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Life
and Times of Sara Baartman
the
Hottentot Venus
Sara
Baartman was taken from the Cape of Good Hope to London in 1810,
aged about twenty, and was displayed in Piccadilly and elsewhere
for paying customers as "the Hottentot Venus". In 1814
she was taken to France, in the interregnum of Napoleon's exile.
"La Venus Hottentote" became the object of medical and
scientific research as well as prurient entertainment. When she
died in 1815 her body was first copied in a plaster-cast and
then dissected, leaving her skeleton, her pickled brain, and her
pickled sex organs for display in Paris museums up to 1985. This
reviewer remembers his amazement on encountering her naked
plaster-cast and her skeleton in glass boxes as the very first
exhibits to be seen by a visitor in the foyer of the great Musee
de l'Homme, standing before tall glass windows that revealed a
distant view of the Eifel Tower. The exhibit, which was set up
at the time of the Eifel Tower, seemed to be saying: look here
in the foreground at Man's primitive, female African ancestry,
and look there in the background at the climax of Man's
achievement piercing the sky, with a long straight avenue parted
through the trees of the gardens between them.
The issue of Sara Baartman became
controversial in the 1980s, when demands began for the return of
her remains to the Cape of Good Hope, for burial with dignity.
The display of her remains had ceased to be of 'scientific'
interest, if they ever had been, and had become an icon of
racial and sexual prejudice. The museum put her skeleton and
plaster-cast into storage, "lost" (apparently
destroyed) her brain and pudenda, and put up a hell of a fight
to retain for France such a glorious object of national
heritage. A decade later, when South Africa was flavour of the
month as a newly independent state, new museum staff seemed much
more accommodating. Hence the film under review could be made in
1998, in expectation of Sara Baartman's imminent return to the
Cape.
The film tells the story in
straitforward enough manner. Spoken sketchy details of Sara's
life on a farm near Cape Town are stitched together as
commentary against pictures of the Cape peninsular dissolving
into the waters of the sea off Table Bay. Next we pull back from
the water to see the Thames and the House of Commons, and we are
told she is now in London. The same technique is later used to
jump Sara's life to Paris. (Somewhat disturbing for a historian,
as all the buildings we see in London and Paris were built long
after Sara's death.) The main interest of the film is a series
of interviews with expert witnesses against appropriate
backdrops, including bravura performances from the Namibian
historian Yvette Abraham, the anatomist-palaeontologist Raymond
Dart in his study with skeletal material round him, a theatre
expert in a theatre, a museologist in a museum, etc. There are
also cartoons of the time, newspaper pages and engravings, and
the very skeleton and the plaster-cast of dead Sara Baartman
herself. It is the latter, a mesmerizing caricature of what Sara
must have almost--but not quite--looked like, that gets the most
visual attention. The final sequence is of this cast being
placed in a box as if for transport, with a female jazz voice
singing that she's going back to Africa.
Here it is as well to add that the film
is based on an optimistic false premise: the body of Sara
Baartman has not yet been repatriated. The South African
campaign ran out of steam. If and when the effort is revived, it
would be well to draw a lesson from the repatriation of the body
of "Le Bechuana" (latterly known as "El
Negro") from Spain to Botswana in 2000. The Spanish
national museum cleaned away and/or kept all the plastered flesh
and stuffing from the body, and returned a bare skull with a few
leg and arm bones in a square box. The only surviving actual
remains of Sara Baartman are her bones, which may someday return
to Africa. The puffy-faced plaster-cast is merely an image of
her in death, and will no doubt be retained in Europe.
To me the most poignant moment in the
film is also the most informative. It is an account previously
unknown to me, when Sara tells a Paris journalist about her
origins. A female over-voice recounts with engaging simplicity a
tale of childhood betrothal in the Houteniqua mountains,
brutally interrupted by white settler slave-raiders attracted by
the smoking fires of the pre-nuptial feast. Who cares if it
could have been a type-story rather than literal truth? It is
the one time in the film that we get a glimpse of a real-seeming
Sara, whose previous recorded comments in a court of law are so
stilted that they must have been dragged or drugged out of her.
