A Very Brief History of Extraction

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

26 January 2026

Part I

Koh…

The Man is 24 years old when he has his first tooth extraction. The dentist – a Doctor Watson, but that is elementary – uses the tools of his trade: a gum lancet loosens the incisor, canine, bicuspid or molar; the steel claw of a dental key hooks around the tooth as its steel bolster rests on the gum before the tooth is tugged and yanked back and forth to further pry it loose; a pair of pelican forceps removes the disengaged tooth from its socket; punches are then used to remove the remaining stump from the disgorged flesh (there is always a remaining stump); a lever forces out the stump if it proves to be stubborn (stumps often prove to be stubborn).

The Man pays the dentist five shillings for the ordeal.

This extraction is just the beginning, for the rest of his life, The Man will suffer through toothaches, tooth decay, and tooth loss.

The Man is a man of means, and so he invests in all the things that are supposed to preserve his teeth and make them healthy: toothbrushes, tooth powders, tooth pastes. His teeth continue to decay, his gums continue to swell, redden and cause him pain, his mouth continues to be a sore point. His suffering is so great that he introduces tinctures of myrrh to his dental hygiene routine. But even myrrh, with its anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and astringent properties, cannot help his situation; his teeth continue to ache, decay, and need extraction.

Even when he is chosen to be the Commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution in 1775, his teeth continue to ache, decay, and need extraction. The Man stains ink on paper to record many of his tooth-related woes. By 1784, a year after the war has ended, he has lost so many teeth that on the 8th of May, he authorises his cousin, Lund Washington, who is managing his plantation, Mount Vernon, to pay ‘Negroes¹ for 9 teeth², which he then gives to the dentist Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur.

Le Mayeur is staying in the area and advertising his ability to perform tooth transplants. He is willing to pay two guineas for every good tooth sold to him ‘slaves excepted’, which explains why Lund Washington pays only six pounds and two shillings for the nine teeth – a third of what they are worth.

While the historical record is not altogether clear what Le Mayeur does with the nine teeth, it is clear that The Man has, by 1784, started wearing false teeth. A dentist named John Baker has already constructed a partial denture made of ivory³ and fastened it to The Man’s remaining teeth, so it can be intelligently assumed that Le Mayeur is given the nine teeth so as to construct another set of dentures. The historical record, however, chooses not to be altogether clear about this.

Koh…

The historical record is also not clear about how the nine teeth are extracted from the mouths of the slaves. Are the tools of the dentists’ trade used: the gum lancet, the dental key with its steel claw and bolster, the pair of pelican forceps, the punches and the lever? Or, is the slaves’ dental extraction handled by blacksmiths (as had been the custom in earlier centuries) who forge and solder together multi-purpose instruments that they also use to pry loose, twist, turn and eventually yank out perfectly healthy teeth that are sold for a third of the price they are really worth?

What is clear from the historical record is that by the time The Man is unanimously elected to be the first president of the United States in 1789, he has only one surviving tooth in his entire mouth. He is fifty-seven years old and wears full dentures fashioned by a dentist called John Greenwood. Greenwood will go on to make four sets of dentures for The Man throughout his two-term presidency and up to his death in 1799.

The first set of dentures that Greenwood constructs provides a hole that can be attached to the president’s sole remaining tooth, a bicuspid on the lower left side of his mouth. The dentures have a base made out of hippopotamus⁴ ivory affixed, by brass screws, with human and animal teeth, and fastened together by gold wire springs. They are an expensive thing of beauty.

The dentures are not without their problems, however. They creak open and slam shut on their hinges like the teeth of an automaton. They scrape the flesh of the inner cheeks and cause discomfort. They chafe against the gums and inflame them. They make speaking, eating, and smiling difficult. The dentures create embarrassing situations for the first president of the United States of America, who wants to be seen as the very picture of vigour and health.

The dentures are the reason why he looks solemn in most of his portraits. They are the reason why his first inauguration is an awkward affair – he is worried about his appearance, worried that people will notice that the contraption in his mouth puffs out his cheeks and lips, worried that he does not fit their image of what a president should look like. They are the reason why his second inaugural address, on 4 March 1793, at the Senate Chamber of Congress in Philadelphia, is the shortest inauguration speech in history – containing only 135 words and lasting two minutes.

