Sara's Story a symbol of subjugation

and humiliation, her homecoming will be a spiritual thing

Sara is the short-name used these days for Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan slave woman who at the tender age of 20 was taken from Cape Town to London and then on to Paris to be displayed naked in their streets and at their circuses like an animal her European audiences viewed her to be. Her story is a tearful and moving one. It is at once the story of an everyday woman, a human being, one of us, treated in the most grotesque ways, used as "scientific proof" of "European white superiority." 

But it is also a story about the more widespread "social, political, scientific and philosophical assumptions which transformed one young African woman into a representation of savage sexuality and racial inferiority." Finally, her story is one that provokes us to look in some detail at the power of imagery to form opinions, and the way such power has been employed to depict people of color, especially women of color.

Since this story was published in February 2002, Sara's remains have been returned to South Africa. Saartjie Baartman's skeleton and bottled organs -- long stored at a French natural history museum -- were turned over to South African officials on April 29 at a ceremony in Paris, the culmination of years of requests by countrymen who wanted to bring her home [February 27, 2002 Editor's Note].

The Miami Herald on February 24 carried a story about a South African woman named Saartjie Baartman that attracted our attention, and, we have learned, has had the attention of many for some period of time.

Before getting into the story, we’d like to highlight what we think is the key issue here, the image of the black person, in this case a woman, in Western art. This is tied into the more macro issue of the way blacks have been portrayed as racially inferior and more specifically, the way black female sexuality has been portrayed as inferior. Those times are changing, but Saartjie's story is worth knowing about, because her story says a great deal about history, recent history at that.

Who is Saartjie Baartman?

She was born on the Gamtoos River in the Eastern Cape in 1789 of a Khoisan family in what is now South Africa. The Khoisans are among southern Africa’s oldest known inhabitants, people who made a major role in shaping South Africa’s past and present. But back in those days, bands of Dutch raiding parties went on horseback to the eastern and northern Cape frontiers to hunt down and exterminate these "bushmen" groups who were considered cattle thieves and a threat to settler society.

Canadian socio-linguist Nigel Crawhall, speaking of the Khoisan people, says this:

"These people moved across this land before any other human being. It was they who named the plants and the trees and the features of this land. . . . There [has been an] explosion of identity . . . [among] people who had spent their whole lives having to hide who they were. These people had been destroyed and now suddenly there [is] light and air."

There was never any light and air for Saartjie. In her late teens, she migrated to Cape Flats near Cape Town where she became a farmer’s slave and lived in a small shack until 1810. That year, she was sold in Cape Town in 1810 at the age of 20 to a British ship’s doctor, William Dunlop, who persuaded her that she could make a great deal of money by displaying her body to Europeans. Dunlop put her on a boat and she ended up in London.

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".

There were protests in London for the way Baartman was being treated. 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, shown in this portrait, who founded the African Association to campaign against racism in England, and wrote of the horrors of slavery. 

Wedderburn is himself an interesting black British radical. He was arrested twice in the early 1800s, once for Sedition for defending a slaves rights to rise up and kill his master, and then a second time for sending among the first revolutionary papers from England to the west Indies. For that, was found guilty of "Blasphemous libel" and served two years in Carlisle jail. He subsequently was released wrote and released his autobiography entitled, The Horrors of Slavery.

French Research Minister Roger-Gerard Schwartzenberg told the French Senate recently that she was also exhibited before "sages and painters," including George Cuvier, surgeon general to Napoleon Bonaparte, and seen by many as the founder of comparative anatomy in France.

Cuvier, shown here, described Baartman’s movements as having "something brusque and capricious about them that recalled those of monkeys." Cuvier used such descriptions to demonstrate the superiority of the European races. Several "scientific" papers were written about Baartman, using her as proof of the superiority of the white race.Jeremy Nathan, a South African film producer who is making a feature film on the life of Baartman, says such women excited the attention of the Parisian intelligentsia at the time. Cuvier was at the center of an eminent school of social anthropologists who believed she was the missing link, the highest form of animal life and the lowest form of human life.

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

Sara Baartman died in Paris in 1816, an impoverished prostitute, a lonely woman, and an alcoholic. She had come to be known as the "Venus Hottentot," which was a derogatory term used to describe "bushmen" of southern Africa.

