Bring back the Hottentot Venus
Date : 1995-06-15
A Quena woman who was shown in Europe as a circus freak last century
is to be the subject of a documentary reviving the memory of South Africa's
aboriginal people, writes Eddie Koch
IN 1815 George Cuvier, surgeon general to Napoleon Bonaparte, was given
the body of a Quena, or Hottentot, woman called Saartjie Baartman, who
had died after living as a circus freak in England and France. The doctor
made a plaster cast of the woman's corpse before he cut out her brains
and genitals and preserved them in laboratory bottles.
Ten years ago these commodities were still on display at the Musee de
l'Homme in Paris -- macabre icons of those "little people" who
suffered the worst forms of ethnocide anywhere in the colonial period
and who are today largely forgotten, even though their descendants fill
the ranks of South Africa's rainbow nation.
Now a local researcher is spearheading a movement to return Baartman's
remains so that the woman can be given the dignity that she was denied
in her lifetime. The operation, dubbed "Bring Back the Hottentot
Venus", is also designed to revive a popular memory of the aboriginal
people who played a major role in shaping South Africa's past and present.
Saartjie Baartman's early life is unknown except that she came from a
clan of Quena people, better known in South Africa by the derogatory term
"Hottentot", in the Eastern Cape. Born in the late 18th century,
probably in the 1780s, Baartman migrated to the Cape Flats, where the
records show she was living in a small shack in 1810.
In that year she met a ship's doctor, William Dunlop, who persuaded her
to travel to England with promises that she would make a fortune by exhibiting
her body to Europeans. It appears that two settlers called Hendrik and
Johan Cezar, probably themselves descendants of a mixed-race marriage
between a Quena woman and a Dutchman, were instrumental in setting up
the deal.
Baartman sailed with Dunlop to England, where she was put on display
in a building in Piccadilly, exciting crowds of working-class Londoners
who viewed her with a mixture of morbid curiosity and malice. Like all
Quena woman, she had a protruding backside and large genital organs --
billed by the show's promoters as resembling the skin that hangs from
a turkey's throat.
Contemporary descriptions of her shows at 225 Piccadilly, Bartholomew
Fair and Haymarket in London say Baartman was made to parade naked along
a "stage two feet high, along which she was led by her keeper and
exhibited like a wild beast, being obliged to walk, stand or sit as he
ordered".
The exhibitions took place at a time when the anti- slavery debate was
raging in England and Baartman's plight attracted the attention of a young
Jamaican, Robert Wedderburn, who founded the African Association to campaign
against racism in England. Under pressure from this group, the attorney
general asked the government to put an end to the circus, saying Baartman
was not a free participant.
A London court, however, found that Baartman had entered into a contract
with Dunlop, although historian Percival Kirby, who has discovered records
of the woman's life in exile, believes she never saw the document.
In 1814, after spending four years being paraded around the streets of
London, Baartman was taken to Paris and, according to the archival accounts,
was handed to a "showman of wild animals" in a travelling circus.
Her body was analysed by scientists, including Cuvier, while she was alive
and a number of pseudo-scientific articles were written about her, testimony
at the time to the superiority of the European races.
Jeremy Nathan, a South African film producer who is making a feature
film on the life of Baartman, says the Quena women excited the attention
of the Parisian intelligensia at the time. Cuvier, who was at the centre
of an eminent school of social anthropologists, met her -- on display
as a naked and exotic savage dressed only in feathers -- at a high-society
ball organised by the Countess Du Barrie.
"This was the time of pre-Darwinist social anthropology and Cuvier
believed she was the missing link, the highest form of animal life and
the lowest form of human life," says Nathan.
Her anatomy even inspired a comic opera in France. Called The Hottentot
Venus or Hatred to French Women, the drama encapsulated the complex of
racial prejudice and sexual fascination that occupied European perceptions
of aboriginal people at the time. It appears Baartman worked as a prostitute
in Paris and drank heavily to cope with the humiliation she was subjected
to.
She died in 1815 of an "inflammatory and eruptive sickness",
possibly syphilis. Cuvier made a plaster cast of her corpse before dissecting
it. He removed her skeleton and cut out her brain and genitals, which
he pickled in bottles that were put on display at the Musee de l'Homme
for more than 150 years. Her remains were removed from public exhibition
10 years ago but remain the property of the museum.
Researcher Mansell Upham now wants these remains to be returned to South
Africa. "Hottentots are the most dehumanised people in colonial history.
Even today the term is used to designate non-human status and Saartjie
Baartman's remains are an icon of this history," says
Contemporary accounts describe how bands of Dutch raiding parties went
on horseback to the eastern and northern Cape frontiers to hunt down and
exterminate "bushmen" groups who were considered cattle thieves
and a threat to settler society.
"Yet the Quena are the ancestors of a lot of people in this country,
some of them marginal people out there who don't exist in the eyes of
anybody. Bringing back her remains can help to address this and stimulate
a debate about aboriginal groups -- like the "bushmen", Griquas
and coloureds -- who have been neglected in reductionist black and white
versions of our history."
Upham, who claims to be a direct descendant of Jan van Riebeeck's protege
called Krotoa (better known in the history books as Eva), says Quena history
has largely been ignored even though the so-called "Hottentots"
were a founder population for many Afrikaners and the Cape coloured people.
Quena clans mixed extensively with Xhosa people, passing on the powerful
clicks that distinguish the Nguni group of languages, and other Xhosa
cultural features. This heritage, says Upham, is literally inscribed in
the features of President Nelson Mandela, who more than likely has some
"Hottentot" ancestry.
Canada, Australia and, to some extent, the United States have recently
developed a historiography that details the experiences of aboriginal
peoples in those countries. An awareness is growing worldwide of the plight
of indigenous people -- groups who were resident in a country before it
was colonised by aliens -- and is reflected in a United Nations decision
to declare this the Decade of Indigenous People.
This consciousness appears, however, to be lacking in South Africa, where
an overriding preoccupation with racial conflict between white settlers
and African polities has overshadowed the role played by aboriginal groups
in the country's history. Upham believes a campaign to "bring back
Baartman" can help remedy the
"Our film will reconstruct the experiences and perceptions of this
young woman," says Nathan. "It will show how the academic discourse
that surrounded her contributed to popular European perceptions of race
and helped to change the course of history."
Academic discussion and research into the plight of marginal groups is
one thing, says Upham, important because they help generate wider public
awareness of their human rights. Of greater concern, however, are indications
that far-right groups are filling the gap left by the country's main political
movements and gearing up to mobilise separatist support among the Griquas,
coloureds and surviving "bushman" groups in South Africa.
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