It does not help matters that, because they have a thin enamel layer, the dentures tend to stain very easily, whether they are made from hippopotamus ivory, or elephant⁵ ivory or walrus⁶ ivory. Even when the president has them cleaned with wax, cedar sticks, pine and chalk, the dentures continue to darken because the acid found in human saliva is too harsh for the ivory. The dentures become so dark that Greenwood calls them ‘very black’⁷ and gently and delicately reminds the president that port wine is not good for them.

The dentures take on such a grainy appearance that a myth claiming that the president’s teeth are wooden is created. The myth takes such a firm hold on the imagination of the young nation – with its belief in self-reliance, ingenuity and superiority – that some people even believe that the president has crafted the teeth himself. The myth takes such a firm hold on the imagination of the young nation – with its belief in self-reliance, ingenuity and superiority – that the trade in ivory that makes the construction of his dentures possible is erased from the story. The myth takes such a firm hold on the imagination of the young nation – with its belief in self-reliance, ingenuity and superiority – that the contributions and sacrifices the slaves make in order to facilitate the construction of his dentures are made invisible.

Koh…

In 1796, Greenwood extracts the president’s last tooth. He uses the tools of his trade: a gum lancet loosens the bicuspid; the steel claw of a dental key hooks around the tooth as its steel bolster rests on the gum before the tooth is tugged and yanked back and forth in order to further pry it loose; a pair of pelican forceps removes the disengaged tooth from its socket; punches are then used to remove the remaining stump from the disgorged flesh (there is always a remaining stump); a lever forces out the stump if it proves to be stubborn (stumps often prove to be stubborn).

The president gives Greenwood the tooth as thanks for his many years of service.

The tooth is everything to Greenwood: memento, charm, trophy.

He places the treasured tooth in a glass-case gold locket, which is attached to a pocket watch, which is also made of gold.

On June 30, 2022, a gold-crowned tooth is placed in a coffin and laid to rest in the Democratic Republic of Congo… but that is a part of this history that is yet to come.

Part II

A group of men meet at a conference in Berlin in 1885 and decide which parts of the African continent they want to conquer and control. The Belgian king is there. He has grand ambitions, as most kings do. He carves out the heart of Africa for himself and calls it the Congo Free State.

But this is not a story about the Belgian king. It is not about how he builds his empire by having his many subjects harvest rubber⁸ and ivory. It is not about how the exponential demand for rubber that is generated by the automobile and bicycle tyre industries turns the Belgian king’s heart into something filled with darkness and horror. It is not about how he exacts taxes, issues decrees that reduce his subjects to serfs, implements a quota system, and creates an army called Force Publique to ensure that he amasses the most wealth from his colony. It is not about how he becomes responsible for the limbs that are severed, the children that are kidnapped, the women that are raped, the families that are killed, and the communities that are decimated.

This is the story of Mbye.

On a day like many others that came before it and many others still that will come after it, Mbye Otabenga is born. While his mother, father, relatives and community know this fact, no ink is stained on paper to record it. This does not stop Mbye from growing and flourishing along the banks of the Kasai River.

Koh…

As is the custom of his people, when Mbye reaches adolescence, he has his teeth chipped and filed into sharp points. He continues to grow but stops just shy of becoming five feet tall – his people rarely grow tall, so he makes nothing of this.

Whatever Mbye is in and of himself on the banks of the Kasai River, men elsewhere have decided that he is a pygmy. Not only that, they have decided that a pygmy is the ‘missing link’ in the evolutionary chain. Not only that, they have decided that a pygmy is something that should be exhibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. And so, one of these men journeys to the heart of Africa.

The Man wears many hats – he is a reverend, former Presbyterian missionary, an enterprising entrepreneur and an intrepid adventurer. He is also a man on a very specific quest. He has been tasked, by the president of the American Anthropological Association, with bringing back with him: “one pygmy patriarch or chief; one adult woman, preferably his wife; two infants, of women in the expedition; and four additional pygmies, preferably adult but young, but including a priestess and a priest, or medicine doctors, preferably old.”⁹

After The Man meets Mbye, he triumphantly stains ink on paper in his journal, ‘The first pygmy has been secured.’¹⁰ And so begins the extraction. Soon, a boy called Malengu joins Mbye. Malengu is followed by Latuna. Latuna is followed by Shamba. Shamba is followed by Bomushubba. Bomushubba is followed by Lumbango. Lumbango is followed by Kondola. Kondola is followed by Lumo.

While The Man’s mission is clear, it is, by no means, an easy one. He needs to bring Mbye, Malengu, Latuna, Shamba, Bomushubba, Lumbango, Kondola and Lumo for exhibition in St. Louis. How can The Man justify his use of the routes of the trans-Atlantic slave trade – from the interior of Africa, to the western coastlines of the continent, through the Middle Passage and onto the eastern shores of the United States of America – almost a century after the trade has officially been abolished and forty years after it has ended in practice?

The Man, enterprising as always, has a solution. He stains ink on paper and casts himself as a saviour. In the case of Mbye, whom he records as Ota Benga, he tells different versions of the same story: he discovered Ota Benga for sale at a Swahili-Arab slave market and secured his freedom by exchanging him for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth; he rescued Ota Benga from a clutch of cannibals and made him promise never to escape; he found Ota Benga devastated after he lost his wife and children during a war against or a raid from the Force Publique and persuaded him to journey with him to a more civilised and much kinder land.

Does it really matter through which routes and by what means he manages to bring the boys with him to Missouri when what he has done is save them? True, he has not been able to capture the microcosm of a village as had been his remit, but he has been able to bring enough boys with him across the Atlantic Ocean to make their inclusion in the exposition worthwhile.

When they arrive in St Louis, it becomes clear that The Man is not the only one who has been sent on such an expedition. Other men have travelled the earth and brought back the world. Thousands of people are put on display in what the exposition has termed ‘anthropological villages’: the Acoma¹¹, the Ainu, the Apache, the Arapaho, the Bagobo¹², the Bedouin, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne, the Chippewa, the Cingalese, the Cocopa, the Comanche, the Eskimo, the Igorot, the Kickapoo, the Klickitat, the Laguna, the Mangyan, the Maricopa, the Moro, the Navajo, the Negrito, the Osage, the Pawnee, the Pomo, the Pueblo, the Sioux, the Tehuelche, the Tinguian, the Tswana, the Visaya, the Wichita, the Zulu. These people have come with their ways of knowing and their ways of being, their arts and their crafts, their beliefs and their practices – all of which are exhibited as spectacles of primitiveness that are advertised and marketed by the exposition’s Department of Exploitation.

Most of these people are captured for posterity by Jessie Tarbox Beals and her ever-present 8 x 10-inch glass plate camera, and that is how we come to know what Mbye, Malengu, Latuna, Shamba, Bomushubba, Lumbango, Kondola and Lumo look like. In one photo, Mbye, now billed as Ota Benga, poses for the camera: arms crossed over his chest, lips stretched in a smile, sharp teeth revealed. It will never be known what he feels in this moment.

The spectators who come to see Mbye, Malengu, Latuna, Shamba, Bomushubba, Lumbango, Kondola and Lumo – who are displayed with monkeys and parrots and made to perform hunting with bows and arrows – gawk at them, taunt them with jeers, reach out to poke them, singe their skin with cigars. When the spectators depart in the evening, the boys are measured, prodded and poured with plaster¹³ in order for busts to be made by men who firmly believe in something called eugenics. Talk about the missing link.

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition lasts from 30 April to 1 December 1904. Through the ever-changing seasons of the American Midwest, with inadequate food, clothing and shelter, the boys from the Congo Free State continue their performance. Once the exposition is over, The Man is faced with a dilemma: what is he to do with Mbye, Malengu, Latuna, Shamba, Bomushubba, Lumbango, Kondola and Lumo?

While the historical record is not clear about what The Man does to the other seven boys, it is very clear about what he does to Mbye. In 1906, the Bronx Zoo invites him to exhibit Ota Benga in the Monkey House alongside an orangutan named Dohong. But, having already displayed him as a pygmy, The Man has to find another angle. True, the narrative about Ota Benga being the missing link draws crowds, but, to get the intellectually curious crowds that visit expositions to also visit an animal zoo, The Man needs to create more of a sensation.

And so, The Man – whose narrative once claimed that he had saved Ota Benga from cannibals – turns Ota Benga into a cannibal. Those chipped and filed teeth that were Mbye’s rite of passage into adolescence on the banks of the Kasai River are turned into evidence of something more sinister.

Koh…

To make the claim of cannibalism compelling, bones are scattered in Ota Benga’s cage, he is given a bow and arrow and allowed to roam the Bronx Zoo grounds.

The spectators come in droves. They gawk at him, taunt him with jeers, reach out to poke him, singe his skin with cigars. Talk about cannibals.