Instead of providing her a decent burial, Cuvier made a plaster cast of Baartman’s body, dissected her and conserved her organs, including her genitals and brain, in bottles of formaldehyde. Along with her skeleton, shown here, Sara Baartman’s brain and genitals were stored somewhere in a back room of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris Her remains including those in the jars were displayed there until 1976. Saartjie Baartman has created controversy in South Africa as well. Willie Bester, a world known contemporary South African artist, made a metal sculpture of Saartjie Baartman.  Bester is shown in the next photo, and you can barely see an overhead image projection on the screen behind him of his sculpture of Sara. Bester's father was Khosian and his mother what has been called "Cape colored." He was himself classified as "other colored" during the apartheid years.In Bester’s work apartheid has remained the dominant theme.

 In particular he has consistently tackled the Group Areas Act (the law that defined where people could and could not live according to their color); the militarized and violent character of South African life stemming from apartheid; and the role played by the Dutch Reformed Church in supporting the apartheid ideology.

Yet, his sculpture of Baartman created controversy, perhaps because it was displayed in the Science and Engineering Library at the University of Cape Town. A panel was convened to discuss the sculpture. Some felt it needed greater explanation to accompany it, to explain the oppression and injustices committed during the colonial era. Others complained that the science library was the wrong venue, because it was in the name of science that Baartman was paraded about Europe like an animal. There were also complaints that if art of indigenous peoples are to be displayed, they should be by indigenous people.

Here in the US, an African American woman, Deborah Willis, has written a recently published book that was motivated to a great degree by the tragedy of Saartjie Baartman. The book, entitled, The Black Female Body in Photography, focuses on the power of the photographic image to reflect and affect opinions. Willis, curator at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture, commented on Baartman’s situation this way: "The stereotypical caricatures of Baartman portrayed her as entertainment while also sexualizing her image. (Despite the negative and stereotypical nature of Baartman’s images) the bustle soon became very stylish in Europe and later in America, and this may have been the result of the popularity of her images."

After reading about Baartman, Willis contacted Carla Williams, a longtime friend and fellow photographer, to discuss the possibility of a book on the black female body in photography. Willis has noted that most images of black women produced in the decades after the Baartman images were exotic shots of African women in tribal attire or were of slaves working in the fields or taking care of white children and babies.

The latter images, according to Willis, provide a counterpoint to the earlier sexualized images of black women. "They were images of ‘neutered’ black females instead," Willis explains. These new images of slaves and "mammies" robbed black women of their femininity and portrayed them more as genderless workers.

American Historical Review has said of the film:

"Zola Maseko's elegant and rather beautiful film recounts the life and times of Sara Baartman in clear and acceptable terms, using both contemporary and contemporaneous sources.... A telling and quite powerful film. It would be very appropriate for any class in the history of racism or colonial history. And just an hour long, it is perfect for a single classroom showing."

Le Monde has written:

"By combining the history and tragic destiny of Baartman, with the theories and racist imagination of the period... (Sara Baartman) presents an implacable plea against racism."

The film was rated the Best African Documentary, 1999 FESPACO African Film Festival, Ouagadougou Burkina Faso, and Best Documentary, 1999 Milan African Film Festival, Italy.

Commenting on the film and the life of Saartjie Baartman, now known to many as Sara, Alex Dodd says this:

"Part of the power of the documentary is that, as a viewer, you cease to think of history as words on a page or abstract theories. Despite the myriad discourses her tale has triggered, one cannot for a second escape the reality that Sara Baartman was a real human being with feelings. (The film) was Baartman’s life…an amazing story of one woman’s life."

South Africa, since it broke loose from the grip of apartheid, has been asking the French to send Sara home. Former President Nelson Mandela made that a personal project. He asked the late President François Mitterand for help in 1994, and two years later, South African Foreign Minister Nzo formally raised the issue yet again But no progress was made.

However, now the French Senate, in late January 2002, approved a bill proposing that Sara be returned home to South Africa. The lower house of the French parliament, the National Assembly, is expected to pass the law before the end of June.

For many South Africans, most especially for the Khoisan and a man named Boezak, a representative on the Khoisan legacy project of the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), Sara’s "sad story has become a symbol for us…of the subjugation and humiliation of Khoisan women through all the ages." He went on to say:"(When) we celebrate her homecoming it will be a spiritual ceremony. It will be a reburial. It will not be a Cape Town thing, it will not be a Griqua thing, it will be a national thing."

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update 9 July 2008