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South
African President Mbeki
on Saartjie Baartman
Letter from the President
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 1974and 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!
Thabo Mbeki, President, South Africa
* * * * *
update 9 July 2008 |