But not all men are created equal. A New York Times headline reads:

BUSHMAN SHARES A CAGE WITH BRONX PARK APES; Some Laugh Over His Antics, but Many Are Not Pleased. KEEPER FREES HIM AT TIMES Then, with Bow and Arrow, the Pygmy from the Congo Takes to the Woods.¹⁴

Ota Benga is scheduled to be displayed every afternoon in September. The Many Who Are Not Pleased ensure that on 28 September – twenty days after he is made to perform ‘the cannibal’ – the performance stops. The Many Who Are Not Pleased include, in their number, Reverend James H. Gordon, who runs the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, which is where Mbye next finds himself. In the suburb of Wicksville, where he spends the next four years of his life, everyone has a different gradation of his own hue.

Whatever he was before, when Mbye arrives in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1910, he is a man. He attends the Virginia Theological Seminary and College, which is run by Gregory W. Hayes, another one of The Many Who Are Not Pleased. He takes courses in the liberal arts and receives an education.

Mbye makes friends easily and begins to count in their number the people he works with at a tobacco factory. They call him Otto Bingo. He has a dentist cap his teeth. He wears fine clothes. He walks sycamore-lined streets. He enjoys nature and finds sanctuary in the poet Anne Spencer’s garden – Edankraal.

With all the many things that Mbye does in his storied life, he never stains ink on paper to tell his tale, and so when he decides, on 20 March 1916 – a day like many others that came before it and many others still that will come after it – to shoot himself through the heart, we are forever left wondering why. It cannot be an accident that he chooses the twelfth anniversary of his extraction from the banks of the Kasai River as his final day.

Two days later, on 22 March, a funeral is held at Diamond Hill Baptist Church in Lynchburg. Mbye is laid to rest in the Old City Cemetery… but not for long. Local legend has it that his grave is dug up, his body removed and reburied at the White Rock Cemetery.

Several decades later, in the newly-independent Democratic Republic of Congo, another grave is dug up, and a gold-crowned tooth is discovered. We have arrived at what should be the last part of this very brief history.

Part III

On the 30th of June, 1960, the Democratic Republic of Congo gains its independence from Belgium, and Patrice Emery Lumumba becomes its first president.

Whatever Lumumba is in and of himself, men elsewhere – in the corridors of power in the White House, in Brussels and in Elisabethville – have decided that he is not the best man for the job. Not only that, they have decided that his pan-African and seemingly communist-leaning rhetoric imperils their interests, wealth and power. Not only that, they have decided that he needs to be taken care of…permanently. And so, one of these men journeys to the heart of Africa.

Less than six months later, The Man has accomplished the mission. At exactly 21.43 on 17 January 1961, Patrice Lumumba, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo are shot by a firing squad in the mineral-rich Katanga Province¹⁵ and their bodies are immediately buried. Some time later, however, the bodies of these newly-independent men are unearthed from their shallow, freshly-dug grave.

The Man commands the soldiers – some Congolese, some Belgian, some official, some mercenary – to hack the bodies into pieces.

Theirs not to make reply,

The soldiers do as they are told.

Koh…

Metal slices through flesh and hews into hard bone.

Koh…

Over and over and over again. Chopping. Breaking apart. Severing.

Koh…

Men have been reduced to bodies. Bodies become disembodied limbs. Disembodied limbs become chunks of indistinguishable flesh and bone.

Koh…

The sound reverberates into the night.

The Man watches from a distance. Perhaps he even smokes a cigarette. This detail is neither here nor there. What matters is what he does next. Just before he gives the next order, a glint, a glimmer – something with the audacity to glisten in the ink black dead of night – catches his eye.

He moves closer to the action. He is happy to find that his eyes have not deceived him. Right there, on what he believes to be Patrice Lumumba’s broken-off jaw, is something precious. The Man crouches down, rests on his haunches, reaches for the jaw and extracts the gold-crowned tooth that has been loosened by the

Koh…

He puts it in his pocket. Something of Lumumba’s to hold on to. A trophy.

The Man then commands the soldiers to burn the remains of the three men.

Theirs not to reason why,

The soldiers do as they are told.

A match is struck. A flame ignites the night. A bonfire licks its way into the darkness. The smell of burning flesh fills the air. Air becomes thick with smoke. Lungs struggle to breathe.

It takes a surprisingly short time to reduce men to ash – whatever their ideals might have been.

It is only when the flames become asthmatic that The Man gives the order to dissolve the ashy remains in acid.

