No Brainers: When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain

 
"The first is the account of Ota Benga, an African pygmy from the Congo, who, in 1904, was brought to the United States by an American missionary. The intent was to place him on display at the St. Louis World’s Fair. That was bad enough but something worse happened afterwards when Benga was placed in the Bronx Zoo, in the monkey house. Decent people did this to him. But Benga’s fate was not as awful as the “Hottentot Venus,” as she was called, brought to England from Cape Town by a British doctor. Her attraction? “Protruding buttocks and [an] oversized vulva.” It wasn’t too long before white men realized that they needed to have sex with her, resulting in her death from syphilis, in 1915. Worse, her genitals and her brain were then pickled and also put on display—“she remained in the Musée de l’Homme until 1974.” This display of Western racism didn’t end until 2002, “after the intervention of Nelson Mandela, [when] her remains were finally returned to her native South Africa and given a decent burial.”"

read the article by Charles Larson >> 


No Brainers: When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain