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Saartjie's return restores our
common dignity
A student essay
that appears on the Internet says: "Her story was forgotten for centuries,
buried under mounds of dusty racist documents by the Afrikaner government
of South Africa, sloshing in a jar of formaldehyde in a museum in Paris.
But slowly she has been rediscovered, by women in South Africa, in England,
in the United States.
"They have written plays and poems, made films
and speeches telling her story in the hopes of reclaiming her torturous
past. Her name was Saartje Bartmaan, or at least that's what her captors
called her. She had swelling buttocks and a vagina whose inner lips extended
maybe three, maybe four inches.
"In the early nineteenth century, when the study
of Khoi women became fashionable in European society, she was convinced
to leave her home to become a dancer, with a contract that she may or
may not have seen. A man from England promised her that she could make
money to bring home to her tribe. What followed was five years of exhibition
in museums and at fashionable parties, her spectacular buttocks and breasts
bare, French and British men and women clustering around her, mocking
her at the same time that her body made them uncomfortable with their
own desire. Her days were punctuated by rape and scientific examinations.
"She died, probably of syphilis, and her body was
given to Georges Cuvier, a French scientist who made a plaster model of
her brain and preserved her buttocks and vagina to be displayed at the
Musee de l'Homme. They remained on display until ten years ago."
Another article says: "The effects of climate on
the physiology of black women were used to support theories about the
sexual promiscuity and fertility of black races, exemplified in the description
by J. J Virey, of the 'degree of lascivity unknown in our climate' among
black women 'for their sexual organs are much more developed than those
of whites.'
"Similarly, David Spurr quotes Richard Burton who
'merely affirms the conventional wisdom of his age in claiming that in
damp-hot climates ...the sexual requirements of the passive (female) exceed
those of the active (male) sex; and the result is a dissolute social state,
contrasting with mountain countries, dry-cold and damp-cold, where the
conditions are equally balanced or reversed'."
Nancy Stepan explains the Victorian mindset that created
the gory exhibits in this Paris museum, which included the remains of
Saartjie Baartman: "Of all the boundaries between peoples, the sexual
one was the most problematic to the Victorian mind. In the area of racial
thought, there had been since the earliest of times a prurient interest
in the strange sexual customs of alien peoples, especially the African.
Did African women, for instance, mate with the great apes who came out
of Africa? Were the sexual organs of Africans larger than those of whites?
Did a tropical climate encourage an unbridled sexuality that resulted
in promiscuity? It was not surprising that anthropological accounts of
strange peoples provided a surrogate pornography for Europeans."
This Letter and the preceding quotations are occasioned
by the return of Saartjie Baartman from France to her homeland, South
Africa.
The scientist who dismembered Saartjie's body when she
died, Georges Cuvier, the founder of comparative anatomy, said when commenting
on Africans: "These races with depressed and compressed skulls are
condemned to a never-ending inferiority.(Saartjie's) moves had something
reminding (one) of the monkey and her external genitalia reminded (one
of) those of the orang-outang."
Saartjie Baartman, a daughter of the Khoi people, was
born in the Eastern Cape in 1789. Later she served as a slave or servant
in the employ of a white colonist. It was while she was thus employed,
that a British Naval Surgeon, William Dunlop, had her transported by ship
to London in 1810.
Dunlop, intent to use her to make money for himself,
told her she could make a fortune by displaying her naked body to curious
Europeans. She was paraded at circuses, museums, bars and universities.
At times, she was displayed in a cage and forced to behave like "a
wild beast". Especially on display were her prominent posterior and
her genitals.
In 1814 and 1815, she was exhibited in Paris by one
Henry Taylor and then by someone called Reaux. By the time she died on
January 1, 1816, she was owned by an animal trainer. During this period,
she was also forced into prostitution and, in despair, resorted to heavy
consumption of alcohol.
After her death, her body was handed to the scientist,
Georges Cuvier. He cast her in plaster and then dissected her body, removing
the brain, the vulva and the anus, which were placed in glass jars in
a preserving fluid. He then removed all flesh from the skeleton. These
remains were kept in the exhibition rooms of the French Museums, open
for public viewing, until 1974 and 1976.
When we gained our freedom in 1994, we requested the
French government to assist in returning the remains of Saartjie Baartman
to the land of her birth. Ultimately, this required that the French Parliament
should pass special legislation authorising the release of these remains
to our country.
The debate of this law in the French National Assembly
took place under the theme "Repatriation of the Hottentot Venus".
This is the circus name that Saartjie Baartman had been given by her European
owners.
On the day the necessary legislation was adopted, on
21 February 2002, Research Minister Roger-Gerard Schwatzenberg, said:
"Saartjie Baartman was firstly a victim of the exploitation suffered
by South African ethnic groups during colonisation. Secondly, Saartjie
Baartman was the victim of colonialism and sexism because her dignity
as a woman and her rights were denied. Thirdly, she was also the victim
of racism which was the characteristic of anthropology at the time, the
latter being very much turned to ethnocentrism.
"I see in this bill a double symbol. Firstly, it
gives us the opportunity to turn the page of decades marked by colonialism,
racism and sexism. It will mark the end of a painful period, when non
European populations were not viewed as equal to the European ones. Secondly,
it marks our will to acknowledge equality among people. This is an important
moment of unity around an essential principle - the dignity of any human
being, whatever his/her religion, origins and condition."
Saartjie Baartman was called Saartjie Baartman by those
who colonised her, her people and her country. By depriving her of her
Khoi name, they took away her identity. By turning her into a non-person,
they defined her as sub-human. As such a subhuman, she became an object
intended to be fully owned, used at will and freely disposed of by those
who had robbed her of her identity. Her few years in Europe gave the fullest
expression to this reality that she was nothing more than an object to
satisfy the needs of those who were her owners.
The inhumane and barbaric fate she met exemplified the
destiny of the colonised and oppressed in our country, including the Khoi
and the San. Denied their identity, defined as subhuman, dispossessed
of their land, their country and their freedom, millions became chattels
in the ownership of others who convinced themselves that they were true
masters of all they surveyed.
Even scientific inquiry was perverted to serve the cause
of racism and the domination of human beings by other human beings. Thus
did Saartjie Baartman become a mere biological specimen to be dissected
and dismembered to arrive at predetermined conclusions that justified
her categorisation as a mere biological specimen.
And thus did entire peoples fall victim to racist beliefs,
underpinned by false intellectual propositions and a corrupted theology,
which justified the perpetration of crimes against humanity on the basis
that these peoples, including our own, were proper objects of a civilising
mission.
The struggle for the return of the remains of Saartjie
Baartman to her motherland was a struggle to uproot the legacy of many
centuries of unbridled humiliation. It was a struggle to restore to our
people and the peoples of Africa their right to be human and to be treated
by all as human beings. Her return stands out as a defining moment in
the continuing process of our emancipation.
The Khoi people of our country and the descendants of
the Khoi have every right solemnly to celebrate the return of one who
was their daughter. They have every right to demand that this historic
act of redress should be given its true meaning by the restoration to
the Khoi and the San their place of pride as Africans equal to all other
Africans.
Those who sought to dehumanise Saartjie Baartman also
have the responsibility to join hands with the millions whose fate she
exemplified, to help rebuild South Africa and Africa, in a common effort
to give meaning to the vision that all of us, regardless of race or colour,
were created in the image of God.
As our ambassador to France, Thuthukile Skweyiya, together
with Deputy Minister Bridgitte Mabandla and her delegation from South
Africa, received the remains of Saartjie Baartman at our Embassy in Paris,
she said: "Saartjie Baartman is beginning her final journey home,
to a free, democratic, non-sexist and non-racist South Africa. She is
a symbol of our national need to confront our past and restore dignity
to all our people."
Speaking on behalf of the government and people of France,
Minister Schwatzenberg said: "After suffering so much offence and
humiliation, Saartjie Baartman will have her dignity restored. She will
find justice and peace."
The remains of Saartjie Baartman returned home a few
days after our Freedom Day, 192 years after she left her motherland. Welcome
home, our Saartjie!
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