as they called him[8]), who rocked in his chair, smoked, read and listened to recording on an Edison phonograph while the natives gawked. “What was Fwela doing in there?” the tribesmen wanted to know, and the answer came, “He was being Batwa…You who are watching him are being mzungu [whitemen]. Now do you understand what happened there?”[9]

 

 

 

 

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[1] Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, p. 114.

[2] Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, p. 117.

[3] Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, p. 121.

[4] Colonies and British Possessions and Colonies, Africa, . Session, 2 February 1904—15 August 1904. Corres-   pondence and Report from His Majesty’s Consul at Goma Respecting the Administration of the Independent      State of the Congo, Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty, February 1901.

[5] On Hugh Walpole’s literary appreciation of Joseph Conrad, a friend, Joseph Conrad (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1909).

[6] Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, pp. 121-122.

[7] Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, p. 125.

[8] Fwela means leader.

[9] Russ Rymer, “Darwinism, Barnumism and Racism” a review essay of Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) in The New York Times Book Review (6 October 1992) p. 3.