As for using the film for teaching
purposes, I showed the film to a few students and colleagues.
They found the film accessible and convincing. They were
simultaneously intrigued, disgusted, and annoyed at the
indignity of Sara Baartman's treatment in life and two further
centuries of exploitation of her body in death. They conceded
that dissection and examination might sometimes be necessary for
medical advance, but agreed with Tobias that the scientific
value of Sara's display had long passed and she ought to be
buried as soon as possible at the Cape of Good Hope.
On the down side, the sloppiness of
some of the subtitles and the monotony of the too-often repeated
musical dirge about going home to Africa were criticized. It was
also suggested that a teaching film may not be able to have
footnotes but it should at least suggest some further reading in
its end-credits. My own criticism centers on the slightly
confused historical view of the origins of scientific racism
propagated by the film and absorbed by my students. This
confusion stems from the film's use of its most graphic cartoon.
This illustration, which also features in Stephen Jay Gould's
essay on the Hottentot Venus (published in his The
Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History New
York: W.W. Norton, 1985), is of "La Belle Hottentote"
on a pedestal, ogled by two Scots soldiers in kilts, a crouching
woman inspecting between Sara's legs, and a dog sniffing up the
rear crotch of one of the soldiers. This cartoon is interpreted
by the English theatrical expert in the film as having been an
English cartoon, a conclusion backed by a French historian in
the film remarking on the lack of cartoons of the Venus in
Paris.
Gould says it is a "satiric French
print of 1812", published in Paris even before Sara
Baartman came to Paris. Even the most cursory inspection of the
cartoon shows that it is entirely captioned in French. It is
undoubtedly a French view of Sara Baartman, even if it portrays
British soldiers. Given the considerable fascination of French
women for Scotsmen in kilts in Paris in 1814 and a hundred years
later in 1914, I even wonder if the attribution to 1812 rather
than 1814 is correct. (There are also stylistic features in the
portrayal of her body that suggest the cartoon was
contemporaneous to anatomical drawings made in Paris in 1814.)
Why is the attribution of this cartoon
so important? Because it is necessary to distinguish between the
English and French periods of residence of the Hottentot Venus
to better understand her place in the development of scientific
racism in nineteenth century Europe. In England she was a living
"curiosity" such as had been displayed since
Elizabethan times, a "savage" from one of the ends of
the world, demonstrating the lowest human and perhaps the
highest non-human end of the Great Chain of Being. The main
public fascination was with the backward thrust of her derriere
which validated and presaged the past and future female dress
fashion of big rear bustles. In France, by contrast, she was
dressed in furs and accompanied by a black servant, in the
manner of an expensive courtesan. Her fascination was private
rather than public, for an elite versed in a long-established
French literary tradition of pornographic curiosity with Khoe/
"Hottentot" female genitalia. Was it really true that
Khoe pudenda were distinguished by a tablier
or "apron" of distended labia minora? (In fact, as we
today know, such distension when it occurred was a contingent
product of childhood manipulation, not a necessary feature of
immutable "racial" biology.)
Hence the woman in the French cartoon
is bending to try and spot the tablier
between Sara's legs. Hence, as we see in the film, the
anatomists Georges Cuvier and Geoffoire de Saint-Hillaire, whom
we need to be told really were the
crucial pioneer figures in the development of European
scientific racism, tried by every means to get the modest,
living Sara Baartman to part her legs as she stood naked before
them. And flourished with such triumph her butchered pudenda in
a glass bowl or bottle when she was dead.
Citation:
Neil Parsons, "Review of The
Life and Times of Sara Baartman, the Hottentot Venus,"
H-SAfrica, H-Net Reviews, December, 2001.
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update 9 July 2008 |