Theirs but to do and die.

The soldiers do as they are told.

Too soon, all is nothing.

The Man takes the gold-crowned tooth with him back to Belgium, where he puts it in a royal blue box. Trophy becomes treasure. It remains so until The Man dies.

On 20 June 2022, the Belgian king (a relative of the man who carved out the heart of Africa for himself in 1885), in his first-ever visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo, hands the gold-crowned tooth to Lumumba’s family. The gold-crowned tooth is placed in a coffin. The coffin tours the country, allowing its citizens to, at long last, pay their final respects to their first president. The tour ends in Kinshasa. On a road named after Lumumba, the coffin is lowered into a stately grave.

The history should end there.

But it does not.

Whatever the Democratic Republic of Congo is in and of itself, men elsewhere have decided that the most mineral-endowed country in the world cannot be allowed to determine its future as it sees fit because that would imperil their interests, wealth and power. Not only that, they have decided that the country can only be of use to them when it is weak, chaotic and volatile. Not only that, they have decided to construct myths of self-reliance, ingenuity and superiority that erase and make invisible their contribution to the volatility, chaos, and exploitation that are always extant in the history of extraction.

Koh…

Between the 16th and 19th centuries an estimated 13 million people are captured on the African continent and taken against their will to the Americas and the Caribbean. Approximately 11 million survive the treacherous months-long journey known as the Middle Passage. 50 percent of these Africans come from Senegambia (modern-day Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali) and Angola (modern-day Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Gabon). In the Americas, these people are conceived as having no rights and are owned and traded as chattel. ↩
George Washington Ledger B, 1772-1793, May 8, 1784, Library of Congress – https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/health/washingtons-teeth/george-washington-and-slave-teeth.↩
The cream to pale-yellow dentine that makes up the tusks and teeth of elephants, hippopotamuses, narwhals, sperm whales, walruses, warthogs and wild boars. ↩
The hippopotamus is a semiaquatic mammal that is native to sub-Saharan Africa. ↩
The elephant is the largest land mammal and is native to sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia. ↩
The walrus is a marine mammal that is native to the Arctic Ocean and the subarctic seas of the Northern Hemisphere. ↩
John Greenwood to George Washington, 28 December 1798, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-03-02-0200 ↩
The latex produced by Landolphia owariensis, an Apocynaceae found in tropical Africa or by Hevea brasiliensis, an Euphorbiaceae found in the South American tropics.
The way the rubber is harvested in the Congo Free State is by slashing the non-cultivatable vines, smearing the sap all over the body, and then scraping off the latex when it has hardened. ↩
Pamela Newkirk, ‘The Man Who Was Caged In A Zoo’, The Guardian, 3 June 2015. ↩
Pamela Newkirk, ‘The Man Who Was Caged In A Zoo’, The Guardian, 3 June 2015. ↩
Several members of different Native American groups are exhibited in order to showcase how subjugated the indigenous people have become and to emphasise how the American West has truly been won. ↩
Approximately 1200 people are brought from the Philippines and kept on a 47-acre reservation – they are the fair’s greatest attraction. Half of them are there to perform; the other half are there to police the performers. The Philippines is the United States of America’s newly-acquired colony, a symbol of its imperial prowess. ↩
A process reminiscent of the harvesting of rubber in the Congo Free State. ↩
The New York Times, 9, September 1906, page 17 – https://www.nytimes.com/1906/09/09/archives/bushman-shares-a-cage-with-bronx-park-apes-some-laugh-over-his.html ↩
The area is home to cadmium, cassiterite, coal, cobalt, copper, germanium, manganese, palladium, platinum, silver, uranium and zinc, all of which can be put to many different uses. For example, the uranium found in the Shinkolobwe mine was used by the Manhattan Project in the construction of the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. ↩

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean writer, scholar and filmmaker. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed and award-winning novels, The Theory of Flight (2018), The History of Man (2020) and The Quality of Mercy (2022) published in southern Africa by Penguin Random House and in North America by Catalyst Press. Her fourth novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People, was published in southern Africa by Picador Africa and in North America by House of Anansi in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Ndlovu holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She has an MA in African Studies and an MFA in Film from Ohio University. Her short film, Graffiti, won several awards including the Silver Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival. She received her BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College. She is a 2018 Morland Scholar and a 2022 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize.

*Image by Social History Archive on Unsplash

A Very Brief History of Extraction – Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu