The Legacy of Sarah Baartman - Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

Representation and Black Womanhood
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Representation and Black
Womanhood
The Legacy of Sarah Baartman
Edited by
Natasha Gordon-Chipembere
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REPRESENTATION AND BLACK WOMANHOOD
Copyright © Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, 2011.
All rights reserved.
“Six Women of Color.” Permission granted by Angela Hayden.
“Nomshado, Queensgate Parktown, 2007.” Permission granted by Zanele
Muholi. Courtesy of Michael Stevenson, Cape Town.
“I’ve come to take you home.” Permission granted by Diana Ferrus.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–11779–2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Representation and Black womanhood : the legacy of Sarah
Baartman / edited by Natasha Gordon-Chipembere.
p. cm.
ISBN 978–0–230–11779–2 (hardback)
1. Baartman, Sarah. 2. Baartman, Sarah—Influence. 3. Women,
Khoikhoi—Biography. 4. Women, Black—Race identity. 5. Women,
Black, in art. 6. Racism in museum exhibits. I. Gordon-Chipembere,
Natasha, 1970–
DT1768.K56B37 2011
305.48⬘8961—dc22 2011011006
[B]
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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For the reasons my soul smiles,
Aminata, Jabulani, and Masauko
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Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized,
the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture
of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It
is the act of speech, of “talking back,” that is no mere gesture of empty
words; that is the expression of our movement from object to subject-
the liberated voice.
bell hooks
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Prelude: “I’ve come to take you home”
by Diana Ferrus xi
Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman,

a Legacy to Grasp 1
Part One The Archive: Disrupting

the Colonial Narrative
One “Body” of Evidence: Saartjie Baartman
and the Archive 17
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Two “My Tongue Softens On That Other Name”:
Poetry, People, and Plants in Sarah Bartmann’s
Natural World 31
Yvette Abrahams / Khib Omsis
Three “Rude” Performances: Theorizing Agency 47
Hershini Bhana Young
Four Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a
Figure that Has Been Looked at Too Much? 65
Gabeba Baderoon
Five Placing and Replacing “The Venus Hottentot”: An
Archeology of Pornography, Race, and Power 85
Sheila Smith McKoy
Part Two Troubling the “Truth”:

Corporeal Representations
Six Writing Baartman’s Agency: History, Biography,
and the Imbroglios of Truth 101
Desiree Lewis
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viii Contents
Seven “I Wanna Love Something Wild”: A Reading

of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus 121
Ilaria Oddenino
Eight “Just Ask the Scientists”: Troubling the “Hottentot”
and Scientific Racism in Bessie Head’s Maru and
Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy 137
Z’étoile Imma
Nine Staging the Body of the (M)other: The “Hottentot
Venus” and the “Wild Dancing Bushman” 147
Karlien van der Schyff
Ten Under Cuvier’s Microscope: The Dissection of
Michelle Obama in the Twenty-First Century 165
Notes on Contributors 181

Bibliography 185
Index 195
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Acknowledgments
This is a work of collaborative, global sisterhood—all premised

on honoring the spirit of our ancestor, Sarah Baartman. I humbly
thank her as auntie and guardian spirit on this project. I would like
to thank all the magnificent contributors in this book: Gabeba,
Yvette, Desiree, Sheila, Ilaria, Z’étoile, Hershini, Siphiwe, and
Karlien for the integrity of their work and the elegance of their
camaraderie.
I would be remiss not to begin in the beginning with my dear
mentor and doctoral supervisor, Dr. Pam Ryan at UNISA, who
guided me through my dissertation in 2006, much of which
inspired this project. I would like to thank my steadfast New
York writing group for reviewing my chapter on Michele Obama:
Natasha Lightfoot-Swain, Vanessa Perez-Rosario, and Hlonipha
Mokoena. Thanks also go to the WOC (Women of Color)
Academic writing group at the CUNY Grad Center during fall
2010. I was able to do all my final edits during our long Friday
working sessions.
Part of the introduction was completed with support from a
PSCCUNY Grant through which I was able to visit the British
and Wellcome Libraries in London for archival materials. I was
fortunate to present aspects of this project at the African Studies
Association UK conference at Oxford in September 2010. The
feedback was provocative and gave me the final push I needed to
bring the project to a close.
Thanks also go to South African artist, Zanele Muholi for her
work and vision and Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town
for accommodating my request for images so effortlessly. I thank
Diana Ferrus for starting Sarah’s return home with her now
famous poem, “I’ve come to take you home” and allowing me
to reprint it in its entirety here. I also need to acknowledge the
graciousness of Angela Hayden for her cover art, “Six Women of
Color.” The first time I saw it, my spirit was humbled and it felt
like Auntie Sarah was giving me a silent nod that this visual image
should hold the words of this book together. Thanks also to the
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x Acknowledgments
wonderful, efficient folks at Palgrave, namely Chris Chappell and

Sarah Whalen. I also thank Ethne Clarke for her stellar work on
the index.
I must acknowledge my sister friends who provided me with
laughter, wisdom, and encouragement throughout this project:
Sindi Gordon, Kisha Clarke-Morrison, Tonya Hegamin, Maria
DeLongoria, Tracey Walters, Selina Okeyo, Megan Jackson, and
Bongi Bangeni. Lastly, where would I be without my family? I give
thanks to my ancestors from Costa Rica and Panama and to all my
family in both places and the United States. I thank my parents,
Norma and Vicente, for stepping out of my path when I needed to
be in the world. I acknowledge the inspiration that my mother-in-
law, Catherine, has provided me. Thanks to my siblings, Xanthe
and Stephen, for being excellent babysitters and sources of laugh-
ter. My children, Jabulani and Aminata, thank you for your spirits
of beauty. And Masauko, thank you for being so dedicated to the
fact that I too have the right to dream, to write, to create. I love
you.
May Sarah Baartman rest in blissful peace.
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Prelude
“I’ve come to take you home”

(Tribute to Sarah Bartmann written in Holland, June 1998)
Diana Ferrus
I have come to take you home, home!

Remember the veld,
the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees?
The air is cool there and the sun does not burn.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckles sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones.
I have come to wrench you away,
away from the poking eyes of the man-made monster
who lives in the dark with his clutches of imperialism
who dissects your body bit by bit,
who likens your soul to that of Satan
and declares himself the ultimate God!
I have come to soothe your heavy heart,
I offer my bosom to your weary soul.
I will cover your face with the palms of my hands,
I will run my lips over the lines in your neck,
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you
and I will sing for you,
for I have come to bring you peace.
I have come to take you home
where the ancient mountains shout your name.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill.
Your blankets are covered in buchu and mint.
The proteas stand in yellow and white—
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xii Prelude
I have come to take you home

where I will sing for you,
for you have brought me peace,
for you have brought us peace.
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Introduction: Claiming Sarah
Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp
Natasha Gordon- Chipembere
A Prelude
On August 9, 2010, I found myself in Cape Town, South Africa,
on National Women’s Day. It happened to be the eighth anniver-
sary of Sarah Baartman’s burial in Hankey, in the Eastern Cape. A
month later, I am sitting on the underground in London, when the
Tube stops; the conductor is announcing signal problems. I look up,
weary from jet lag and the red eye from New York. As if by divine
providence the stop is Piccadilly, where Sarah was first exhib-
ited when she arrived in London with Hendrick Cezar in 1810—
No. 225 Piccadilly Circus, the space that Sarah had to face dai-
ly—on a stage—the eyes of all those who could pay the two shil-
lings to see her body. As I sat in the Tube, all I could say was eish,
Sarah, my sister. I think of Diana Ferrus’s now famous poem “I’ve
Come to Take You Home” (1998), which set the wheels cranking in
France (after eight long years) to have Sarah’s remains repatriated
to South Africa. Countless people have been moved by her histori-
cal narrative(s), now mythical and iconic, from the cacophony of
voices attempting to own a part of Sarah’s story. She has become
the landscape upon which multiple narratives of exploitation and
suffering within black womanhood have been enacted. However,
there are those scholars, womanists, activists, sisters, mothers,
and lovers who are not easily seduced by the “victimized woman”
or “Mother Africa nationalist icon” status bestowed on Sarah by
South African president Thabo Mbeki’s eulogy on August 9. Many
South African and diasporic women continue to be disturbed by
the implicit (and complicit) silences around questions of Sarah’s
personhood: her intimate spaces. Their work creates new possibili-
ties for imagining the private, rather than the public spectacle of
the “victimized” plight of the “Hottentot Venus.” These writers
maneuver away from the preying eyes and gaping tongues of those
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2 Natasha Gordon- Chipembere
who build academic and writing careers on producing “authorita-

tive” (and thus finite) biographies on Sarah, works that only made
evident the cartographies of their own historical viewpoint; Sarah,
the woman, remains invisible.
The reason I decided to take on this book project was simple;
as a black woman from the Caribbean (Costa Rica and Panama
via Jamaica), I have not found a space where the questions about
Sarah Baartman I wanted to ask and have answered existed. I have
found a core group of women who insist on other truths by butt-
ing hard against the “archived” colonial history and contempo-
rary nationalizing of Baartman as the symbol of exploited black
womanhood post her 2002 burial. The women included in this
collection—Siphiwe Ndlovu, Yvette Abrahams, Hershini Bhana
Young, Gabeba Baderoon, Sheila Smith McKoy, Desiree Lewis,
Ilaria Oddenino, Karlien van der Schyff, and Z’étoile Imma—are
individuals for whom I have the deepest respect. Ironically, I have
found their seminal works on Sarah Baartman sitting on isolated
corners of the world’s bookshelves. These women—eight from
Southern Africa, three from the African Diaspora, and one from
Italy—emerging and established scholars alike manifest a range of
scholarship that moves beyond rhetoric in Baartman’s narrative. I
initiated this edited collection as a place to gather these voices into
a dialogue, forging this sisterhood side by side in the pages of excel-
lence so that we can be in each other’s company as we face the hard
questions about Sarah Baartman. The task of querying her legacy
on representations of our bodies in the twenty-first century informs
how we challenge silent spaces and invisibility by asking questions
that are not supposed to come out of our mouths in a world that
wants to wish us all away, a world that asks us to conform into aca-
demic tongues of rigor, straightening our t’s and dotting our i’s; if
not, we perish. I wanted this book to be a conversation among these
women who each claim Sarah Baartman and learn from her legacy,
and a space for South African women writers specifically to be bol-
stered in this sisterhood that has been forged on these pages. This
is not a text monopolized by Western voices but a space for global-
ized reflection. There are reputable texts by African American writ-
ers, artists, and scholars about Sarah Baartman with a few African
voices interwoven (see Debra Willis’s Black Venus 2010: And They
Called Her Hottentot). I find the Baartman conversations in the
North radically different from those in the South, and so this book
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Introduction 3
attempts to present a strong voice from the South (with echoes of

the far-reaching Diaspora), of women providing linguistic shoulders
to lean on, compassionate prayers, and academic expertise around
textured questions that have yet to sit side by side with each other.
Laura Chrisman notes that much postcolonial study does not
have the linguistic capacity to address colonial South African history.
Thus, “writing back to the centre, mimicry, or hybridity do not ade-
quately account for the formal, linguistic and ideological textures of
some of the literature under study” (Chrisman 2000, 208). In much
Baartman scholarship from the North, one finds that she has been
coopted into a postcolonial black subject of the African Diaspora
and her womanhood has been “read” within the paradigms of the
North American slave experience. Carole Boyce Davies notes that
one must “identify the exclusionary nature of US constructions of
black feminism . . . or it forces black women form other parts of the
world to locate their identities with the context of US hegemony”
(1994, 31). While in most certainty, Sarah’s narrative can be under-
stood in regard to disaporic or exile studies, it was, in fact, her spe-
cific “Khoisan-ness” that precipitated the European interest in her
body as an object of curiosity to display. Following the reasoning of
Pumla Dineo Gqola, I read and position Sarah Baartman as a slave,
rather than as an indentured worker, as regardless of legal definitions
within South African historical studies, the Khoisan were exposed
to conditions that would clearly be defined as slavery (2010, 15).
Slavery in South Africa was a gendered project that erased the lives
of female slaves. This book becomes testimony to claiming Sarah’s
life as a slave while enabling women to become active agents by fac-
ing her legacy. This collection engenders new language that extends
the limits of general postcolonial interpretation and insists upon a
historically specific Southern African context as the landscape and
the time frame in which to access Sarah Baartman.
Sarah Baartman died almost 200 years ago, if her 1815/1816
death estimate is correct. Loosely, what we know is that Sarah,
a Khoisan woman, came from a community of people; she had a
life prior to the European encounter. She was called by a name in
her mother tongue, rather than the Dutch and English remnants
that continue to embattle the purveyors of her legacy today (i.e.,
“Saartjie/Sarah/Sara”). We know that her people were decimated
by the Dutch commandos in their colonizing of the Cape. We know
that she ended up in Cape Town, as a noncitizen, and worked for a
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number of families including the Cezars before she left Cape Town.
Slavery was practiced in the Cape between 1658 and 1838 (Gqola
2010, 6). We know she was taken (my emphasis) to London in the
spring of 1810 and displayed at 225 Piccadilly Circus. We know
that she was involved in a court case that tried to discern her slave
status, in November 1810, which was ultimately dismissed. She
was baptized in 1811 in Manchester, taken to Paris in 1814 and
1815 ; she died and was dissected by Georges Cuvier. Her remains
were thus displayed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until the
late 1970s, when she was put into storage and taken out only in
2002 for her repatriation to South Africa. There is really nothing
else, except speculation of her time in the Cape or Europe.
Much of the scholarship that exists today on Sarah Baartman is
an attempt to fill in the gaps. But much of this filling has insisted
on viewing her externally, perceived through an archived, colonial
lens that does not bring the reader any closer to the personhood
of Sarah Baartman. This imagining of Sarah has confined her to
the space of victim, prostitute, and drunkard, labels that have now
become synonymous with black womanhood (even those with the
best intentions kill her in their texts by having her drown in a
bathtub due to her obesity or reduce Sarah to her caricatured “hot-
tentot” features of diseased buttocks and enlarged labia. One can
only imagine the agendas of those without, as Siphiwe Ndlovu
calls, “an ethic of care”!).
We know nothing of Sarah’s thoughts; these we can only imagine.
Though there are debates around the presence of some testimonies
in Europe, all these I posit are through the voices/written words of
her European translators and owners. They remain questionable in
regard to agenda and intent. I am not willing to surrender my know-
ing of Sarah Baartman on these texts. What each individual brings
to Sarah’s story depends on how attached one is to the “authentic-
ity” of the colonial archive and the location of one’s politics. This
book is not about answers but about asking more provocative ques-
tions. This book challenges more privileged voices that sit in the
“right places” with enough funding and access to create texts that
authenticate their “version” of Sarah’s story. As writers in this col-
lection, we insist on an end to the redundancy of a colonial histori-
ography that never glimpses (or acknowledges) Sarah Baartman, the
woman whose name we can call only in English, not in her Khoisan
name or her mother’s tongue. This is not a book that includes any
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Introduction 5
racist and sexist caricatures of Sarah from old aquatints and British
and French newspapers. There are no images of Sarah in this book
because we do not know how she would represent herself, and this
is most important. We know that the caricatures are not honest with
their lenses; these images rendered the monster that was African
womanhood in the eyes of the colonial empire. As contributors of
this book, we see Sarah’s personhood as sacred, fragile, and fierce,
and this is how we each claim Sarah Baartman.
This collection also investigates the trajectory from Sarah
Baartman’s nineteenth-century narrative to contemporary mani-
festations of a dominant Euro-American gaze on African and
Diasporic women’s bodies. The story of Baartman, with its question-
able archived colonial historiography, begins this investigation into
how her legacy has impacted current representations of African and
Diasporic1 women in the twenty-first century. Within Eurocentric
(a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist
and sexist development of European language employed not solely
with Baartman, but also contemporaneously upon the bodies of
black women, focusing predominantly on the “anomaly of their
hypersexual” genitals. In the final chapter in this collection, I explore
this idea further in a discussion around the “dissection” of Michele
Obama during the presidential campaign. Baartman’s story has stim-
ulated international discussions concerning the conflations between
gender, race, representation, and selfhood. Her narrative begins with
the meditative construction of the South African Khoisan into the
“barbaric Hottentots” by the English starting in the early 1600s.
Linda E. Merians’s text Envisioning the Worst: Representations
of “Hottentots” in Early-Modern England establishes a founda-
tion for the sentiments explored in this collection. Merians maps
the historical construction of the Khoisan in the Cape colony
through the early 1600s. Most of her research is provided from
materials English sailors used to write home (travel narratives, let-
ters, journals, geography books, among others). She notes at the
beginning of her book that there has been no other indigenous
society that has been described so negatively or appropriated as
widely as the Khoisan people, the so- called Hottentots (Merians
2001, 48–49). The deliberate construction of a barbaric, savage
people was a method through which the English could displace
their own fears and anxieties as a nation in the midst of trans-
forming into an imperial power. Said’s notions of Othering come
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into play here as the Khoisan people were villanized/Othered in a

direct attempt by the English to establish themselves as superior,
thereby justifying colonization and oppression. 2
The domination of Africans was explained with the aid of sci-
ence, thereby establishing the Khoisan (“the Hottentots”) as the
most ignoble group in the progression of mankind, purported to
mate with the orangutan. It is here that Sarah Baartman, placed
on exhibit in London and Paris from 1810 to 1815, enters the dis-
course. Baartman
was used as a yardstick by which to judge the stages of Western evo-

lution, by which to discern identity, difference, and progress . . . [She
was] relegated to the terrain of the primitive—the lowest exemplum
of the human species—while the European . . . always . . . assume[d] the
pinnacle of human development. The process of mediating the self, of
reflecting the self, through the body of the black female Other begins
and rebegins with every regard. (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 23)
First, reinforced throughout this collection is that the persona of the

“Hottentot Venus,” infamous for her buttocks and alleged Hottentot
Apron (extended labia), is a creation of the European imagination;
second, the language used in representing her established a histori-
cal, unmediated trajectory of derogatory images about black wom-
en’s bodies worldwide. Central to this work is the deconstruction
of the idea concerning Baartman’s “mythical Hottentot Apron,”
which fixated a Western gaze on her genitals, and has become a fact
about her person that has never been proven with physical evidence.
Yet, the myth prevails. Culminating with her dissection by Georges
Cuvier, Baartman’s genitals were thus unveiled to the European
world, where, I suggest, the master text about the black female body
was created. It is with this fabrication that an external gaze is sanc-
tioned, querying the African woman’s humanity based upon the
nature of her genitals. Alongside this comes the entrenchment of a
language of degradation, sexualization, and primitiveness.
Sarah Baartman
According to Cecil le Fleur, chairman of the National Khoisan
Consultative Council, Sarah Baartman was born around 1789
in the Eastern Cape in South Africa (McGreal 2002, 2). She was
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Introduction 7
from the Quena people. Baartman was forced, as a noncitizen, to

go Cape Town as a laborer for a Dutch family (Abrahams 1997,
34–48). According to European reports, Baartman was brought
to London in 1810 by Hendrik Cezar, the brother of her Dutch
master, and his traveling companion, Alexander Dunlop, an
Englishman. For two shillings, the British public could view the
“Hottentot Venus” at no. 225 Piccadilly Circus, advertised as a
human curiosity, exhibited “on 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” (Qureshi 2004, 236).
In her book Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular
Culture, Janell Hobson dedicates her thesis to the symbolic appro-
priation by the West of Baartman’s blackness, female body, and
sexuality and to contemporary perceptions of black women’s bod-
ies worldwide. Hobson’s premise is that Baartman, as defined by
Georges Cuvier, Napoleon’s surgeon who dissected her remains,
became the prototype of “an anomaly, a freak, oversexed and sub-
human” (2005, 6). Her buttocks coupled with her perceived hyper-
sexuality created a Western historical trajectory of sociocultural
images/imaginings of Africa and the black female body as inher-
ently inferior, and thus a site to be plundered.
As the medical and anthropological discourses that codified
racial difference gained strength in the nineteenth century, new
categories were constructed in which one’s morality and humanity
were linked with one’s biological makeup. Baartman’s case was
even more extenuating as English and French scientists and doctors
were most fascinated with her sexuality. Signified by her genitalia,
her sexuality was classed as abnormal, excessive, and debauched
as opposed to normative European self-representations. African
women’s sexuality became aligned with all things deviant (Wiss
1994, 11). The grotesque body, in this case Baartman’s, was des-
ignated to the margins, a nightmarish construction external to the
“normal” European form. Baartman’s Otherness fixed firm the
European positionality of normal, beautiful, moral, and superior.
Baartman’s story is not exceptional in that she became instantly
a hit in both London and Paris during the early nineteenth century.
According to Zine Magubane,
Baartman was one of thousands of people exhibited and trans-

formed into medical spectacles during the course of the nineteenth
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century . . . however; none of these . . . have been made to stand as

“icons” of racial or sexual difference. (Magubane 2001, 830)
Hobson concurs with Magubane when she notes that Baartman

becomes the “preeminent example of racial and sexual alterity
because of her ridiculed and pathologized buttocks” (2005, 57).
Most curious is the contemporary desire to continually reentrench
Baartman within the paradigms of the Euro-master narrative, as
European scientific history held absolute authority over the label-
ing, measuring, and identifying of the African persona. Here South
African historian Yvette Abrahams’s work on Baartman is high-
lighted for several reasons. Her doctoral dissertation is the first
comprehensive historiography on Baartman written by an African
woman, anywhere, in any language. Also, Abrahams’s political ori-
entation toward “reading” Baartman’s narrative within an African
womanist framework lends credence to the work in this collection
that addresses Baartman’s genital encounter with Europe in the nine-
teenth century. Lastly, Abrahams maintains that the Khoisan has
never had a history of labia lengthening or manipulation, for which
Baartman became infamous in Europe. Sarah Baartman’s person
demands a private, interior respectful space; this premise becomes
the lens through which much of the scholarship here is invested.
Informed by aspects of this premise, I turn to my own investi-
gation of the Western obsessive fascination with African women’s
genitals. Most curious is the current propensity for representations
of Baartman (from North and South) to collude with the master
narrative. For example, after Baartman’s burial in 2002, there
were a number of celebrated African American women writers,
such as Barbara Chase-Riboud and Suzan- Lori Parks, who took
on Baartman’s story as a way of claiming Diasporic sisterhood.
Ultimately, their literary productions have been critiqued as pro-
ducing a Baartman who is a self- destructive, sexually excessive,
drunken stereotype, echoing Cuvier. The European historical
fabrication of the “apron” renders Baartman’s story even more
powerful as it confirms the Western ability to construct, as fact,
that which they cannot fully understand or ascertain. Baartman
was never seen as a person with feelings; rather, it was her body
through which her narrative was shared. The ensuing mythol-
ogy provided a one- dimensional lens to witness her body as the
epitome of African savagery, worthy of degradation.
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Introduction 9
Many scholars3 suggest that Baartman’s story became famous,

not because of her exhibition, as there were many like her, but
because her case was brought before the English judiciary system
in November 1810. Although slavery was abolished in England
in 1807, it was not abolished in the British Empire until 1833
(Qureshi 2004, 224). Under the pretense of moral outrage, the
African Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior
of Africa brought Baartman’s case to court, charging her Dutch
owner, Cezar, with enslavement and indecency. Cezar appealed
that Baartman was under a consensually signed contract for
her personal exhibition in England and that she would return
to her native South Africa within two years. The real issue for
the court was not the immorality of exhibiting a live, African
woman in a cage like an animal, miles away from home, but the
indecent exposure of her body before a civilized, moral English
public. There was little to no discussion on how Baartman was
brought to England, though it insinuated that she came as a
slave and remained so under Cezar’s care (The London Times
1810). Numerous English papers4 reported on this case. However,
Baartman’s own voice is silent. Through the voices of European
male translators, Baartman is on record as a witness stating she
willingly exhibited herself, though historians debate whether she
was primed by Cezar to make such responses. Baartman, who
remained unnamed throughout the entire court case, was per-
ceived as illiterate, though in 1817 Cuvier reported that Baartman
spoke Dutch, some English, and French (one also infers that she
spoke her mother tongues). During the entire court case, commu-
nication and debate took place between and among Baartman’s
colonizers. Her “voice” is only present through a European
translator.
In the end, accountable for her predicament, Baartman is charged
with her own enslavement to gain financial profit. The case was
dismissed on the grounds that Baartman was a willing participant.
After the trial, it was speculated that she was exhibited throughout
the English countryside in a number of small sideshows and private
viewings. She briefly reappeared in December 1811 in Manchester
where she was baptized. Baartman’s show finally resurfaced in
Paris in 1814, where she was owned and exhibited daily by animal
trainer, S. Reaux (Wiss 1994, 23). Her show caused an instant fer-
vor in Paris, inspiring a number of creative productions, including
9780230117792_02_int.indd 9 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

caricatures and a one-act vaudeville show, entitled “The Hottentot

Venus or the Hatred of the French Woman” (Wiss 1994, 26).
On or about December 29, 1815, five years after her arrival
in Europe, Baartman died in Paris in the house of her owner, S.
Reaux, the animal trainer. Georges Cuvier held a key interest in
Baartman and had followed her exhibitions in London and Paris.
A team of zoologists, anatomists, and naturalists, which was
lead by Cuvier and included Henri de Blainville and Geoffrey
St. Hillarie, subjected Baartman to a three- day examination in
March 1815 in the Jardin du Roi, Paris. During this time, they
sketched her nude although Cuvier reported that she refused
to uncover her genital area. Cuvier was given Baartman’s body
upon her death. His monograph on her autopsy formed the basis
for much of the nineteenth-century debates on European racial
categories of difference. Cuvier meticulously cut and measured
Baartman’s gentialia, to which he could not get access while she
was alive. He made a plaster cast of her body and placed her
brains and genitals in jars of formaldehyde (Hobson 3005, 45).
The “Hottentot Venus” is a construction of a masculinist, colo-
nial discourse on female sexuality that has a prevailing impact on
the way that Africa and Diasporic women are represented in the
twenty-first century. Abrahams notes:
Upon Sara Baartman’s body a superstructure of scientific racism was

built which supported the continued enslavement of Africans in the
Americas and the “civilizing” mission in Africa. (1997, 18)
Baartman’s skeleton and body cast were displayed within the halls
of the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle until 1827, when her remains
were moved to the Musée de l’Homme, situated in case no. 33
until the late 1970s. She was removed into storage until her return
to South Africa in 2002.
In 1995, a South African campaign gained ground for the imme-
diate return of Baartman. France was worried that her return
would open a Pandora’s box of having to repatriate hundreds of
thousands of skeletons and other body parts of non-Europeans
used as “scientific” data during the nineteenth century. Initially,
the French refused her return. Nelson Mandela took up the case,
though it took eight years to fulfill this request. Baartman’s skel-
eton and preserved organs were finally returned to South Africa
9780230117792_02_int.indd 10 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

Introduction 11
in April 2002. The state buried her remains on National Women’s

Day on August 9, 2002 (Qureshi 2004, 246). She was laid to rest
in the town of Hankey, near the Gamtoos Valley, where she is
believed to have been born.
The Modern Day “Hottietot”:

Representing Contemporary
Black Women
The legacy of pernicious, demeaning Western representations of
black women’s bodies continues well into the twenty-first century. I
suggest that one of the most apparent vestiges to employ Cuvieresque
philosophy about black women’s bodies and their exhibition can be
found in contemporary American hip-hop music videos. Though
many black women identify with the spiritual, ancestral figure of
Sarah Baartman, questions about the beauty potential of the black
female body remain. Today, black female bodies are continually
excluded from Western discourses on beauty and femininity. Black
female images are most visible in marginalized, sexualized forums,
namely American hip-hop music videos and African American
male magazines, which are semipornographic in nature. The stag-
nant images and perceptions of black women’s bodies and their
sexuality are thoroughly encoded in the dominant popular culture.
Sadly, the dissemination of these images has now infused the pro-
duction of these videos throughout Africa; one can find virtually
the same images on Ugandan or South African television screens,
readily consumed by urban African youth. Rural South African
women maintain some of the highest numbers of eating disorders
in the country, while college students in Malawi save their money
for “body potions” that they can purchase to improve their shapes
by whittling their waists and bums.
Mark Reynolds’s provocative article “Negritude 2.0: Modern
Day Hottietots” draws implicit connections between contemporary
black women with ample buttocks in the modeling/entertainment
industry with Sarah Baartman. Mark Reynolds queries the exact
distance between Sarah Baartman’s buttocks being prodded and
displayed in cages in both London and Paris in the nineteenth cen-
tury, and modern “Hottietots,” black women who dance in music
videos where their buttocks are displayed in full prominence.
9780230117792_02_int.indd 11 6/20/2011 1:31:06 PM

Buffie the Body, made famous by her appearance in a number of

big-name rap videos, has declared that she will strip for Playboy
for no less than 1 million dollars. Two shillings (as in the price
to see Baartman at Piccadilly Circus) or 1 million dollars: the
amount is irrelevant as the black woman’s body remains fixed
on the commodity market with a price tag, a body which can be
bought, displayed, and disrespected (Reynolds 2006).
***
The contradictions of Sarah Baartman’s legacy are tremendous.

Sarah Baartman died in the nineteenth century and endured
Cuvier’s knife. This book does not seek to pull together archi-
val pictures, shuffle through newspapers in the British Library,
or speculate on the entertainment interests of 1815 in Paris. This
book aims at grasping Sarah’s legacy by learning the lessons of it.
It also aims at acknowledging her humanity. Sarah Baartman has
been the object of an external gaze (in body and text) for 200 years.
Sarah’s interior spaces are addressed in this collection. Who envi-
sions what she saw and felt as she looked out at the gaping British
faces, from the stage in which she walked, sang, or sat during that
fall at Piccadilly in 1810? Where are the aquatints of Baartman
looking at Cuvier’s face during the three days she was drawn at
the Jardin du Roi in Paris in 1815? The fact that these questions
initiate a radical switch of perspective is exactly what inspires each
of the contributors in this book.
This collection is divided into two major thematic areas, though
the undercurrent of the entire book layers them rather than seeing
them as disparate parts. One section informs the other in con-
versation that exists fluidly and dialogically throughout. The first
section addresses the task of disrupting the colonial archive by
engaging Sarah’s interiority and personhood. The second section
focuses on troubling corporeal representations—in literature and
contemporary media—of Sarah Baartman and her impact on black
womanhood in the twenty-first century.
Siphiwe Ndlovu opens the book with her insistence that though
seductive, the colonial archive must be breached if one wants to
begin another reclaiming of Sarah’s historiography. She suggests
alternate spaces of memory and wisdom in “old, other ways of
knowing and remembering in order to practice an ethic of care”
9780230117792_02_int.indd 12 6/20/2011 1:31:06 PM

Introduction 13
(2011, 32) around Sarah Baartman’s personhood. Yvette Abrahams

radically positions the reader in the Khoisan world of Sarah’s
beginnings through her recollections of planning the Khoisan
traditional garden, an integral aspect of the new Sarah Baartman
Remembrance Center in South Africa. She insists that for Sarah to
be understood as a Khoisan woman, the reader must walk along
the plants, colors, and scents that were indigenous to the setting
that Sarah would have grown up in. Hershini Bhana Young takes
on the difficult task of discussing slavery in South Africa, encour-
aging an alternative interpretation of acts of agency on the part
of slaves and Sarah Baartman. Gabeba Baderoon creates new lan-
guage around notions of private and intimate spaces not only for
Sarah Baartman but also for black women who face the historical
legacy of slavery and oppression. Sheila Smith McKoy ends the
section with a provocative look at pornography and the infusion of
erotic desire in how the Baartman narrative has been constructed
over time.
Desiree Lewis and Ilaria Oddenino engage in a conversa-
tion over the readings of various nonfictional and fictional texts
(namely Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks) providing a provocative way
of constructing language around agency, personhood, and author-
ity. Z’étoile Imma applies new understandings of Sarah’s historiog-
raphy through the investigation of scientific racism applied to the
Khoisan people in Bessie Head’s Maru and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our
Sister Killjoy. Imma produces an informed, critical look at how
Sarah’s life has been incorporated into various narratives of African
womanhood. Karlien van der Schyff discusses the gender disparity
in the European “freak” show exhibitions of the nineteenth cen-
tury through a textured discussion on Sarah Baartman and Clicko,
the “Wild Dancing Bushman.” She concludes that though African
personhood was a commodity that was readily accessible for exhi-
bition and entertainment in Europe, the manner in which these two
people from South Africa were advertised, treated, and exhibited
rested solely on their gender. Lastly, I close the collection with a
discussion around the media images and blog spaces that “dis-
sected” Michele Obama during the Obama presidential campaign.
The essays here are wide ranging in how each contributor selects to
spell Sarah’s name, in how they address the various literary texts,
and in how they position themselves in the face of the archives and
“authenticity.” The link is the fact that at all times there is in an
9780230117792_02_int.indd 13 6/20/2011 1:31:06 PM

insistence on seeing Sarah’s humanity as private and sacred and on

asking questions of those who will not see her humanity.
It is this quest for a liberatory discourse on African and Diasporic
women’s bodies that this book seeks to address. Culminating with
Sarah Baartman’s exploitation in nineteenth-century Europe, English
and French scientists (especially Cuvier) solidified dehumanizing
concepts about African womanhood. Placed on a stage, Baartman
became for many the representation of all black women: deviant,
hypersexualized, and lacking. Upon her death in Paris, Cuvier’s
monograph established a language of racism and sexism that would
be used in the descriptions of black women’s bodies for 200 years.
The story of Sarah Baartman is that of black women across land
and time. No one can speak for Sarah Baartman. However, today
African and Diasporic women can apply the knowledge of her story
as active agents in how they participate in the exhibition and repre-
sentation of their bodies in the twenty-first century.
Notes
1. I am speaking specifically about African and Diasporic women here.
2. In Orientalism, Edward Said contends that Orientalism “has less to do with
the Orient than it does with ‘our’ [Western] world” (1978, 12). In creating
this exotic/different “Other,” this approach is a mental and social process
used to gain knowledge—and thereby power—over the Orient. Essentially,
Said’s polemic regarding Orientalism is the recognition of the fact that “to
have . . . knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over
it” (1978, 32) to the extent that Occidental “knowledge” of the Orient
becomes the Orient. Additionally, this body of knowledge, or discourse, “is
best grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitation of thought [rather]
than . . . a positive doctrine” (1978, 42), which eventually limits personal
experience and any development toward a “genuine” understanding of other
cultures outside of the metropole. Othering, according to Said, is a psycho-
logical activity expressed in the knowledge/power relationship insofar as
knowledge is based on observation of contrast and is expressed through a
syntax demanding exclusivity, which intrinsically constructs an “Other,”
through which to define difference.” (www.clcwebjounral.lib.purdue.edu).
3. See Yvette Abrahams, “The Great Long National Insult: Science, Sexuality
and the Khoisan in the 18th and 19th Century,” Agenda 32 (1997): 34–48;
Yvette Abrahams, “Colonialism, Dysfunction and Dysjuncture: Sarah
Baartman’s Resistance (remix),” Agenda 58 (2000).
4. See The London Times, November 24–26, 1810, The Morning Chronicle,
The Examiner, and The Spectator November 1810 for similar reports.
9780230117792_02_int.indd 14 6/20/2011 1:31:06 PM

Part One
The Archive: Disrupting

the Colonial Narrative
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 15 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM

9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 16 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM
Chapter One
“Body” of Evidence: Saartjie

Baartman and the Archive
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
I live to tell the story

of your futile efforts
to silence me.
Diana Ferrus, The Neverending Story, 1810–2002
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to oth-

ers. Their attention was liberation, running over my body suddenly
abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I
thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
When I first saw her I thought that she was beautiful. No. That is
understating it. I thought she was the ideal—ample hips, a gener-
ous bosom—the kind of woman I had wanted to be when I was
five years old. I saw women like that everywhere: carrying babies
on their backs; crossing the street with loads on their heads; sitting
in chairs on their verandahs watching the world pass by; laughing
at the corner of a dusty road; arguing with husbands at the store—
all this while never looking harried or hurried. When I grow up,
I thought to myself, I will look like these women and just like
them I will be happy in the world. I too will stand under the shade
of a jacaranda tree my left arm akimbo, a stick of grass in my
mouth, my right hand gesturing to shoo a fly—mistress of all I
surveyed. Nothing would make me happier, the five-year-old me
thought, than to one day be a woman with ample hips and a gener-
ous bosom. To be beautiful. To be a sight to behold.
But when I did grow into the woman I had idealized as a child
I was sorely disappointed. What had once been ample and gener-
ous was now just “fat.” What I thought was ideal was now a tall
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 17 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM

18 Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
and thin woman with nothing ample or generous about her. My

savannah-raised body had become something I could not come to
terms with. I had forgotten about all those women I had idolized
as a child. And then one day I turned the page of a book and there
she was—Saartjie Baartman1—and before I could even think oth-
erwise I thought she was beautiful. She was beautiful just like
those women of my childhood, the women who were there long
before I encountered the women in Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and
Glamour.
Yes, I admit it, when I first saw Saartjie Baartman—naked,
looking directly at me—I saw a woman full of grace. It was only
when I started reading the text beneath the image that I real-
ized the picture pointed to a body in pain, a body shamed, and a
body violated. Horrible and unspeakable things had happened to
this body before and after the image had been painted. It turned
out that the scene I encountered was not a thing of beauty after
all. The more I read (and there was a lot to read about Saartjie
Baartman), the woman that I had encountered gradually left the
scene and all that remained was a body, a body of evidence. Here
was a body, which although subaltern, seemed to speak not only
for itself, but for women, especially brown women, everywhere.
Saartjie Baartman’s body told the story of how brown women had
for centuries suffered emotional, physical, and epistemic violence
at the hands of white men, history, and science.
As I read what others had to say about Saartjie Baartman’s body
and its legacy I found myself asking: but is this the only way to
encounter this body—as a marker of something negative? Why did
we have to see her body only in response to the way the Europeans
of the nineteenth century who had peered, jeered, humiliated, and
violated and later dissected her had? What about other ways of
seeing her? For example, what about the way I had seen her as an
ideal when I first encountered her? Could we not start there, with
something positive? If not necessarily as an ideal, which is in itself
a problematic concept, then at least start with seeing her body as
something beautiful and full of grace. However, I cannot ignore
the problem that even this positive approach occasions—and that
is the primacy of the body. I realize that I too had encountered her
as a body—focusing on her ample hips and her generous bosom—
not as a woman, not as a person. What about the woman? Why
is she so elusive? Why does she seem to disappear as her body
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 18 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM

“Body” of Evidence 19
takes center stage yet again? Is it possible to recuperate Saartjie

Baartman the person, or is she forever lost in the many perfor-
mances that her body enters?
Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais2 do well to remind us that there
is a difference between the woman they call Sara Baartman and
her bodily performance, The “Hottentot Venus.” However, it is
also worth remembering that it was Saartjie Baartman who per-
formed The Hottentot Venus—that there was a woman behind the
body. Saartjie Baartman did not become The Hottentot Venus; she
simply performed The Hottentot Venus. It is this performance that
makes the continued elusiveness of this woman something worth
thinking about. Scully and Crais make a worthy effort of retriev-
ing Sara Baartman, trying to find in the archives a woman who
lived, loved, and suffered before becoming The Hottentot Venus.
However, this Sara Baartman seems too shaped by the archive, and
by extension (Euro) history. I strongly suspect that before there
was a Saartjie Baartman, or a Sara Baartman, there was a woman
with a past, that is, a woman who had lived through events that
shaped her life, some of which were written down and entered in
the archive, but most of which simply happened and in time were
forgotten. It is this woman with a past who remains elusive. It is
of this woman that I wonder what, if anything, should, or can, be
done with her.
Recent scholarship on Saartjie Baartman (and here I will be
looking particularly at the work of Yvette Abrahams, 3 Zine
Magubane,4 and Sadiah Qureshi5) has called for a better con-
textualization of her story, criticizing earlier scholarship, particu-
larly the work done by Richard Altick6 and Sander Gilman,7 for
doing with words and images what Georges Cuvier had done with
a knife: dis(re)member8 Saartjie Baartman. Many earlier scholars
and artists, even those with the best intentions, tended to overde-
termine and overemphasize Baartman’s assumed sexual and racial
alterity because they used the politics of their own time as a lens
through which to read her body. As a result, her body became
the site of much contestation and negotiation over twentieth-
century issues about race and sexuality. According to Abrahams,
Magubane, and Qureshi, this dis(re)membering effectively
removed Baartman from history and treated her as an ahistori-
cal object upon which and through which questions, arguments,
and theories of racial and gender difference could be (de)posited.
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 19 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM

Laura Callahan9 visually represents this scholastic violence when

she writes Baartman’s name (itself a site of much contestation) as
Sara(h) Ba(a)rtman(n) and in this way makes visible the contin-
ued dis(re)membering of Baartman’s body that takes place in the
scholarly attempts to re-member her. All of this begs the question
of how and why it came to a pass that a scholarship dedicated to
righting/writing the wrongs done to Baartman’s body itself came
to commit these wrongs?
Zine Magubane cites Sander Gilman’s “Black Bodies, White
Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late
Nineteenth- Century Art, Medicine, and Literature” as the genesis
for a theoretical treatment of Baartman that focuses “obsessively
on [her] body and its difference” (2001, 817). Magubane suggests
that even as these scholars argue that race is socially constructed,
“they valorize the very ground of biological essentialism they pur-
port to deconstruct” (2001, 817). By failing to problematize and
contextualize the very idea of “blackness” and interrogate “what
social relations determined which people counted as Black, and
for which people did Blacks become icons of sexual difference
and why” (2001, 817), these scholars, according to Magubane,
fail to realize that “Hottentots” were not even considered black
in the nineteenth century and therefore tend to create a geneal-
ogy of “othering” the black female body in which Baartman is
the progenitor. For Magubane, this “othering” effectively removes
Baartman from the historical moment in which she lived, where
her body may not have been seen as black.
In a similar vein, Sadiah Qureshi criticizes earlier scholarship
for ahistoricizing Baartman by treating her exhibition as though
it was a unique occurrence, when in reality Baartman was just one
of the many humans, animals, and plants that were trafficked to
Europe for display of their singular qualities. Qureshi points out
that “Baartman’s value lay in her perceived uniqueness as a rare
live specimen of the exotic” (2004, 235), and that her exhibition
and commodification were more analogous to animal importa-
tion than to the transatlantic slave trade. Therefore, scholars who
do not focus “upon the material processes involved in Baartman’s
objectification, exhibition, and politicization” (2004, 233), and
choose instead to focus on her race for the sake of twentieth-
century identity politics, run the risk of treating blackness as
historically timeless. Qureshi argues that since Regency London
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was populated by black people, it was not Baartman’s blackness

that marked her as different but, rather, her Khoikhoi ethnicity.
Qureshi believes that if the only way we understand Baartman’s
exhibition is as the beginning of the process that inscribes “black”
as different, ugly, and sexually deviant, we lose sight of the mate-
rial practices that determined what qualified as exceptional, odd,
or uncommon enough to be part of imperial collections and pub-
lic performance. In other words if “blackness” was the attraction
then there would have been no need to look to far and distant
lands for specimens and performers of blackness since London
already had a significant number of blacks. Therefore, there
must have been more to Baartman’s exhibition than the color
of her skin. According to Qureshi, it was the abolitionists who
objected to Baartman’s exhibition then and it is scholars now who
made Baartman’s tale political and different. Both Qureshi and
Magubane believe that it is this failure of scholarship to contextu-
alize Baartman that has led to her stature as “a modern cultural
icon” (Qureshi 2004, 234). As Magubane puts it, “Thus, in the
final analysis, the theoretical lapses of contemporary social scien-
tists, rather than the actions of nineteenth-century pseudoscien-
tists, are the ones that threaten to finally succeed in transforming
‘the Hottentot Venus’ into the central nineteenth-century icon for
racial and sexual difference between the European and the Black”
(2001, 832).
Both Magubane and Qureshi argue that placing Baartman
within her proper historical context will effectively de- center race,
sexuality, and difference in studies about her life. When one con-
siders that until very recently most accounts of Baartman’s story
began in 1810, when she left what was then the Cape Colony and
arrived in England, it is not surprising that very little, if anything,
was mentioned about Baartman’s life prior to 1810, that is, her
life in the Cape Colony where, presumably, she was seen largely
as “same” and not sexually or racially different. The reason often
given for these lacunae in earlier accounts is lack of written evi-
dence. Most scholars lamented that since there were no written
records of Baartman’s life prior to her encounter with Europe,
nothing can be known about her life in Africa.
However, some scholars have not let the sparseness of written
documents deter them from tracing out Baartman’s earlier, pre-
1810 life.10 Yvette Abrahams strives to place Baartman within
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her (proper) historical context. In her analysis of the abolition-

ists’ trial against Hendrik Cezar, The Hottentot Venus’s show
manager, Abrahams paints a picture of Baartman as a Khoikhoi
woman being questioned by European men and responding to
them the only way she knew how, that is, through the lens of
Khoisan-European relations in the Cape Colony. Instead of tak-
ing Baartman’s “testimony” at face value, Abrahams recontex-
tualizes the question of Baartman’s agency by analyzing how
Khoisan-European relations in the Cape Colony might have had
something to do with the puzzling and ambiguous ways in which
Baartman responded to questions put forward to her regarding
her free will and independence during the trial. When framed
thus by Abrahams, it is easy to appreciate that Baartman might
not have understood that her questioners wanted her “real” opin-
ion, she might have thought they wanted her to say what they
wanted to hear. According to Abrahams if we fail to see how
Baartman’s life in the Cape Colony influenced her experiences
in Europe then we run the risk of “using and abusing the history
of Sara Bartman, much as her body was abused [in the] last cen-
tury” (1996, 98). Abrahams suggests that scholarship regarding
Baartman should always be cognizant of the social and politi-
cal milieu of the Cape Colony in which Baartman lived before
becoming a European sensation.
Like Abrahams, Magubane, and Qureshi, Laura Callahan calls
for a better handling of Baartman and worries that if scholars are
not careful, they will simply continue the tradition begun by Georges
Cuvier and other pseudoscientists of “searching for truth in the dis-
membered minutiae of discourses, bodies, and ideas” (2006, 152).
Callahan calls for scholarship “to remove the image of the racial
other from the realm of the aesthetic and return to it the dignity
and respect accorded to all human beings” (2006, 12). Citing Diana
Ferrus’s poem “I’ve Come to Take You Home,” Callahan suggests
that all artists and scholars should emulate the poem’s “ethic of care
[which] disrupts a racist ideology predicated on ideals of rational
observation and examination by focusing on the ideals of empathy
rather than of rationalist knowledge” (2006, 144):
I have come to wrench you away,

away from the poking eyes of the man-made monster
who lives in the dark with his clutches of imperialism
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 22 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM

who dissects your body bit by bit,

who likens your soul to that of Satan
and declares himself the ultimate God!
I have come to soothe your heavy heart,
I offer my bosom to your weary soul.
I will cover your face with the palms of my hands,
I will run my lips over the lines in your neck,
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you
and I will sing for you,
for I have come to bring you peace.
According to Callahan, “Only in respecting the boundaries of the

body and dealing with it by respecting its integrity and under-
standing its ‘opaqueness’ can we begin to see that the source of the
knowledge we seek is in the culture and the ethics of exploitation
developed by a system of positivist racial exploration” (2006, 154–
155). The work done by Abrahams, Magubane, and Qureshi to
better contextualize Baartman’s story problematizes our eagerness
to identify “with Baartman as an ancestral self and [to see] her
treatment as representative of the negativity of modern depictions
of black sexuality” (Qureshi 2004, 250), and therefore makes us
begin to respect the “opaqueness” of her body.
As provocative as their critiques are, neither Abrahams,
Magubane, nor Qureshi interrogate this phenomenon of
re-essentializing Baartman beyond stating that it is the product
of contemporary identity politics. Therefore, it is not altogether
clear how a better contextualization of Baartman that uses the
same archive that was invested in “othering” her will be able to
help us practice an “ethic of care.” By focusing on the archive,
we begin to see how and why it is that a scholarship dedicated
to righting/writing the wrongs done to Baartman’s body came to
commit these wrongs itself.
As much as I agree that Baartman’s story has to be better con-
textualized, I believe this contextualization, as it has been mapped
out thus far, relies too heavily on, and is therefore limited by,
the archive: that collection of written records that are selected,
classified, catalogued, recorded, and stored. The reason why
most scholars begin Baartman’s story in 1810 has already been
stated above but begs repeating here; it is because this is when
the most substantial archive regarding her body begins—Dutch
Cape Colony records, advertisements for The Hottentot Venus
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 23 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM

show, court transcripts and Cuvier’s published scientific findings.

It is, therefore, tempting to think that perhaps the racial focus
on Baartman that Abrahams, Magubane, and Qureshi point to
as being limiting and limited is such because the archive itself is
limiting and limited. After all, the archive we use to contextu-
alize Baartmann is an archive that was “developed by a system
of positivist racial exploration” (Callahan 2006, 155). Therefore,
concentration on the archive not only limits the scope of our anal-
ysis of the Baartman phenomenon because it does not allow us to
entertain the possibility of other ways of knowing and coming to
knowledge of the past, but it also hampers our attempts to prac-
tice an “ethic of care.” We become so absorbed in/with the archive
that we begin to think only in its terms. As such, we leave many
questions unasked and unanswered. We are implicated within the
archive’s system and that is why it is imperative that we inter-
rogate the archive and our own relationship to it. Without this
interrogation of the archive it is not possible to practice an “ethic
of care” because the lens through which we are looking is always
already an “othering” lens.
Without critically interrogating the archive itself, we run the risk
of arresting our own development, we are trapped in a moment
of response, that is, we are always responding to what is in the
archive and never allowing ourselves to think “outside,” “around,”
and “through” it. So that even as we speak of how the archive
violated Baartman’s body and by extension black female bodies
in general, in that same breath we say of Baartman, as T. Denean
Sharpley-Whiting11 does, that she was “weighed down by her
abundant buttocks” (1999, 18) and went about “literally carry-
ing her fortune behind her” (1999, 18). We violate Baartman all
over again. Barbara Chase-Riboud even goes so far as to speculate
that perhaps Baartman’s death was caused by her being trapped
by her huge hips in a bathtub. Moments like these cannot help but
evoke the provocative question that Audre Lorde poses in her essay
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”:
“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used
to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” Lorde’s response
to this question is one we should always keep in mind: “It means
that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and
allowable” (1984, 110–111). It is for this reason that we need to
escape the confines of the archive.
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 24 6/20/2011 1:31:47 PM

Escaping the archive is not as simple as it sounds. The archive

is alluring; it beckons scholars and artists with its presence; its
“proofs,” its tangibility, and its matter. It seems to be always
already there. It gives us a sense of security. It is precisely because
of its charismatic nature that we need to interrogate, not only the
archive itself, but also our own involvement with it. It is because
of its seemingly all-encompassing power that we need to test the
limits of the archive. We can start by asking, as Magubane does,
“why this woman has been made to function in contemporary
academic debates as the preeminent example of racial and sexual
alterity” (2001, 830). Qureshi answers this question by stating that
“enough is known about Baartman to individualize her—she is far
from being an anonymous skeleton whose plight we might pity.
Instead she is a named person, and this facilitates a sense of iden-
tification with her as an ancestor, or empathy with her treatment
as a human” (2004, 249). However, the reason why Baartman
holds the position she does in the scholarly and artistic imagina-
tion is not only because of the substantial archive prompted by her
body after her encounter with Europe but also because of what the
scholars and artists themselves bring to the archive.
Achille Mbembe informs us that “through archived documents,
we are presented with pieces of time to be assembled, fragments of
life to be placed in order, one after the other, in an attempt to for-
mulate a story that acquires its coherence through the ability to craft
links between the beginning and the end. A montage of fragments
thus creates an illusion of totality and continuity” (2002, 20). The
archive is merely a product of our composition; thus the Baartman
we encounter within the archive is our creation just as much as she
is a product of Cuvier. And this is why most scholars and artists, not
quite able to escape the legacy of an archive built on the “ethics of
exploitation” and their own contemporary race and gender politics,
write Baartman as somehow same and somehow different.
Not only do we read Baartman as always already different, we
also think that she is “speaking” her difference, exhibiting her
“otherness” so that even as we seek to right/write the wrongs we
feel were done to her body, we are anchored in its alterity. This
is why most earlier and some recent scholarship seems to be tell-
ing the same story, only from different angles; the story of how
Saartjie Baartman’s body came to be an example of sexual and
racial difference. However, this concern with alterity had virtually
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 25 6/20/2011 1:31:47 PM

nothing to do with Saartjie Baartman the person, and everything

to do with those who saw her body as different. The fact that
even the best and most well-intentioned scholarship cannot seem
to see past this difference speaks to how the “master’s concerns”
have become our concerns. Mbembe sees this as having something
to do with the archive that creates “the community of time, the
feeling according to which we would all be heirs to a time over
which we might exercise the rights of collective ownership” (2002,
21). This imagined co-ownership of time requires the death of the
author. The selected work in being archived is dispossessed of its
author, which brings the work into the public domain where it can
be consulted. The original author haunts the archive to be sure,
as Georges Cuvier does, but he is silenced by the historian, artist,
and scholar who speak through him in order to establish their
authority. In this way the original author’s concerns continue to
be our concerns, thereby we continue to focus on the “othering”
narrative.
This “othering” narrative is so appealing because as Mbembe
points out, “The final destination of the archive is . . . always situ-
ated outside its own materiality, in the story that it makes pos-
sible” (2002, 21). It is not that the archive has no limits because as
Mbembe states the archives “have no meaning outside the subjec-
tive experience of those who come to use them” (2002, 23). The
power of the archive is contingent upon who owns them, who
puts them together, who is allowed to access them, who reads
and interprets them, and who makes what is found in them pub-
lic. This subjective experience, according to Mbembe, reveals the
limits of the archives, which are useless and superfluous in and of
themselves. Therefore, the fault is not in the archive, but in our-
selves because we do not realize that we give the archive its lim-
itless power. The “othering” narrative persists only because we
want to tell the story of our own encounter with a positivist and
racist episteme, archive, and history that “others” us. The reason
why Baartman’s “othering” narrative is appealing is because it
makes the scholars’ and artists’ own “othering” stories possible to
tell; this is how we have chosen to “empathize” with Baartman’s
story. The problem with empathy as practiced within the racist
and positivist archive designed around Baartman’s body is that
instead of empathizing with Baartman’s experience and suffer-
ing (if such a thing is indeed possible), we, in keeping with the
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 26 6/20/2011 1:31:47 PM

archive’s “ethics of exploitation,” use Baartman’s story to tell us

about our own present.
Janell Hobson says of her first encounter with the image of
Baartman’s “disembodied and dissected genitalia—preserved in
a jar filled with formaldehyde fluid” (2005, 4) that “there was no
effective language to emote or even intellectualize the body poli-
tic, as it relates to Baartman’s legacy” (2005, 4). And yet most of
us, after we first come across images of Baartman’s body, struggle
to tell its story, to contextualize it not only so that we can better
understand how such a thing could even happen but also to try
to understand how it continues to happen in more subtle, but no
less real, ways today. In other words, we use what happened to
Baartman’s body to try and understand what happened and is
continuing to happen to our own bodies. Baartman’s story allows
us to speak the unspeakable. When it comes to Baartman not
only do we make the subaltern speak, we make her speak on our
behalf and this is a violence that is more than just epistemic. So
for example, when I encountered Baartman’s image that first time
and reduced her to hips that I thought were ample and breasts
that I thought were generous, what I was really seeing was what
mattered to me, what told my story, what made me remember
my encounter with those images in Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and
Glamour that told me that I was not beautiful. I did not see
Saartjie Baartman at all.
Since the limit and the power of the archive rest in those who
use it, we need to move past the moment of encounter, we need
to remember outside the limits of the archive, we need to think
beyond a positivist and often racist episteme, and in short, we
need to tell our stories in old ways made new. We can start by
reclaiming who we were before our own encounter with the sys-
tem that “othered” us. What did we know then? How can we
make it matter now? For instance, I can remember that once
“beautiful” to me were those women standing with arms akimbo
under the jacaranda trees. This type of re-membering calls for
a more personal, indeed subjective, way of knowing and that is
exactly what is needed. A way of knowing that does not require
proofs, a way of knowing that respects the “opaqueness” of the
body, a way of knowing that is comfortable with the unknown,
the forgotten, and the silenced: a way of knowing that allows us
to realize the limits of the archive. For, as Audre Lorde reminds
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 27 6/20/2011 1:31:47 PM

us, “We have built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation
and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be
altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions that are
a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dis-
mantle the master’s house” (1984, 123). The problem of course,
as Lorde is well aware, is that adopting the master’s concerns
(by adopting his archive) has made us think only of dismantling
his house (deconstructing the archive). What we need is to build
new houses that are built upon different ways of knowing and
coming to knowledge and different ways of thinking about and
remembering the past.
Our old, other ways of knowing and remembering continue to
exist alongside the archive; our pasts have always existed alongside
history. To pretend otherwise is to not only write ourselves into an
intellectual cul-de-sac, it is also to do ourselves, our pasts, and our
futures a violent disservice. As we look back at the past and try to
come to terms with the silence of those made subaltern by the systems
of slavery, colonization, capitalism, and patriarchy, it is imperative
to always remember that these systems were systems, to borrow a
most provocative phrase from Ranajit Guha, of “dominance with-
out hegemony.” We have always known something “otherwise,”
something “different,” something that “problematizes,” hence our
always having been perceived as threat, as killjoy. If instead of ask-
ing, as most scholars do, what Saartjie Baartman’s body can “tell
us about our own positions of racial and sexual disadvantage (or
privilege) in a world shaped by global white masculinist imperial-
ism” (Hobson 2005, 24) we instead recuperate (these) other ways of
remembering and knowing that are not limited by the archive then
we take a small, but giant leap toward practicing an “ethic of care.”
For example, when I encounter Saartjie Baartman in the archive I
can remember those older ways of knowing what was beautiful and
use that as my starting point.
You may very well wonder now that I have reached the end
of my tale if there is any way we can rescue Saartjie Baartman
from the archive. The answer is no. To say her name is already
to speak about the woman in the archive, because this is her
first recorded name. Saartjie Baartman is already a woman with
a history. What is important to stress in Saartjie Baartman’s
case is the fact that what we have is not a “person” as such but,
rather, the imagined totality of a person pieced together from
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dis(re)membered parts in order to be re-membered. We tend to

think that the archive points to the “presence” of a woman, a
person, when in fact what it points to is her absence. The woman
we are seeking is disappeared by her many performances—on
stage, on trial, on the receiving end of a knife—and what appears
are her “performance remains” (Young 2005, 57)—the adver-
tisements, the pamphlets, the testimony from the court case, the
mutilated and preserved body on display in the museum. We
mistakenly treat the traces that make up the archive as having
been left behind by this woman even as we mention that they
were left behind by European men who were invested in writing
her off as “other” and “different.” The woman with a past, the
woman whose original name we do not know, the woman whose
life’s events we do not know because they were never recorded
and have been forgotten, the woman I suspect we all want to
behold when we encounter Saartjie Baartman in the archive will
always, thankfully, elude us. Even as scholars work hard to find
out more about this woman with a past and turn her into Saartjie
Baartman, Sarah Bartmann, Sara Bartman, or whatever other
name suits, as they place her in the archive, I trust and hope that
there will always be something of this woman with a past that
remains . . . always just out of reach. For what I think becomes
apparent when we practice an ethic of care is that not everything
is knowable, nor should we want it to be.
Notes
1. I use the name Saartjie Baartman because, to the best of my knowledge,
this is the name that she enters the historical record with. However,
whenever I mention what others have written about her I will respect-
fully keep their choice of how to address her. I am aware that this will
be confusing, but it is a confusion that goes to the heart of the chapter’s
argument as I hope will become clear.
2. Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot
Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008).
3. Yvette Abraham, “Disempowered to Consent,” South African Historical
Journal 35 (1996).
4. Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism,
Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the Hottentot Venus,”
Gender and Society 15:6 (2001).
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 29 6/20/2011 1:31:47 PM

5. Sadiah Qureshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman, The Hottentot Venus,”

Science History 17 (2004).
6. Richard Altick is often credited with having brought Saartjie Baartman
to the attention of twentieth- century scholars, theorists, and writers
in his book The Shows of London. In the book he starts out by stat-
ing that when the shows of London began there was no “causal con-
nection between putative country of origin and a freak’s freakishness”;
the link was created by the showmen who capitalized on selling the
“freakishness” of individuals as the “freakishness” of the entire race
they belonged to. Therefore, when Saartjie Baartman entered this world
and was re- created as a “freak” so too were all the Hottentots that she
synechdochally represented re- created as freaks in the social imaginary
of London. Altick is often charged with taking these nineteenth- century
actions and opinions at face value and not critiquing or challenging
them.
7. Gilman traces the link in the nineteenth- century artwork and literature
between “the icon of the Hottentot and the icon of the prostitute” and
finds that different tropes were used to sexualize the white female pros-
titute, and that most of these, like the black servant in Edouard Manet’s
Olympia, were tied to the idea of an inherent black female hypersexual-
ity. When Saartjie Baartman became a sensation in London she was seen
as already hypersexual. It did not help matters that traveler’s accounts
had for the longest time told of highly oversexed “Hottentots” that
even copulated with apes. And so it was that Saartjie Baartman, The
“Hottentot Venus,” came to represent black female sexuality in general,
and because her sexuality was seen as abnormal she represented patho-
logical sexuality as well. As such the body of Saartjie Baartman as The
“Hottentot Venus” came to “write” prostitution and sexuality on the
white female body.
8. Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus (New York: Theatre Communications Group,
1990).
9. Laura Callahan, Deciphering Race (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 2006).
10. In addition to Yvette Abrahams, some South African researchers and
scholars such as Sharad Master and Mansell Upham have mined the
archives for evidence of Baartman’s life and history in the Cape Colony.
Outside South Africa, the recent collaborative work of Pamela Scully
and Clifton Crais has attempted to do the same.
11. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1999).
9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 30 6/20/2011 1:31:47 PM

Chapter Two
“My Tongue Softens On That Other

Name”: Poetry, People, and Plants in
Sarah Bartmann’s Natural World
Yvette Abrahams / Khib Omsis
Let us go through it the way we feel comfortable

Let us deal with our pain the way we ought to
According to us . . .
(Primrose 2003, 44–45)
Introduction
In order to be safe, I think I had best give what I am doing its
own name. Let me, like Audre Lorde did in Zami, call this a
biomythography. Like Lorde, I am doing it for the same pur-
pose. I wish to uncover from racist patriarchal myths a story of
wholeness:
Woman forever. My body a living representation of other life older lon-

ger wiser. The mountains and valleys, trees, rocks. Sand and flowers
and water and stone. Made in earth. (Lorde 1982, xvi)
Lorde was quite clear why a new genre was necessary. She spoke
the exile experience when she said:
Once home was a far way off, a place I had never been to but knew
well out of my mother’s mouth . . . This now, here, was a space, some
temporary abode, never to be considered forever nor totally binding
nor defining, no matter how much it commanded in energy and atten-
tion. For if we lived correctly and with frugality, looked both ways
before crossing the street, and then someday we would arrive back in
the sweet place, back home. (1982, 4–5)
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 31 6/20/2011 1:32:51 PM

32 Yvette Abrahams / Khib Omsis
Exile is not just a physical experience. It can be of many dimen-

sions; spiritual, social, intellectual, etc. I have suggested elsewhere
that those of us who have been enslaved, almost exterminated, col-
onized, and hated are all in a sense exiled (Abrahams 2000, 275–
276). I would suggest further that academic analysis, grounded
as it is in the colonizing epistemology known, ironically as the
“Enlightenment” is itself a perilous place to be. A liberatory his-
tory, then, to be truly revolutionary has to in some sense lead us
back home. It has to be a map. Jewelle Gomez testified to the
extraordinary liberatory power of what Lorde was doing:
In labeling Zami a “biomythography” Audre emphasizes the connec-

tion to storytelling—the act in which the story and its teller, the per-
former, become part of the story, not just the conveyance. And the tale,
no matter its actual scale, can become larger than life. The rhythms
of Zami deliberately evoke the energy of a legend related aloud, in an
intimate setting, like her mother’s kitchen. (Quoted in Lorde 1982, x)
Now, I am all for black women taking over the entire house, gar-
den, and street. But I think that in order to do that, we need to
start where we feel comfortable. We need to feel at home. And
the kitchen is where history has placed us. I need to say a bit more
about this metaphorical kitchen, though. See, it really exists. As
Alexis De Veaux warned:
The fact that Lorde called the work a “biomythography,” speaking

publicly to its blending of truth, mythmaking, and social history, seems
to get lost in her reader’s desires for an iconic Lorde. (2006, 412)
Like Lorde, the map I seek has to reflect the true way, otherwise
we shall lose. Again like Lorde, I believe that this emotional truth
is part of the real-world reflection. The worldview Lorde’s genre
reflects is that we, the storytellers, the performers who are part of
the story, have to embody the story and make it real. This does not
make us perfect. In fact, this process of keeping it real makes us
singularly scarred and weather-beaten candidates for guruhood.
Because, as has often been said about Lorde:
Each part of the self she constructs is based on a sense of corpo-

real materiality that she attempts to render in both her prose and
poetry . . . As a writer, Lorde is acutely aware of this indissolubility: She
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 32 6/20/2011 1:32:51 PM

“My Tongue Softens On That Other Name” 33
perceives her body as a text and is conscious of her texts as emerging

from her body . . . Although embodying oneself and naming one’s sub-
ject positions are not perfectly synonymous, they overlap in Lorde’s
writing because of her awareness of her presence in Western society as
both experience and sign. (Morris 2002, 1)
I would add though that this position of the body as sign is not
purely a reflection of our position as colonized beings, but as
Gomez explains, it a re- connection to a very ancient story. It is not
just an antithesis but also a positive move rooted in an authentic
tradition.1 We can draw the map home because it is a place we
already know how to get to. The compass is within us.
Though we know the way, we are not there yet. As with wis-
dom and honesty Khosi Xaba desires to write a poem for Sarah
Baartman:
This poem will sing of the Gamtoos Valley holding imprint of her baby
steps
It will contain rhymes of her friends, her family, her community
...
Conjuring up her wholeness, her voice, her dreams, emotions and
thoughts. (2008, 25–27)
I am starting to believe that perhaps we are not the generation who

shall write the definitive histories of our foremothers. Perhaps, is
it our task instead to prepare the way. At this point, is it not most
important to write the history that is emotionally true? To tell the
story that heals? So I propose a biomythography as an approach to
free up cluttered minds and center confused hearts in preparation
for the history that shall come.
Telling the Story

In her poem My Tongue Softens on the Other Name, Gabeba
Baderoon brilliantly brings alive the tradition of speaking through
plants. As she says:
In my mother’s back yard washing snaps

above chillies and wild rosemary
Kapokbos, cottonwool bush, my tongue softens
on the rosemary’s other name
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Brinjal, red peppers and pawpaw grow

in the narrow channel between
the kitchen and the wall that divides
our house from the Severo’s. At the edge
of the grass by the bedrooms, a witolyf reaches
ecstatically for the power lines. (2005, 31)
Baderoon reestablishes a long history of female poets evoking

the familiar, the home, as the place where we root and find rest.
From this, she has taken the story elsewhere, to food and cuisine
as stories of culture that trace our slave and indigenous female
ancestry through paths that the written hetero-patriarchal, white
supremacist records have thought were silenced. Baderoon redis-
covers authenticity, a sense of identity that we have never lost, at
home washing the beans, but that we in many ways have to yet to
fully establish in the academic world. Under capitalism we have to
find our way to this identity through the soft commonplace speech
of the garden, in the narrow channel between the kitchen and the
wall. It is a good place to start. It has escaped the notice of hege-
monic historians precisely because it falls beneath the radar. It is
too lowly to notice; it partakes in the nature of the everyday, the
daytime life of the kitchen maid in which the master was emphati-
cally not interested.
Starting here, with Baderoon’s other names, I want to take this
story in another direction. I want to keep the language of the slaves
and indigenes, the speaking through allegory and innuendo, with
plenty of space between the lines for the reader. In fact, like kapok-
bos leads us back to the plant and from there brings us to that
which is simple, unquestioned, and healthy for body and soul, I
would like this poetry to take me beyond words, to the world of
plants where no words are necessary. In this I seek to exemplify
balance. I walk away from the academic fashion that preaches that
there is no reality beyond the language to say in womanist fashion
that we can have both, that as our tongues soften on the other
name we don’t have to wonder who we are, or, therefore, how to
understand the pain we have been through. The flowers of kapok-
bos were used to stuff pillows, and there we can lie, in the reality
without which language could not exist. Both must exist for the
other to exist, the one without the other is imbalance, disharmony,
and pretty unrealistic too. As every gardener knows, nature just is,
and will defeat you if you do not accept her ways. Fighting with
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 34 6/20/2011 1:32:51 PM

plants gets you nowhere because they will not listen to you however
much you shout at them. So I seek a soft tongue instead—I read
poetry to them about them that they will appreciate and hopefully
grow sweeter because of it.
Through this philosophy I seek the other Sarah Bartmann, the
one who like the plants lives beyond words, who just is, who will
not be wooed through megalomania (“you cannot exist except
through my language”) or harsh words, but who may perhaps be
seduced to appear (as respectfully one may seduce such a vener-
able ancestor) through soft words and poetry. In this I pay homage
to the way she would have seen the world, not as a place domi-
nated by one species but as a place fully populated by KhoeKhoe
(in its original sense of “people of people”), animal people, and
plant people. Not all of these people had words, yet they commu-
nicated through a rich and full language clearly understood by the
KhoeSan. I will now bring you to a translation.
Auntie Sarah may yet come, because she has a home already. As
Diana Ferrus says in what has become perhaps the most famous
contemporary South African poem:
I’ve come to take you home—

home, remember the veld?
the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees
the air is cool there and the sun does not burn.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones. (1998)
Ferrus brings to Auntie Sarah the sense of crossing waters—the oak

tree is an exotic plant—but also the feeling of ancient peace that
one has to lie under an oak tree to feel. The poem invites the oak
tree to become part of home, thus doing honor to Auntie Sarah’s
life as a crosser of waters. She brings us home; it is home because
the tongue softens on that other name. It is home because it smells
of home. Buchu, protea, and mint are all plants of home, although
this time not a narrow passage in the city but a broad landscape
of endless views, and of course the water in the stream chuckling
sing-songs. The word buchu indeed is so ancient it has survived
in its autochthonous state for centuries, remaining throughout
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 35 6/20/2011 1:32:51 PM

colonialism an unaltered KhoeSan word. The plant is a centrality

of indigenous cultures, its very meaning is medicine, and as such
the plant has given its name to the generic term for healing. Many
plants are buchus that are not, strictly speaking, related, but we
can always distinguish the mother-buchu, so to speak, by its smell,
which is unmistakable. Our children know this smell because a
cupful of it taken every night is said to ward off colds and flu and
keep a child healthy throughout our long, wet Cape winters. If I
offer you buchu; I offer you what Auntie Sarah smelt, you can sit
in her nose and begin to know her, and thus her history, and thus
her pain, and thus her salvation: all through that one sniff, buchu.
Ferrus reaches back through tradition and speaks through plants,
as I aspire to worshipfully do. Ferrus respectfully begs our ances-
tor through poetry to come home to us, to show her face, to rest
on the bed she has made. I think it will be more successful than
dissection in finding Auntie Sarah’s true self.
And this is what I mean: that there is a true self, that beyond our
stories and the stories that we tell about our ancestors. They live
their own lives, hopefully untroubled by us the descendants who
sift through their lives in search for truth. There is a reality beyond
language, or should I say language exists in balance with the real-
ity it describes, and this reality is not our slave. All we can do is
ask nicely, with soft tongues, to see there for a moment. In order
to do that we have to have eyes to see with, we have to have a self,
a person who can access beyond words but also beyond suffering.
Sometimes to tell a story is just to be, as do the plants. Like them,
we have to have an “I” (or is it “we”), which just is. When we
have lost this identity and despair of finding it, the temptation is
to deny that it exists. It is not always possible to be there. Still, the
impossibility of being there is no excuse to pretend that this state
does not exist. There is a reality beyond these restless words. One
could make it manifest by simply planting a garden of the plants
in Ferrus’s poem. The poetry would be plants telling us about a
person.
I found myself firmly in this tradition of truth through plants in
the poem I wrote a decade ago:
Moon wind water rocks speak truth

Air rises buchu scent mid growing trees:
Rose, jasmine, chamomile, mint and KhoeSangoed.
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 36 6/20/2011 1:32:51 PM

Rose for heart’s ease

Jasmine for rest
Chamomile for tranquility
Mint-which both warms and cools—for oneness
KhoeSangoed for home and buchu for spirit:
All speak peace to the girl by the waterside being braided. (2000, 264)
This poem can be manifested. Have a good sniff. History without

words. Smells are the most evocative thing ever. It is said that a
smell can bring back memory in a way that none other of our
senses do. Put like that, it is strange that we have for so long tried
to write history without it. So smell the spell by which I evoked the
young Sarah! Perhaps it shall help you understand her true self.
Perhaps this is a spiritual point. Try to understand a religion that
worshipped all that lives as expression of our Great Creator, who
was lonely and so made Creation to keep her company. So happy
were we to be Created that we could not do other than sing praises,
glory, glory all day long, chopping on rocks, painting walls, plant-
ing, weeding, and feeding other creatures to bring greater hap-
piness to Creator, our Mother. We lived, we ate them; we died,
they ate us. It is the original meaning of communion. What greater
ambition could a KhoeSan have than to become good compost?
Imagine the space in between creation and compost-life-as-a-time
to create poetry. Try to understand Auntie Sarah with those beliefs,
those ambitions, performing the ritual of passing under water to
become a Christian in order to understand this strange new world
we slaves and indigenes found ourselves in. It was a condition of
the !nau that you must have someone who has already been on
the other side to lead you through. Now she leads us, those who
grapple with growth and change.
Try to understand a Creator so generous, she even gave us free
will, even the power to do wrong. Introducing chaos into the equa-
tion, so confident in us, her children, that unpredictability was not
a problem, but a solution: creativity. Does it cast new light on the
forever silenced part of our ancestor’s history: her art, her music,
her dancing? What else could we possibly wish to know about
her, those of us who seek her true self in the world beyond words?
Well, her art may well be lost to us, but her life is here. Her story
says that this space called life is for creation. We have buried her
bones, she is becoming good compost, and all that is left to do is to
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 37 6/20/2011 1:32:51 PM

make poetry. The young Sarah would not understand the anguish
with which her history is treated. The elders would not approve the
battleground which some historians seek to make of her life. In her
culture an olfactory poem could say what needed to be said. The
colonialists sought to enslave her, but in her culture, she walked
through Paris, smelling the stories of these !Urisan2 who stayed
talking, talking, talking all the time, as if they were masters of the
universe and words, the only reality.
Then you will understand that one can grow a garden to make
poetry manifest. I could put a rose geranium (Pelargonium gra-
veolens), a jasmine (Jasminum multipartum), and a few buchu
(Agathosma crenulata) bushes by a pool with chamomile
(Matricaria zuurbergensis) at their feet, below some mint (Mentha
longifolia)3 hugging the waterside and placing above some
KhoeSangoed (Helichrysum petiolare) to drape artistically down
the bank—as it loves to do. If I did this, would you understand
that I wished to say something about Auntie Sarah, that I sought to
recall her to you as a young girl, and that I expressed qualities, life
experiences that it is important that we call to our remembering?
Would you understand this as history? Then suddenly you would
be thinking like the KhoeSan. Then there might be a chance that
you would be able to truly know Auntie Sarah.
I say this because I have promised for a decade that I would write
a book about Auntie Sarah. I said I would write a biography, but I
also said it would be a history written with something of the way
she would have understood the concept of history. I wanted this
book to see the world through Auntie Sarah’s eyes. So I asked her.
I sought her true self and said “Auntie whom I dearly love, grant
me please a dream, a vision of the way you saw your life.” Well,
here I am; I am busy developing the biography—except it is not a
book at all. It is a garden. See, Auntie Sarah would have thought
of nature a little as we think of the grocery store. It is a place to get
food. Except that where we worry about having enough money to
eat she would have thought in terms of abundance, a gift from our
Great Creator for the edification of her children. So a grocery store,
which was a temple, which was also a place of beauty and great
symbolism. Auntie Sarah would not know hunger, either physical
or spiritual, until she came into contact with colonialism.
Auntie Sarah would have walked in a landscape that said
“history” to her. As her people walked from coast to inland and
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inland back to coast, following the change of seasons and leav-

ing the onset of rain behind each time, each name of a place, a
rock, a stone would have spoken to her. Gamtoos, the river of her
birth, was named after her people because it was their heartland.
Touw’s River, the River of Women, was changed to commemo-
rate a battle of KhoeSan women against the onslaught of colo-
nialists. Tratradouws Pass, the Women’s Door, was called by this
name because it was too narrow for the large stock and so the men
walked round the coastal road with the cattle while the women
crossed the high mountain with the small stock—each journey a
river through mountains of (his)tories. This place would have been
famous for the excellence of its thatching reed for huts, the other
place for the exceptionally good quality of its soap bush. At a third
place she would have been warned (every year with regularity) that
the wild garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) grew exceptionally strong here
and so should never be harvested too far out of the rainy season. In
this we learn something about Auntie Sarah’s understanding: that
she valued connectedness. We also learn something about her epis-
temology. For in Khoe pharmacology there is no “magic bullet.”
Instead they thought of medicine as part of what we nowadays
would call a holistic health care approach. The herbs they used for
healing worked in the context of a healthy lifestyle and a peaceful
mind playing “glory” with the cosmos. (This is a fact that is often
forgotten when our plants are ripped out of their environment in
the service of this or that miracle cure.) As with other indigenous
knowledge systems, the KhoeSan would consider the problem of
ill health as a matter of immune system boosting and promoting
balance between body, mind, and society. That is why today some
of our most famous herbs, like cancer bush (Lessertia frutescens)
are called by Western science adaptogenic; they do not contain one
substance that acts against one disease, but a multitude of sub-
stances that together act so as to boost the body’s ability to deal
with stress. In our language, we would say they assist the body to
perform a !nau. When it is done the body has learnt and will not
fall sick from the same disease again. Plants and humans tell the
same story about growth and change through balance.
What this tells us about the way Auntie Sarah thought is that
she would not be likely to consider one solution to one problem.
She would think holistically, looking for root causes of problems
and seeking solutions that would promote system change in the
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 39 6/20/2011 1:32:52 PM

direction of total balance: change balanced by that which is con-

stant, order balanced by chaos/creativity, structure balanced by
fluidity. Her mind would seek patterns, not categories. So that
would be the kind of history I would like to bring to life.
Auntie Sarah would have viewed this landscape as a beauty
salon and also as truth, for she thought of certain trees and plants
as soap, as body oils, as perfumes, and also the embodiment of cer-
tain qualities that spoke as poetry. For instance, one could speak
of the yellowwood (Podocarpus spp.), the elephant and the whale
as the most long-lived of creatures, but then also they become
symbols of wisdom. For long life, when carefully cherished, brings
experience and with it growth and change well changed (that is the
only way I can describe the concept of !nau). The being that goes
through it and is changed is the true self. For Auntie Sarah that
triple combination of tree, land mammal, and sea mammal in itself
or when applied to the life of a human would have spoken volumes
in allegory, poetry, and the act of memory we call history. It would
have said “a life well lived.” It would have said “whole.”
The point I am trying to make is that I understand the craft of
telling history through Auntie Sarah’s eyes as not fully distinguish-
able from gardening the world she lived in. It could not be. She
would have understood the two as married crafts, the way we even
today understand the relationship between poetry and rhythm.
This garden that I am going to plant would speak to her. When it
is done (or as close as a garden ever gets to being done) I will not
feel the need for a book.
Making it Real
I should say that since her funeral in 2002, we have been work-
ing on a project together with the South African Department of
Arts and Culture to build a Center for Remembrance4 next to her
gravesite in Hankie, Eastern Cape. The Sarah Baartman Legacy
Project Memorial Garden to give it its full name is to lie adjacent
to the buildings and walking route that together form the center.
It pleases me to be able to report that this project has come so far
(through three presidents, not to mention three ministers of arts
and culture) that there is a R40 million budget set aside in the
Department of Public Works to build it and the architectural plans
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have at last been approved. Those of you who spend time in the
bureaucratic guerilla struggles will know that is great progress.
The Kouga Municipality, of Cacadu District Municipality,
Eastern Cape Province, has very kindly donated the 87-hectare
farm surrounding the gravesite to the project. It is by a stroke of
great good fortune to find a piece of land that has been left largely
untouched since Auntie Sarah’s time. It probably was, during most
of the nineteenth century, a mission station bought by the resi-
dent KhoeSan, but the land was bit by bit—taken in taxes—and
that is how it came to pass into the ownership of the municipality.
The local KhoeSan have kindly not laid any claim to restitution,
although the farm itself will continue to remain open to the tradi-
tional healers who for centuries have gathered herbs there.
The Center will occupy part of the land. Some of it will be
farmed but most of it will be left for the people to roam and
wander as the KhoeSan did of old. We hope to introduce some
stock too, to be herded, so that the plants can once again thrive
like they should. It is presently sadly undergrazed in places and
overgrazed in others, so the land needs to be taken care of and
restored to its ancient balance of human people, plant people, and
animal people. This will not be easy to manage on such a small
piece of ground, but it is a pleasure to meet such a challenge. The
Legacy Project as a whole is there to pay respect to Auntie Sarah’s
memory, yet an integral part of its design is that it will also serve
as a site for learning and research on indigenous knowledge sys-
tems, arts, and crafts. It will create jobs. This aspect is important
because the people of Hankey, a small farming town, are poor and
mostly unemployed. They work seasonally on the surrounding cit-
rus farms, and it is said of their lives, like so many South African
rural lives, that when you work you are poor and when you don’t
you starve. By creating jobs and opportunities for skill training in
a culture they already know, we are hoping to place the knowledge
of the past in the service of creating better lives today. In particu-
lar, it is important that women gain access to the opportunity to
live and work in a way that empowers them to protect themselves
from violent relationships. Hankey, like the rest of South Africa,
has extremely high rates of substance abuse and gender-based vio-
lence. So the role of the Center in healing the wounds of the past
and giving us hope for the future has had to go beyond what one
normally expects of museums.
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This land of the Center is divided into three parts. The memo-
rial garden is deeply symbolic and meant to be accessible to all. It
is distinctly hedged, thus introducing the notion of boundaries, of
shifting understandings of “inside” and “out” to accommodate
human ecology. The productive garden will be designed around the
harmony of the economics of production and convenience for the
species that live in it, merging gradually into the veld beyond. The
latter two elements can be open to the public, but are not necessar-
ily inviting, as opposed to the memorial garden that is specifically
designed around the needs of humans. This approach divides the
space ecologically into three distinct zones of high, medium, and
low human impact, as well as horticulturally into high, medium,
and low water zones. With experience, it will be possible to make
such a system sustainable.
The overall design of the memorial garden seeks to represent the
different phases of the Moon. Following Witbooi,
[I]t may be concluded that the Khoikhoi worshipped the moon. A

legend was told that the moon sent a louse to the Khoikhoi with the
message: “Go to Men, and tell them, as I die and dying live, so you
shall also die and dying live.” The Moon was therefore associated with
the promise of immortality. Every night when it was full moon or new
moon, the Khoikhoi would sing and dance in worship. (1983, 8)
The circle as the symbol of the full moon had profound religious
and aesthetic significance for the KhoeSan (Abrahams 2000). Thus
the design of the garden is based on this principle, and allows us
to speak of the meaning of circular thinking. The design of the
inner part (the memorial garden) is a circle, bisected by a stream
that forms a semicircle, thus reflecting the moon in its waxing
and waning phases. The stream empties into a circular pool, again
reflecting the full moon. This directs us to think of the three in one
(aspects of the moon as symbol of everlasting life). The concept
of the three-in-one allows us to speak of the underlying philoso-
phy that has consistently underpinned this legacy project, namely
that it seeks to celebrate Sarah Bartmann’s life as an individual, in
the context of her people, within a broader (if uneven) history of
South African communities building nationhood. The notion of
circularity is also reflected in the design of the integrated water
management system for the productive garden. No input of addi-
tional water is required to irrigate the garden, the inlet tank and
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 42 6/20/2011 1:32:52 PM

stream also provides a cleansing system and no dirty water exits

the garden. It is a completely sustainable system.
The introduction of open water in the garden also allows us to
reflect a fundamental aspect of KhoeSan life and spirituality, namely
continuity and change. As water is always itself, it is constant in the
same way that our Great Creator is constant in her/his promise
to us.5 As it is part of every living thing, it represents the way the
spirit of the Divine is present in each of us. Yet as water is part of
every living process, it is also constantly changing. Change, transi-
tion, !nau was a central concept of KhoeSan life and spirituality,
expressed in many ceremonies and traditions. Naturally, a culture
that can rightfully claim to be the oldest culture in the world has
accumulated untold expertise in the fine art of balancing continuity
and change. Essentially, the concept of !nau saw change as a posi-
tive thing, provided that it was done according to custom and true
to our history. In other words, KhoeSan tradition was never frozen
in time but embraced change. The issue was never what we did, but
how we did it. To change according to the principles of !nau was to
do so in a culturally acceptable way. Witbooi observes:
A central concept which must be dealt with is !nau. All the Khoikhoi in
a transitional stage experience !nau . . . The !nau person had to be initi-
ated before he/she accepted into the new group. Only very old men and
old women past the age of childbearing could come into contact with
the !nau person. But even here the precondition had to be met. Only a
person who had experienced the stage of !nau could come into contact
with a !nau person. (1983, 104)
Water, as a symbol of both constancy and change, was a critical

part of !nau rituals (Witbooi 1983, 104–108). Therefore this gar-
den holds the three key elements of a successful !nau: the moon,
as symbol of the Divine Promise; the memory of Auntie Sarah, a
spirit who has successfully (and triumphantly) transited into the
new world and thus may lead us, the liminarians, into a successful
transition; and lastly water, as a cleansing and healing element that
can also lead us by example. Water shows that we can change and
yet be ourselves. In fact, it may be argued that one of the great-
est problems afflicting the KhoeSan today, leading to depression,
conflict, and other symptoms of collective post-traumatic stress
disorder, has been that colonialism, and attempted genocide inter-
fered with our ability to accomplish a successful !nau. The Legacy
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 43 6/20/2011 1:32:52 PM

Project, through its element of redress in this garden, seeks to pro-

vide the elements necessary for a successful !nau, thus contributing
to its stated aim of healing.
In the garden, the stream is bordered on the left hand side by
a path and on the right-hand side by gannabos (Salsola aphylla)
and other economic waterside plants. The path crosses the stream
by a bridge and continues along the boundary of the indigenous
lawn until it reaches the pool. To the left-hand side of the stream it
is proposed that the land be planted up with species native to the
Hankey area, while as one crosses the right hand side the vegetation
changes to indigenous vegetation of the western Cape and lastly, to
exotic plants characteristic of Cape Town and environs in the early
nineteenth century. A special feature here will be a collection of the
old roses which grew in the Cape during Sarah Bartmann’s time,
and I look forward to replicating their uses for perfume, cosmetics,
and eye washes. A walk around the garden from left to right thus
provides a journey through Sarah Bartmann’s natural world from
birth through childhood, teens, and adulthood until her departure
for Britain in 1810. It enables the viewer to see the world through
her eyes. This symbolizes change. Constancy is provided through
olives on the left and sweet thorn on the right, which both cover all
the climactic zones and ecological niches contained in the garden.
The Memorial Garden will contain mainly cosmetic and medic-
inal plants, which is, for the production of soaps and oils, and the
elimination of germs and bacteria. This in the garden’s aspect of
redress, healing, and celebration of the dignity of womanhood.
Bearing in mind the KhoeSan philosophy of holistic health, the
choice of plants symbolizes the necessity for spiritual and emo-
tional health as an important part of physical well-being. Thus
the garden is designed to be beautiful to the eye as well as pleas-
ing to the nose, again as a compliment to Auntie Sarah. Nutrition
is an essential element of health, but only a few edible plants are
included, the bulk being grown in the productive garden where
their needs can be easier accommodated.
Conclusion
I will end just by talking more to you about one tree, the sweet
thorn tree (Acacia karoo). It is a pioneer plant that is fast-growing
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 44 6/20/2011 1:32:52 PM

and will protect the other trees as they grow. Another way of put-
ting it is that the sweet thorn is a leader. It is strong, rugged, and
giving, in fact it is the nature of this tree that it cannot stop itself
from giving. It is a leguminous (pod-bearing) tree, meaning it draws
nitrogen from the air and puts it into the ground. Nitrogen is an
important plant nutrient that is what I mean by the giving nature
of the sweet thorn. It has been estimated that a hectare of sweet
thorn trees will fix up to 250 kg of nitrogen in the ground per year.
This is the equivalent of 2.5 tons of fertilizer that the farmer usu-
ally gets from petroleum mined from the ground (Johnson 1998,
70). In other words, sweet thorn cleans the air, fertilizes the soil,
stores carbon, and leaves the world a better place than she found
it. She leaves the gift by creating an economy of abundance.
Not surprisingly, sweet thorn grows over all of South Africa,
but it is a strong feature of dry regions where little else will grow.
I believe the KhoeSan were fond of planting it wherever they went,
and while it is lovely everywhere it is appreciated best, I feel, against
the majestic landscape of the semidesert Karoo. There, sweet
thorn lines all the river beds, its roots binding the soil, preventing
erosion. Sweet thorn is an extremely palatable tree; the leaves are
good fodder for both large and small stock. Obviously because it is
leguminous the grass grows extra green under it. The flowers feed
bees. The sweet thorn pods can be gathered for stock and is said to
be good feed for chickens since it is high in protein. Humans can
also eat them. The KhoeSan used to make coffee with the beans
but they say it is an acquired taste. You can tap the sap from the
sweet thorn once a year just like maple syrup and the children used
to love it because they could chew it like gum. You can ferment it
and distil the alcohol, to mix with various fruit juices.
The sweet thorn like a true pioneer tree grows quickly, about a
meter per year, although this means it does not live long as trees
go. It is a tough tree, easily withstanding gale force winds, and
is often the first tree to be found growing on the windward side
of the beach. Its leaves are fine and far apart, meaning it casts a
light and dappled shade, so altogether the sweet thorn provides
ideal conditions for slower-growing trees to germinate and grow
beneath its branches. But having said all of this about the sweet
thorn, I want you to know that all her qualities are cast in such
a fine outer casing, she is one of the most beautiful of trees. Her
flowers, bright yellow, will cheer anybody out of depression, they
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 45 6/20/2011 1:32:52 PM

smell, as her name says, sweet. They feed bees who surround the
tree drunk with pleasure during flowering time. The perfume from
the flowers will help you understand in its essence the nature of
this kind tree. Then you will grasp fully the nature of the person,
Auntie Sarah, for whose history the sweet thorn is a metaphor, a
monument, a memorial, and a life made manifest.
Notes
1. I know some readers will have a heart attack at any notion of “authentic-
ity.” All I can say is think “food.”
2. KhoeKhoegewaab word referring to white people.
3. Yes, I am aware of the irony of using Linneaus’s system of classification
to identify plants, since he classified us as monstrosities, but the purpose
of this work is not to recriminate, but to communicate.
4. You can read more about it at www.sarahbartmanncompetition.co.za
5. Strictly speaking, the Great Creator is above gender, having created the
species that have one gender, the species that have two, and the species
that have three. However, in our human limitation we often approach our
Great Creator in a gendered way, as Witbooi will use the pronoun “he”
and I will use the word “she.” However, it is recognized that this is our
human limitation and not a statement about the nature of the One.
9780230117792_04_ch02.indd 46 6/20/2011 1:32:52 PM

Chapter Three
“Rude” Performances:
Theorizing Agency
Hershini Bhana Young
Sometimes in the interests of critical liberatory agendas, power

can be depicted as seamless and totalizing, resulting in a landscape
peopled by the binary opposites of the empowered and the victims.
In order to see more than the brutalizing effects of coercive sys-
tems that render the black body always as spectacle, it is necessary
to theorize the elusive agency of Sarah Baartman, a difficult task
given the invisibility of her thoughts and feelings within the tradi-
tional archive. To imaginatively approximate something close to
her agency, I map the uneven discursive terrain that exists between
a specific ethnographic spectacle, that of Sarah Baartman, deroga-
tively known as the “Hottentot Venus” and slaves for sale. I stage
the confrontation of two kinds of spectacles: that of the individual-
ized ethnic African on display on stage for money with the display
of stolen enslaved Africans carefully stripped of individuality for
purposes of sale. I do so to offer a “more critically and historically
embedded understanding of the freedom celebrated in literary and
cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism” (Wong 2009, 6).
Too often the story of freedom is narrated as a finished event with
slavery and freedom clearly demarcated from one another tempo-
rarily, geographically, and culturally. However, my comparison of
Sarah Baartman to slaves for sale demonstrates that slavery and
freedom were less distinct than historians have traditionally con-
structed. Slavery and its interpretative crises haunt freedom, neces-
sitating not only an examination of the vulnerability of freedom
itself but also of its possessive individualism that revolves around
notions of will, agency, and consent.
In April 2002, the remains of the Khoikhoi1 Sara Baartman
were finally returned to South Africa after an eight-year campaign.
9780230117792_05_ch03.indd 47 6/20/2011 1:33:33 PM

48 Hershini Bhana Young
The repatriation of Sara Baartman and her burial on National

Women’s Day in the town of Hankey, approximately 500 miles
east of Cape Town provided a moving testimony to the resiliency
of peoples dealing with the legacy of imperialism and apartheid.
While much has been written about Baartman, very little is known
about her prior to her arrival in London. We do not even know
her original name. Presumably born in early 1790s (Abrahams
1996, 89–114), she was brought to the Cape by Dutch farmers
after the death of her father where she worked as a “servant” for
Peter Cezar. Alexander Dunlop (a ship’s doctor and a procurer of
museum specimens) expressed an interest in procuring Baartman
as a curiosity based on her putative steatopygia (the disease of
large buttocks), labial apron and her degenerative, female hotten-
totness. Baartman became part of a circuit of material goods that
moved merchandise from various parts of Africa and its diaspora
to England. Flora, fauna, animals, and people were commodified
and shipped to England to represent and justify colonial expansion
and to entertain the British via displays of exotica.
Baartman arrived in London in 1810, accompanied by Alexander
and her exhibitor, Henrik Cezar, where she was displayed as the
“Hottentot Venus,” a crude and terrible joke about her supposed
ugliness and deformity.2 It is no coincidence, given the implicit
equivalency between animals and humans as exotic commodities
that Dunlop attempted to sell her to a museum entrepreneur, a
William Bullock of Piccadilly, together with a “Camel-opard [sic]
[giraffe] skin of great beauty and considerable value” (Strother
1999, 47). Bullock later expressed regret at not purchasing both,
given the lucrative exhibit. Later that year abolitionists brought a
suit against Baartman’s exhibitors, asserting that she was being
exhibited against her will. Slavery was abolished in Britain in 1807
and only abolished in the British Empire in 1833. Abolitionists at
this time were organizing and publicizing their concerns. Baartman
proved to be the perfect test case. Ultimately the court found in
favor of the defendant Cezar.3 Soon after, Baartman all but disap-
pears from the historical records until 1814.4
Baartman begins the second, perhaps better known chapter of
her life in 1814 when she was exhibited for fifteen months by an
animal trainer, S. Reaux. In Paris she became the object of fasci-
nation of scientists, most significantly George Cuvier (1769–1832),
“one of the ‘fathers’ of modern biology” and scientific racism
9780230117792_05_ch03.indd 48 6/20/2011 1:33:33 PM

“Rude” Performances: Theorizing Agency 49
(Fausto-Sterling 1995, 20). Baartman died in December 1815,5

allowing for Cuvier’s infamous autopsy where he was finally able
to examine Baartman’s genitalia, something it is said she resisted
when alive. Cuvier made several body casts of her, and preserved
her brain, skeleton, and dissected genitalia. Baartman’s remains
continued to be on display in the Musée de l’Homme intermit-
tently in different exhibitions until her repatriation in 2002.
Rather than dwelling on Baartman in Paris, my chapter
focuses on her initial exhibition in London, specifically around
the conditions of her staging and her politicization as a symbol
of unfree and free labor that arose around blacks. In this way I
do not repeat the “historical focus on Sara Bartman’s anatomy
rather than her conditions of labor” (Abrahams 1996, 98). Nor
do I accept uncritically Sander Gilman’s much cited core argument
around Baartman: that the sexuality of male and female blacks
became the symbol for deviant sexuality of all kinds by the eigh-
teenth century. Gilman’s insistence on Baartman’s importance as
a “collection of sexual parts” leads him to read the 1810 lawsuit
as concerned with sexual lewdness as much as abolitionism (1986,
87–88). His failure to address issues of slavery and free labor in
the interests of his theory about the iconographic status of black
sexuality requires that I place Baartman back into African his-
tory, “restoring the Khoisan to chronicity” (Abrahams 1996, 99)
and paying attention to “what social relations determined which
people counted as Black . . . [and] the important differences that
marked how social actors in different structural locations saw and
experienced Baartman” (Magubane 2001, 817–818).
This chapter traces the problematic equivalency that functioned
to erase Baartman’s agency by linking her to the ultimate sym-
bol of powerlessness for abolitionists, the slave. One year before
Baartman’s appearance in London in 1810, the British government
accused the Dutch of being unworthy to colonize the Cape due to
their failure to “civilize” the native population. In response, the
British government colonized the Cape. Under Lord Caledon, gov-
ernor of the Cape, the British ushered in their new role as protectors
of the mistreated natives via the proclamation of the “Hottentot
Code” of 1809. Baartman’s arrival in London a year later with a
Dutch “keeper” therefore could not go unnoticed. Indeed, her body
became the battleground for larger questions of Cape colonization,
questions about the competence of Lord Caledon, and imperial
9780230117792_05_ch03.indd 49 6/20/2011 1:33:33 PM

native policy (Abrahams 1996, 99–101). As Abrahams insists, this

“was not a case about a nameless woman from a far flung place.
The Sara Baartman case was located in the heart of British and
colonial politics” (1996, 102). The African Association, a pre-
cursor to the Royal Geographical Society, brought a suit against
Cezar and Dunlop soon after Baartman’s arrival. The African
Association had “every reason to believe, that the unfortunate
female in question was brought away from her own country with-
out her consent, was kept here for exhibition without her consent,
and that the appearance of compliance which she evinced was the
result of menaces of ill-treatment” (Wiss 1994, 16). The repetition
of the phrase “without her consent” is significant as the case piv-
ots around the notion of coercion versus consent and enslavement
versus the contractual obligation of the “free” market.6
The African Association sued Henrik Cezar, Baartman’s “cap-
tor” in order to demonstrate that she did not own her own labor and
body, thereby forcing the cessation of her performance in England.
As stated in Macauley’s affidavit, he was “desirous if possible
of learning under what circumstances she came to England and
whether she was made a public spectacle with her own free will
and consent or whether she was compelled to exhibit herself and
was desirous of returning to her own country” (Strother 1999, 43).
Had Cezar in fact followed the provisions of Caledon’s Hottentot
Code—was Baartman legally indentured or was she enslaved?
The discussion of Baartman’s performance during the court
case revolved around the ways in which her performance reiter-
ated the performances of slaves as injured spectacles/commodities
on the auction block—compelled to exhibit themselves and long-
ing to go home to their own country. What the members of the
African Association noticed was the similarity between the slave
pens with barred windows and doors that locked on the outside
with Baartman’s cage at the end of the stage. They drew atten-
tion to the link between the slave show rooms and auction blocks
and the confined space of Baartman’s tiny stage. They heard in
Baartman’s “exhibitor” asking her to turn around for the public in
order for them to get their money’s worth, an echo of the voice of
the slave trader calling a particular slave to display herself as com-
modity to potential buyers.
The African Association attempted to draw a direct connection
between the spectacular nature of enslavement and the spectacle
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of Baartman, ordered about by her “exhibitor.” They felt that

Baartman’s alienation from her body, a body that served the inter-
ests of her “master,” resembled the slave’s alienation from her body
rendered as commodity and beast of burden, in order to further
the interests of her master. Rather than seeing the kinds of exploi-
tation that can occur under the guise of “free” labor, the African
Association attacked Baartman’s performance by attacking the
institution of slavery and thereby actively defending a capitalist
colonial order “based on the ‘voluntary’ commodification of the
self and a ‘willing’ capitulation to the dominant logic of capital”
(Magubane 2001, 829). As Wong argues:
The “earliest legal contests over slavery in Britain were fought over the
status of those slaves whom slaveholders had brought into the realm.
Somerset [v. Stewart (1772)] was the culmination of a score of earlier
freedom suits that abolitionists had initiated on behalf of these slave
attendants, and it established a powerful antislavery precedent favor-
ing freedom for slaves once on free soil”. (2009, 11)
The African Association’s legal proceedings against Baartman’s

exhibitors in many ways were part of this attempt to challenge
slavery through the figure of the traveling slave who geographi-
cally traversed slavery to freedom. However, what distinguished
this case was its need to ascertain whether or not Baartman was a
slave in the first place, and not whether the condition of her slavery
followed her into Britain. Such an attempt allows us to critically
intervene, not so much as to whether Baartman was a slave or not,
but rather in the discussion of a freedom that is dependent on and
productive of slavery itself. Thus the discussion shifts from the
exaggerated differences between contractual black labor and slav-
ery to their similarities, specifically the similarities in the opera-
tion of limited agency. Comparing Baartman’s performance with
those of slaves during sale allows me to disrupt simplistic binaries
of agency and subjugation by showing agency to operate on a con-
tinuum: always responsive and determined to various degrees by
its context. By retheorizing agency, one can avoid an overestima-
tion of Sarah Baartman’s agency as a participant in the supposed
free market of capitalism and an underestimation of slave agency
during sale. While comparing these historical moments of perfor-
mance necessitates maintaining a distinction between Baartman’s
supposed contractual obligation and the slave’s will-lessness,
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I place her coerced performance alongside the spectacle of slaves

during the slave auction in order to flesh out the various degrees
of coercion and consent implicit in these painful performances of
subjugation. Looking at these heart-wrenching bodies on display,
I make the argument for a limited notion of agency that erupts at
various moments of these performances.
In comparing Baartman and slaves for sale, I do not assume a
shared black identity. To do so would be to collapse their differ-
ences by not paying close attention to the contextual specificities
that anchor the meaning of their bodies in place and time. Scholars
such as Oyeronke Oyewumi and Chandra Mohanty warn against
falsely universalizing methodologies and constructs that can either
retroactively map contemporary meanings onto historically located
bodies, or under the guise of universality utilize Western concepts
such as “gender” while subjugating indigenous worldviews and
systems of meaning. However, for the purposes of my chapter, I
find it essential to set transatlantic sites in conversation with one
another not so much to apply the same universal identitarian cat-
egories to both situations but rather to map their uneven develop-
ment and application. I set these two seemingly disparate sites in
conversation with one another precisely because these bodies on
display were being evaluated against each other (albeit indirectly).
These bodies were being compared to the bodies of their viewers,
all in order to develop modern transatlantic systems of race and
gender that enable capitalism and its attendant modes of political
power.
The second half of the seventeenth century saw a shift, as Philip
D. Curtin argues, from “culture prejudice” to “color prejudice”
(1964, 30). I would argue that instead of a shift, one sees the grow-
ing use of science to legitimate older racial/cultural classifications
for the purposes of national politics. Color prejudice did not replace
the culture prejudice but rather supplemented the latter, showing
that “race is a discourse of vacillations. It operates at different
levels and moves not only between different political projects but
seizes upon different elements of earlier discourses reworked for
new political ends” (Stoler 1995, 72). The development of a scien-
tific codification of older racial prejudice became crucial in order
to justify and structurally develop involvement in the slave trade
and imperial policy. From the 1670s onward, slavery began to
be inextricable from notions of blackness. Early seventeenth and
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eighteenth-century travelers’ descriptions of “Hottentots” threat-

ened to disrupt the growing codification of race into a visual sci-
ence that underpinned slavery, due to the “fairness” of their skin.
This literature on the Khoikhoi insists that they are not black or
brown but yellow, tawny, fairer skinned, with their babies being
born white-skinned. For example, “in a 1707 report sent from the
Cape to the members of the Royal Society, John Maxwell describes
‘Hottentot’ skin color as ‘naturally as White as ours,’ . . . ‘a race
onto themselves’ . . . [and therefore] ‘unfit’ for slavery” (Merians
2001, 26).7 There were similar discussions regarding the Khoikhoi’s
hair texture and physical features, leading to the conclusion that
“[b]lackness is less a stable, observable, empirical fact than an ideol-
ogy that is historically determined and, thus, variable” (Magubane
2001, 823). Racial formations are “shaped by specific relations
of power and therefore have different histories and etymologies”
(Stoler 1995, 90).
In her comparative study of race, class, and gender, Magubane
pays close attention to these histories and etymologies. As a result,
she is loathe to propound
a general theory of the articulation of race, class, and gender that

is capable of explaining the very different social relations of, for
example, England in the nineteenth century and Brazil in the twenty-
first . . . [Rather the] utility of historical case studies lies less in their
ability to generate a totalizing theory than in their ability to suggest
ways of looking at the world or at social situations that may be taken
up and deployed, with modification, in other contexts. (Magubane
2004, 185–186)
Magubane wishes to foreground what might be called a diasporic

methodology that highlights the connections between economic
processes and racialized gender. In other words, discourses of sex-
uality, race, and labor must be placed “within a common frame as
productive sites in a broader process of [the] normalization [of the
white bourgeois body]” (Magubane 2004, 92).
It is also crucial to redefine notions of agency away from liberal
ideals in order to read the willfulness and will-lessness of Baartman
and diasporic slaves. Reconceptualizing agency within the coercive
systems of imperialism and slavery requires thinking through our
definitions of significant action and who is capable of such action.
Historical action, in conventional terms, can be defined as the
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“public-sphere expression of individual will, remembered and nar-

rated by an empowered audience” (Stone-Mediatore 2003, 138).
The actions of Baartman and slaves for sale thus can easily be
overlooked, not only by the institutional structures that disenfran-
chised them but also by the interpretative lens by which their action
has been defined and understood. New ways of understanding the
agencies of these people rendered as spectacle involve the expan-
sion of definitions of action as more than individual achievement
within the public sphere. One must acknowledge that action can
yield “no immediate or self-evident ‘products’ ” (Stone-Mediatore
2003, 140). Thus Baartman’s and slaves’ resistance may have had
little impact on their larger conditions—slave resistance seldom
prevented their sale and Baartman’s resistance changed little about
the conditions of her alleged “contract.” This lack of easily rec-
ognizable results has enabled readings of Baartman and slaves as
disempowered people totally lacking in agency. If one theorizes
historical action to include those actions that do not have direct
results or that do not result in self-aggrandizement, agency starts
to look very different. It lies in the interstices of performances by
black people on display.
Historical action pays very little attention of the vocabulary of
the body. One needs to focus not just on how bodies are read, but
how to read these bodies in ways that allow for the resurfacing
of agency and will. Foucault’s often cited mode of modern power
called biopower comes to mind in that it functions as a “political
technology that ‘[brings] life and its mechanisms into the realm
of explicit calculations and ma[kes] knowledge/power an agent of
transformation of human life” (quoted in Stoler 1995, 3). Biopower
regulates and disciplines the (social) body via an imprinting on
the body of historical events. The task of genealogy then becomes
“to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of
history’s destruction of the body” (Foucault 1984, 83). Diasporic
Africanists have also taken an interest in the body as an important
site for the consolidation of identity, stating that “the body . . . can-
not escape being a vehicle of history, a metaphor and metonym
of being-in-time” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 79) and that
“embodiment articulates the evolution of capitalism and colonial-
ism” (Magubane 2004, 4). However, as Timothy Burke cautions,
one cannot simply translate a local African or African American
vocabulary for the body into scholarly language on the body as
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understandings of the body as a unit of analysis is not consistent

across time and space. Rather biopower is historically and cultur-
ally specific:
Regarding the body as an invariably significant or coherent subject

in any culture must be regarded as a suspect notion; the body as a
subject is specifically a product of the peculiar and convoluted his-
tory of Western and Christian insistence on mind/ body duality . . . In
particular, bio-power . . . makes sense only in reference to historically
specific and modern figurations of the body in Western history, and
thus have dubious relevance to the precolonial and perhaps even
contemporary cultural experiences of many Africans. (Burke 1996,
190–191)
Burke also reminds us to ground the theorization of the (social)

body in material conditions to avoid the reification of bodies.
Close attention must be paid to (black) bodies’ signification on
discourses of race, nation, and gender and also on the flesh and
blood realities of bodies that are brutalized, captured, and that
survive and resist. Looking at the body in a historically contextu-
alized manner allows us to unearth the embodied ways in which
domination works as well as to reveal the plural notions of iden-
tity and agency that diasporic Africans were able to practice even
within conditions of extreme violence.
I would like to turn to some of the descriptions of Baartman’s
performances that came out of the African Association’s lawsuit
and that appeared in newspapers at the time in order to read her
agency. The descriptions contained in the affidavits, precisely
because they are concerned with issues of will, allow us to re-read
Baartman’s performance for her limited agency, and to link it to
the violent staging of the body occurring during slavery that cre-
ated blackness as a transnational spectacle, even as slaves resisted
with whatever means they could access. Macaulay noted that
Baartman
gave evident signs of mortification and misery at her degraded situa-

tion in being made a spectacle for the derision of bystanders without
the power of resistance . . . do believe that from the dejected appearance
of the said female and from the obedience which she pays to the com-
mands of her exhibitor that she is compleatly [sic] under restraint and
controul and is deprived of her liberty . . . appeared very morose and
sullen. (Stoler 1999, 43–44)
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Macaulay’s affidavit was riddled with contradictions that are pro-

duced by his simplistic binary of individual agency and victim-
ization. He made much of Baartman’s complete inability to resist
and her total obedience even as he pointed to those parts of the
performance where her resistance was evident in some shape or
form. He read her agency in order to argue that this performance
was against her will, even as he attempted to show that the per-
formance deprived her of her will absolutely. He thus talked about
her total obedience to her master even as later he documents an
instance when Baartman refused to display herself. Her refusal
necessitated that the
Exhibitor . . . let down a curtain . . . after the curtain was let down [he]
looked behind it and held up and shook his hand at her but without
speaking and he soon afterward drew up the Curtain and again called
her out to public view and she came forward again upon the stage.
(Stoler 1999, 44)
This incident and the tension that appears between willfulness

and domination in the affidavit speak volumes, not only about
coercion involved in the spectacle of the “contractually” obli-
gated Baartman, but also about the vectors of agency and submis-
sion that cross-hatched the performative sale of the slave. Rather
than locating agency only within the realm of “free” labor and
coercion only within the quintessential realm of unfree labor/
slavery, an examination of these troubled sites where blackness
is being staged, allows us to see the coercion and severely con-
strained workings of agency in both types of performances. I am
not collapsing the two and thereby underestimating the terrible
subjugation of slavery. Rather I locate them with a genealogy
of performance where as Roach argues, culture “reproduces and
re- creates itself by a process that can be best described by the
word surrogation . . . [a] process that does not begin or end but
continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network
of relations that constitutes the social fabric” (1996, 2). Thus the
performances of Baartman and slaves at auction are not identi-
cal but indelibly and uncannily linked in a violent network of
surrogations that render racialized bodies as fleshy commodi-
ties. These undeniable links between the performances consti-
tute a crisis in notions of coercion and consent that raises crucial
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questions about how we conceive of blackness, performance, and

agency today:
In contrast to approaches that foreclose performance in the troubled

frame of autonomy, arrogating to the enslaved [and obligated] the
illusory privileges of the bourgeois subject or self-possessed individ-
ual, or performance as evidence of the harmonious order of . . . hege-
mony and the slave’s consent to that order, or performance as a
reprieve from the horrors of the system, what is considered here are
precisely the ways in which performance and other modes of practice
are determined by, exploit and exceed the constraints of domination.
(Hartman 1997, 54)
While Hartman largely focuses on pleasure in its various modalities

as possibilities for agency and redress, I wish to focus on perform-
ing one’s fungibility and resistance to that fungibility as possible
sites whereby one can trace agency. Such a tracing acknowledges
that resistance, both in form and content, is shaped by domina-
tion as people negotiate the daily violence of coercive systems and
performances.
Buyers of slaves were aware of the numerous tricks of the trade
and often spent considerable time trying to extract the “truth”
from the carefully enacted performances insisted upon by the slave
trader. Buyers prided themselves on their ability to separate the
slave body from the performance forced by the trader. In a ritual
enactment of mastery, buyers questioned, probed, fingered, and
groped slaves in an attempt to read the truth of his or her body
as they mapped their desires onto the black body as spectacle and
imagined blackness into being. In an engraving appearing in Le
Commerce de l’Amerique par Marseille (Chambon 1764) entitled
Marche D’Esclave (slave market) one sees an Englishman licking
the chin of a slave to determine his age and deduce from the taste
of his sweat whether the slave was sick.8 So important did being
a “good judge of slaves” become, that the ability to buy a “good”
slave became part and parcel of the requirements of a white mas-
culinist social world. As Roach puts it, “in the staging of New
Orleans slave auctions, there is a fiercely laminating adhesion of
bodies and objects, the individual desire for pleasure and the col-
lective desire to compete for possession. As competitions between
men, the auctions seethe with the potential for homosocial
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violence” (1996, 215). One sees similar fantasies operating around

Baartman’s body that to a certain extent required her severely lim-
ited participation. Audiences pinched, poked, groped, and ques-
tioned as they attempted to confirm the veracity of her sexualized
and racialized performance as advertised by her “exhibitors.”
Through an enactment of this degrading ritual, they consolidated
their own mastery, their own fantasy of white superiority, and sub-
jectivity.9 They refused to be fooled by the exhibitor who merely
wanted their money—rather, as rational beings they were able to
“correctly” read Baartman’s body and thus create their own.
However, one must remember that even while black bodies
were being packaged, sold, bought, and misread, the “Other” was
looking back. Even as these black bodies on display constituted
semiotic fields onto which “physicians, scientists, and lay people
[could] . . . inscribe and project power cultural meanings and moral
prohibitions” (Urla and Terry 1995, 2), they were also resisting
these hegemonic readings. They were pushing against the fantasies
and anxieties enacted to create them as abject spectacles of black-
ness in the first place; “as the traders instructed them in how to
represent themselves as salable, the slaves learned about slavehold-
ers’ system of slave-buying signs; as the buyers looked them over
and asked them questions, the slaves looked back and came to their
own conclusion about the prospects held by a given sale” (Johnson
1999, 171). At every opportunity, black bodies were observing,
learning, and looking back at their enslavers and other slaves. One
could think about Baartman as refashioning submission into a
challenge against the authority of her exhibitors. Her obedience
becomes a tactic in a strategy of resistance. Thus the performative,
even as it has the power to make bodies in certain ways, has the
ability to unmake those same bodies.
No mechanism of power can foreclose all possibilities of disrup-
tion, intervention, and transformation. Power, rather than being an
absolute, assumes various guises via historically specific mediums.
Such variance results in the unevenness of the workings of power,
an unevenness seized upon by resisting subjects and exploited as
much as possible. The conditions of oppression shape the perfor-
mative modes of resistance seized upon by the black body, even as
they exceeded and disrupted them. These performative modes of
resistance are characterized by “the nonautonomy of the field of
action; provisional ways of operating within the dominant space;
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local, multiple, and dispersed sites of resistance that have not been
strategically codified or integrated” and a re-working of the dis-
course of abject (black) body (Hartman 1997, 61). Thus while
Baartman cannot refuse her performance outright, she can dis-
rupt her display in various ways that resist the hegemonic read-
ings of her body as ethnographic spectacle/freak and captive body.
For example, her temporary refusal to appear on stage, while it
does not cancel her display, slows down the performance.10 The
seamlessness of an un-self- conscious performance is disrupted;
the audience instead of viewing an object is forced to deal with the
troublesome assertion of a denied subjectivity. To put it another
way, an object does not draw attention to the conditions of its
display. To do so would be to exceed the category of the object, no
matter how that will was expressed.
I would argue that Baartman’s “work slowdown” was no acci-
dent. Rather her “reluctance” drew her audience’s attention to
the complex workings of her will within the cramped space of her
coerced performance. This was not so much to manipulate the
audience’s sympathy as to assert her agency in a context where her
behavior was seen as natural instinct, a primitive un-self- conscious,
unthinking mode of being. Similarly, Baartman’s reportedly “rude”
performance of the one-string bow can be seen as a refusal of vir-
tuosity of an instrument whose playing was supposedly instinc-
tual to her and her tribe.11 Via her lackluster performance of the
bow, Baartman de-naturalizes her performance, using her playing
to speak against the intentions of the exhibitors. Her “morose”
attitudes, frequent sighs, and her sullenness all work against the
ideological underpinning of subjugation that insist upon the simu-
lation of pleasure and “consent” on the part of the dominated.
Baartman’s slowness and her general reluctance expose that the
“simulation of consent in the context of extreme domination was
an orchestration intent upon making the captive body speak the
master’s truth as well as disproving the suffering of the enslaved”
(Hartman 1997, 38). She shows herself suffering and captive, even
within the confines of a so-called “voluntary” exhibition of her
body.
Johnson argues that “[u]ltimately . . . the rites of the market had
to be enacted by the slaves. From the time the buyers entered the
yard in the morning to the time they left at night, the slaves were
expected to enact carefully scripted roles” under threat of beating,
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deprivations, torture, and inducements (1999, 129). Slaves for sale

were forced to perform complex roles. While traders could “feed
them up,” oil their bodies, provide tallow for their hair, allow their
wounds to heal, pluck grey hairs and dress them up, traders were
forced to rely on slaves to “act” as they were advertised. Traders
needed slaves to perform their role as human commodities and
to this end the traders instructed slaves to make up ages that cor-
responded with their oiled and costumed bodies and to hide pasts
that might lower their price and disrupt their sale. Slaves who had
run away or been ill were told to hide their histories. Those who
were being sold for their skills were told to play their skills up,
whether real or imaginary. This small space of performance pro-
vided the key for many slaves in resisting and shaping their sub-
jugation. Slaves used the opportunity at times to undermine their
own sale.
A Virginia trader in 1850 for example wrote to another trader
about Coleman who delayed his sale by telling potential buyers
that he had lost his hair because he had “cupped.” Another letter
from South Carolina states, “James is cutting up . . . I could sell him
like hot cakes if he would talk Right . . . The boy is trying to make
himself unsound. He says he wore a truss in Charleston” (Johnson
1999, 180). Slaves manipulated information about themselves in
order to have some limited say over their sale, often presenting
themselves as opposite to whatever the potential buyer was seek-
ing. The slave John Parker remembered, “I made up my mind I
was going to select my owner so when anyone came to inspect
me I did not like, I answered all questions with a ‘yes’ and made
myself disagreeable” (Johnson 1999, 179). It is interesting that
Parker used “yes” instead of “no” to discourage buyers. Through
a compliant noncompliance, through a remaking of submission
into a direct challenge, Parker ripped off the veil of simulated plea-
sure that covered over slavery’s consumption of the black body.
Through his orneriness, Parker marks out a small terrain of resis-
tance that counters notions of consensual domination, insisting on
a form of subjectivity that disrupted the myth of “happy darkies”
on plantations. Other slaves cut off fingers and mutilated their
bodies to protest the necromancy of the market place that reduced
them to fungible commodities, even as they utilized its logic of
laboring commodity. In such instances, one sees slaves using the
internal logic of the marketplace to protest their sale and in some
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small way, to shape the terms of that sale. Though we do not have
Baartman’s words to attest to her own use of the logic of her dis-
play, we can politically imagine the rude performances, the work
slowdowns, her “sullenness” and her gestures as possible moments
of compliant noncompliance.
One must continually bear in mind that often acts of resistance
were undertaken with the full knowledge that the conditions
under which they were being attempted would most likely not
change. Baartman’s refusal to appear on stage when called ulti-
mately resulted in a delay of her show though not its cancellation.
No matter how skillful and careful the slave’s manipulation of the
discourses whereby his or her body was contained, ultimately he
or she, in most cases, was still sold and continued to suffer under
the brutal regime of slavery.
If ultimately these performative acts of resistance did not end
oppression, one could argue that they are not examples of agency
at all. Instead one could see them as evidence of failed agency and
the success of the processes by which the black body was com-
modified and dispossessed. Such a reading then would lead us to
conclude that Baartman was only victim, an injured body reduced
to racialized and sexualized spectacle and that slaves were only
ever commodities, brutally displayed, bought, and sold. In these
historical contexts where the effects of power appear to be over-
whelmingly repressive, where bodies are brutally displayed at
will as fungible objects, where every glimmer of resistance is met
with even harsher punitive measures—it would be easy to dismiss
those tiny challenges embodied in the interstices of various perfor-
mances. The image of a sick Baartman dying far from home, and
the knowledge of the extreme violence of a system that unceremo-
niously bought and sold human beings as beasts of burden would
overwhelm the inheritors of this legacy. However more nuanced
understandings of coercion and consent, resistance, and victimiza-
tion lead us towards an understanding, not only of how freedom
did not break with but elaborated many of slavery’s paradigms but
also of the crucial political role of the performative The performa-
tive, while it cannot simply transcend the constraints of domina-
tion, provides us with a means to reinvest in the body as spectacle.
Through its denaturalization of abjection and blackness, of body
and commodity, the performative can create a context within
which to transform the spectacle into something more than an
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expression of the master’s will. It gestures toward a deeply impor-

tant, fragmented, and difficult-to-locate agency of beings rendered
as objects for far too long.
Notes
1. There has been much confusion about what tribe Baartman belonged to,
especially in light of the complex history of imperialism and nomenclature
in the Cape. There are numerous linguistic, physical, and cultural differ-
ences between the various clans of Khoisan, all called “Hottentots” by
Europeans. See Linda Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of
“Hottentots” in Early- Modern England, (Newark: Delaware University
Press, 2001). Baartman belongs to the KhoiKhoi people, a group that
was recently officially recognized by the United Nations as an indigenous
“First Nation.” For more in-depth discussions of issues of nomenclature,
indigenous status and the politics of Khoisan identity, see The Proceedings
of the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference (1998).
2. See Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring
Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997), 70–71.
3. Bernth Lindfors says that Baartman testified in Low Dutch on “behalf
of her managers, saying she had freely consented to exhibit her person in
England, was earning good money” (1996, 210). I doubt that Baartman
“freely consented” to anything.
4. Some newspapers indicate that Baartman was subsequently exhibited
in Manchester, Limerick in Ireland and perhaps Bath. We also have
her baptismal records from 1811. See Footnote 36 in Qureshi, Sadiah,
“Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus,’ ” (2004, 254).
5. R. D. Altick explains Baartman’s death by saying that she “possessed, in
addition to a fondness for trinkets customarily attributed to savages, an
even greater one for the bottle. Thus debilitated, she was in no condition
to fight the smallpox . . .” (1978, 269). Altick reiterates racist stereotypes
of drunken natives and vain Hottentots. Writers in the eighteenth century
warned against pride and excessive vanity by describing such behavior as
belonging to “Hottentots,” as Linda Merians discusses.
6. This emphasis on labor later becomes obscured by issues of respectability
and morality, the result of evangelical sentimentality and the British gov-
ernment’s support of capitalism.
7. Magubane (2001) makes a similar point on page 822, referring us to
the original travelers accounts of Barrow 1801; Burchell [1827] 1953;
Lichtenstein 1812; Pringle 1834 and Thompson 1827.
8. See image at http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/details.php?
filename=C001
9780230117792_05_ch03.indd 62 6/20/2011 1:33:34 PM

9. From Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian (London: Richard

Bently, 1839), Mrs. Mathews states: “Of the people attending the show,
‘one pinched her, another walked round her; one gentlemen poked her
with his cane; and one lady employed parasol to ascertain that all was,
as she called it, nattral’. This inhuman baiting the poor creature bore
with sullen indifference, except upon some great provocation, when she
seemed inclined to resent brutality, which even a Hottentot can under-
stand. On these occasions it required all the authority of the keeper to
subdue her resentment” (4.137). Cited by Bernth Lindfors, 1996, 208.
10. A London Times Reporter records: “And one time, when she refused for
a moment to come out of her cage, her keeper . . . went behind and was
seen to hold up his hand to her in a menacing gesture; she then came for-
ward at his call, and was perfectly obedient.” London Times, November
26, 1810, 3.
11. I am aware that to European audiences, all musical performances by
“Others” were heard as rude, unmusical, and primitive. However I wish
to read descriptions of Baartman’s against the author’s intentions.
9780230117792_05_ch03.indd 63 6/20/2011 1:33:34 PM

Chapter Four
Baartman and the Private: How Can

We Look at a Figure that Has Been
Looked at Too Much?
Gabeba Baderoon
The burial of Sara Baartman’s remains on August 9, 2002 in

Hankey in the Eastern Cape, near where she was born, was a signal
event in South African and world history. The story of Baartman’s
life has often been recounted, yet below I consider a little discussed
aspect of the negotiations over the return of her remains from
France and propose a theory of the private based on an analysis of
Baartman’s life and her contemporary meanings.
For over a century after her death, Baartman was simultane-
ously an excessively visible and nearly forgotten historical figure,
visible because for most of that time her remains were on pub-
lic display and little known because she had slipped from public
view. As the essays in this collection show, Baartman was taken
from South Africa to Europe in 1810 and exhibited publicly in
London and Paris as the “Hottentot Venus” in shows that drew
large audiences and even wider notoriety. Between 1810 and 1815,
Baartman’s public visibility was heightened by the circulation in
London and Paris of popular caricatures, paintings, and songs that
focused compulsively on her body. After her death in Paris in 1815,
Baartman’s body was dissected by the renowned scientists Henri
de Blainville and Georges Cuvier and a plaster cast was made of
her body. Their reports became the basis of a now discredited
science of race that placed European men at its apex and black
women at its nadir and asserted the racial inferiority and sexual
deviancy of black people. Baartman’s skeleton, brain, and genitals
were subsequently exhibited in the Musée de’ l’homme in Paris,
and it was only in 1974, 159 years after her death, that these were
removed from public view.
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66 Gabeba Baderoon
After a period of obscurity, Baartman was brought once again

into public view in a series of highly influential essays published
the 1980s, this time through writing that explored the uses made
of her visibility in the nineteenth century to cement a deroga-
tory view of black female sexuality. For the past thirty years,
Baartman has been the subject of a different kind of visibility—in
poetry, plays, visual art, and scholarship by women of African
descent who have asserted an intimate bond between Baartman’s
legacy and the lives of black women globally. Writing and visual
art about Baartman since the 1980s has been a largely recupera-
tive project, aimed at recovering her memory in service of broadly
anti-racist and anti-sexist projects (see Guy- Sheftall, among oth-
ers). Through them, Baartman has again become one of the most
visible women in African history. In fact, as Zine Magubane
points out, a “veritable theoretical industry” has grown up around
her (2001, 817). In the process, Baartman has again become a
“hypervisible” figure (Gqola 2006, 45). The nature of this vis-
ibility, despite the good intentions behind much of the writing
and art, has caused Magubane and Gqola to point to discomfort-
ing echoes between nineteenth-century representations and those
that have emerged since the 1980s in the insistent corporeality
that continues to characterize images of Baartman. Combined
with a neglect of African feminist writing on Baartman, this de-
historicized image of Baartman has been marked by assertions
both of singularity and representativity that in effect disarticulate
her from African history and turn her into a floating global sym-
bol of the Black female body. As a result, we have been left with
a plethora of images of Baartman and a continuing compulsion
with gazing at her.
How then, can we look at Baartman differently? One answer to
the question is not to represent her, to respect the limits of what
we can know, and the purposes to which we can put her mem-
ory, her body, and her history. Pumla Gqola posits the idea that
despite the plethora of images and debates about Baartman, there
is an ‘unknowability’ about her life that signals her full humanity
(2010, 102). I embrace this proposal, and build upon it, exploring
what Baartman’s unknowability may mean for us as a theory. For
me, this means to consider a new definition of the “private,” draw-
ing on recent analyses of autobiography and documentary forms
in Africa.
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Baartman and the Private 67
An originary moment in studies of Baartman occurs in Zoe

Wicomb’s essay “Shame and the Case of the Coloured,” delivered
as the keynote speech at the 1996 conference of the Association of
University English Teachers of South Africa and published in 1998.
In the essay, Baartman is for the first time placed in a theoretical
perspective attentive to slavery, colonialism, and apartheid and
the notions of race and sex that these generated in South Africa.
In the essay and later in her novel David’s Story (2001), Wicomb
takes the unprecedented theoretical step of asking what Baartman
means for Black women who have been made the bearers of the
shameful memory of sexual violence during slavery. Wicomb pro-
poses a radical rereading of Baartman located within a rigorously
non-nationalist analysis of South Africa’s memory of slavery and
sexuality. Wicomb wrote about the lingering psychological impact
of slavery for the descendents of enslaved people and specifically
for black women. She proposes not a heroic recovery of Baartman,
but situates her within the lingering self-denial and shame gener-
ated by the memory of slavery among the descendents of enslaved
people in South Africa. In a formulation that links the memory of
sexual violence during slavery with an accusation of women’s com-
plicity with violence. Wicomb states, “Baartman exemplifies the
body as site of shame . . . the shame of having had our bodies stared
at but also the shame of those (women) who have mated with the
colonizer” (1998, 92).
This unprecedented analysis addressed the psychological
effects of systemic violence, recalling a debate raised in the United
States by the critic Darlene Clark Hine in her widely cited essay
“Rape and the inner lives of Black women in the Middle West:
Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” an analy-
sis of the psychological impact of sexual violence during slavery
for contemporary African American women. In her essay, Hine
theorized a sophisticated yet subterranean strategy for survival by
Black women in the aftermath of the multiple violations of slavery.
She argued that in response to continuous sexual assault during
North American slavery, African American women developed “a
cult of secrecy, a cult of dissemblance, to protect the sanctity of
inner aspects of their lives” (Hine 1997, 436). Thus Black women
transformed memories of sexual violence into oblique signs that
were “better left unknown, unwritten, unspoken except in whis-
pered tones” (Hine 1997, 436). This “dissemblance” was crucial to
9780230117792_06_ch04.indd 67 6/20/2011 1:34:01 PM

68 Gabeba Baderoon
Black women’s psychic survival and their withdrawal into a recu-

perative and resistant space created the possibility of new subjec-
tivities. Hine asserted that:
only with secrecy, thus achieving a self-imposed invisibility, could ordi-

nary Black women accrue the psychic space and harness the resources
required to hold their own in the often one-sided and mismatched
resistance struggle. (1997, 437)
Her essay is important for showing the logic of such silence and
its coded symbolism in light of the continuing impact of systemic
sexual violence. Importantly, in Hine’s analysis, African American
women’s dissemblance is conscious and rational, and it constitutes
“a self- conscious Black women’s culture of resistance” (1997, 438).
This emphasis on a self-conscious political project means that the
unconscious is largely absent in Hine’s view. Her conception of
a resistant and resilient pattern of psychic responses among the
descendents of slaves to widespread sexual violence is reframed in
Wicomb’s paper into an analysis of suppressed shame. Other writ-
ers have gone on to discuss less conscious and ‘rational’ patterns of
response among African American women such as self-injury and
infanticide, most famously articulated in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Such patterns are harder to see as resistant.
Arlene Keizer’s essay “Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker,
Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory” (2008)
probes the notion of a conscious project of resistance by Black
women during and after slavery through examining a series of
works about slavery by the renowned African American visual art-
ist Kara Walker. Walker’s “cut-out” silhouettes represents acts of
sexual violence by slave-owners against female slaves without the
reassuring script of the latter’s heroic resistance. Walker’s images
allude to Baartman through visual codes that recall nineteenth-
century caricatures of the latter’s body. In her analysis of Walker’s
work, Keizer shows that such pieces speak more ambivalently and
therefore uncomfortably about how Black women survived psychi-
cally, revisiting, like Wicomb, the suppressed accusation that to
survive continuous violation, enslaved women used various strate-
gies against sexual exploitation, including negotiating emotional
relationships amid constant violence. Such negotiation carried
steep costs, or, as Wicomb phrased it, the memory of survival is
9780230117792_06_ch04.indd 68 6/20/2011 1:34:01 PM

burdened by “the shame of those (women) who have mated with

the colonizer” (1998, 92). Walker’s art has met with controversy
among many commentators, including an older generation of
Black artists, who found untenable her allusions to the ambiguities
of survival, rather than a preferred recollection of resistance.
In the South African context, Wicomb’s “Shame” essay and
David’s Story proposes a similarly discomforting and challenging
vision that Baartman “exemplifies the body as site of shame” (1998,
82). At a moment in the country’s history when a nationalist view
was in the ascendancy in South Africa, Wicomb’s 1998 essay was
already post-nationalist and wary of the uses made of Baartman.
Zine Magubane points similarly to the unreflective repetition of
a focus on Baartman as body in contemporary representations of
her that neglect how notions of race and sexuality have changed.
The focus on Baartman’s body disarticulates her from a necessary
attention to history, giving her a simultaneous singularity and rep-
resentativity, thereby ascribing “Baartmann’s [assumed] corporeal
alterity the power to produce history” (2001, 832). I revisit the idea
of the singularity and representativity of Baartman below. Wicomb
also refuses this pattern, insisting instead on attending to the spe-
cific legacy of colonialism and slavery in the self-conception of those
descended from slaves, known in South Africa as “coloureds,” and
posed the ethical question of how to speak about Baartman with-
out invoking her for contemporary ends that neatened the untidi-
ness and ambiguities of history or repeating its violations.
As both Magubane and Wicomb argue, one way to repeat the
past is to repeat the pattern of Baartman as bodily icon. Meg
Samuelson discusses the production of such images in her impor-
tant study Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women?
Stories of the South African Transition (2007). In a series of read-
ings of contemporary representations of Baartman, Samuelson
shows how images of women were deployed to symbolize the tran-
sition to a new national identity in 1994, but were simultaneously
de-centered and deprived of meaningful access to power. Among
the examples she analyzes is Baartman’s state funeral on National
Women’s Day at which then-President Thabo Mbeki gave the main
address. Samuelson argues that the South African state’s discur-
sive use of Baartman operates on a rhetoric of inclusion and exclu-
sion that entrenches binary oppositions, resulting in a policing
of insiderness, belonging and authenticity that can be deadly for
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70 Gabeba Baderoon
those deemed on the outside of such categories. Later, I discuss

a photograph by Zanele Muholi that addresses this formulation.
Reading Wicomb’s David’s Story, Samuelson shows that in con-
trast to such nationalist claims on Baartman, the novel refuses to
deploy the latter either in the service of a mythology about the
antiapartheid struggle or of static notions of ethnic histories and
identities. Instead, the Baartman whom Wicomb writes into exis-
tence in David’s Story is definitively resistant to all mythological
claims, leaving readers at the end of the novel with an image of
a recurring, elusive figure whose meanings cannot be defined by
national or ethnic symbolism.
Pumla Gqola’s compelling essay “(Not) representing Sara
Bartman” in her book What is Slavery to Me? (2010) speaks to
this Baartman, and then goes further. Gqola proposes that in
the face of the “theoretical industry” around Baartman, there is
a space to negotiate how much we can seek to know about her.
To establish the grounds for such negotiation, Gqola first locates
Baartman in African as well as Western history, and contests the
neglect of southern theorists in much contemporary Western writ-
ing on Baartman. Gqola then offers a meditation on the ethics of
representing Baartman, proposing a limit on what can be known
about Baartman’s life. She suggests that Baartman is ultimately
unknowable, and that to accept this unknowability offers a way
to accept her full humanity. The notion of observing a limit on
what can be known about Baartman, of discretion, of declining
to bring her again into what Premesh Lalu calls “colonial frames
of intelligibility” (2000, 45), is ultimately a political choice. This
subtle navigation of the imperative to know is a new element in the
debates about Baartman’s life.
How the journey ends

“A tale that begins with [Baartman] cannot be one with narrative
certainty”
(Gqola 2010, 56)
In the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, Baartman was one of thou-

sands of people from Europe’s former colonial territories whose
remains had been gathered in metropolitan museums. Among the
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many human remains exhibited and stored in the museum’s col-

lections, hers had fallen into obscurity. I draw a particular lesson
from accounts of the negotiations that led to Baartman’s return
and propose that there was a philosophical and political meaning
to what happened in the course of the negotiations that followed. I
base my theory of the “private” on these meanings.
In the course of the protracted negotiations between South
Africa and France to return Baartman’s remains—her skeleton,
brain and genitals—the process was stalled by French claims
that the remains had been lost and could not be identified among
the museum’s holdings (Maseko 1998). However in 2002, once
the French government agreed to return them, a dispute arose
about the veracity of the physical remains offered by the French
(Abrahams 2010). Despite this, the South African committee that
negotiated her return declined to have the remains tested to verify
whether they belonged to Baartman, or even whether the three sets
of remains belonged to the same person (Abrahams 2010). To the
committee, to do so would amount to a replication of the violation
through enforced access to which Baartman had been subjected,
and repeat the “great long national insult” to which Baartman
had been subjected during her life (Abrahams 1997). Instead,
on August 9, 2002, Baartman was given a ceremonial burial in
Hankey, near the place where she was born. This set of acts con-
stituted a philosophical and political assertion that the commit-
tee would define its way of knowing differently. The committee
decided to accept without DNA testing that the remains offered by
the French belonged to Baartman and to ensure this, they would
be honored through a homecoming and burial ceremony.
This series of events can be read in several ways. Death is a
marker of the human, and after death, whether bodies are vio-
lated, displayed, or buried, determines whether they are seen as
human (Butler 2004). Baartman’s burial therefore restored her to
the realm of the human. This was done through technologies of
the sacred; rituals that dress and cover, pray over and bury the
body. Her burial also offered the possibility of completeness after
a century and a half of interruption represented by her unburied
state. Thirdly, her interment signaled the end of the invasive vis-
ibility to which Baartman was subjected during her lifetime and
for 159 years after her death. I propose that this withdrawal from
public and scientific access meant that she became once again a
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72 Gabeba Baderoon
subject with an interior that is inviolable and private. The use of

the term private may seem surprising here, but I have in mind a
privacy occluded by notions of the solipsistic liberal humanist sub-
ject. Instead, I envision a different concept of privacy, one that is
both collective and historically formed. For this, I draw Wicomb’s
insight that Baartman’s fate symbolized a collective “shame of
having had our bodies stared at” during slavery and colonization,
a shame that transmuted the colonizer’s visual and sexual access
to Black women’s bodies into an accusation of deviance and sex-
ual collusion with the colonizer (Wicomb 1998, 92). If during her
life and for 159 years afterward, Baartman’s fate symbolized this
enforced and shameful availability, then burial returned her to the
inviolable and the private.
We can analyze further the committee’s decision by asking what
was at stake in its refusal. We are left with two perspectives: it mat-
ters whose body was buried, or it matters that the remains were
given an honorable burial, even if they belonged to someone other
than Baartman. In effect, one could read the committee’s decision
to mean that Baartman’s funeral also symbolized restitution for
those for whom we have no records, the unnamed thousands of
human beings on whose bodies rested a conception of the universe.
In a crucial way, therefore, through the process of negotiation,
return and burial, the remains returned by the French, consist-
ing of her skeleton, brain and genitals, were accepted, or rather,
asserted, as constituting Baartman’s body and her person in its
entirety, as can be seen in the title “the return of Sara Baartman.”
To those in the committee whose view had prevailed, the with-
drawal of Baartman’s body from scientific access was a withdrawal
from a racist and invasive gaze at a vulnerable Black body, which
became once again a subject with an interior that is neither fully
knowable nor violable in order to seek that knowledge. After her
subjection to an invasive visibility during her lifetime and for 159
years after her death, it is this shift that I suggest can be seen as a
move into the private.
Rethinking the private

What is privacy? In Sources of the Self, the philosopher Charles
Taylor provided a definition of the private self as a being “with
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inner depths” (1989, x), and that our sense of individual subjectiv-
ity is marked by “the senses of inwardness, freedom, individuality
and being embedded in nature” (1989, ix). In contrast to the uni-
versalizing reach of Taylor’s view, and drawing from the analysis
above, I theorize an “African privacy” after Baartman, proposing
a set of subjectivities formed in the context of colonialism and its
aftermath.
In an essay in the collection Refiguring the Archive (2002), the
literary scholar Bheki Peterson asserted that the absence of fuller,
more nuanced views about Black lives in official South African
archives was the effect of deliberate policies of exclusion. South
African archives were shaped not only by what they contained but
what had been “ignored or criminalized . . . banned and destroyed”
(2002, 31). Such archives had been configured to exclude the evi-
dence and complexity of Black lives, “as though [people] do not
exist” (2002, 32). As a result, Peterson proposes that we look for
hidden archives “stored in the stubborn memories of people, in
suitcases and plastic bags under beds, in wardrobes and in ceilings”
(2002, 31).
There is a different reason for the paucity of details about
the lives of the less powerful in the archive. This was due to an
intellectual and political project on the part of the powerless to
evade the archive and its strategies of surveillance, to elude the
threat of capture and classification that official archives represent.
Dominated people have long crafted a way to exist and keep their
histories outside of conventional archives, in an analogy to the
“memories,” “plastic bags” and “ceilings” alluded to by Peterson.
South Africa’s slave-holding history holds examples of both the
official erasure of the details of slave lives and efforts by enslaved
people to evade surveillance.
The slave-holding society of Dutch and British colonies gen-
erated foundational discourses of the body, of race and sexual-
ity in South Africa. The Dutch East India Company, which
colonized South Africa in 1652, brought people from East Africa,
India and South East Asia to the Cape as slaves, and enslaved peo-
ple eventually formed the majority of the population. This fact
and the high proportion of male slaves to colonists meant that
the exercise of discipline over slaves was violent and often “spec-
tacular,” or intentionally visible. Female slaves were subjected to
enforced prostitution, and the Slave Lodge, where the Dutch East
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74 Gabeba Baderoon
India Company housed its slaves (and which is now a museum

that memorializes slavery), was also the main brothel of the city.
Despite this, slavery in South Africa has been portrayed through
a discourse of the picturesque that has erased its sexual and racial
violence (see Baderoon 2004). There was an intense anxiety in set-
tler society at the Cape about insurrection, so the visibility and
transparency of slave bodies and minds was compulsively pursued.
Because of anxiety about their unknowable minds and often inde-
terminate bodies (due to enforced prostitution of enslaved women,
the colony was marked by a high degree of racial heterogeneity)
legal codes subjected enslaved people to continual surveillance, for
instance, regulating what they could wear, requiring them always
to carry a lantern at night, and forbidding their congregation.
Slave subjectivities were intended to be rendered transparent by
such regulations, but the knowledge held by slaves was both sought
after and feared. For instance, there was the mythology about
slave-women in the kitchen who could “gool” (bewitch) or poison
their owners, or how submissive enslaved men were seen as wily
and duplicitous. Many of the slaves at the Cape were Muslim and
there was a high rate of conversion among slaves and indigenous
people because Islam offered what the historian Nigel Worden
calls “a degree of independent slave culture” separate from that of
slave-owners (1984, 4). Islam was tacitly tolerated by the Dutch at
the Cape, but under the Statutes of India, its public practice was
punishable by death. In this context, to talk about resistant subjec-
tivities among enslaved people suggests that they were reacting to
and therefore logically subordinated to dominant society. Instead,
to talk about “privacies,” suggests a parallel and hidden culture
constituted of ritualized, internally varied and changing practices
hidden from dominant society, interior to the societies created by
enslaved people and interior to their consciousness. Importantly,
the subjectivities of enslaved people are not easily or transparently
available in the archives and the desire to render them visible runs
the danger of echoing the techniques of surveillance that made
them invisible, seen in the compulsions to probe “the secrets pos-
sessed by the Hottentot Venus” (Gilman 2010, 27). Therefore it
is necessary to read signs of such subjectivities in “oblique” ways
rather than simply to try to render them legible.
For me, the oblique meanings inside archives and the project
to evade surveillance extend what I mean by the private. I intend
9780230117792_06_ch04.indd 74 6/20/2011 1:34:01 PM

the word to connote the intimate, personal, closed, hidden, coded,

secret, veiled, unknown, the apparently meaningless, the invis-
ible, the ordinary, the in-between, the silent, the autobiographical,
the unrepresentative, the unimportant, the individual, the sin-
gular, what is removed, marginal, informal, obscure, underside,
obverse, overlooked, unofficial, subversive, interstitial, vulnerable,
transitory, undocumented, separated, varying, unpredictable, and
unreliable in dominant views of history. Using Baartman, I draw
on a notion of a privacy that unsettles established narratives, but
avoids the risk of “privatizing” and then abstracting human beings
from history, or what Sarah Nuttall calls the “intensification of
private life as a counterpoint to public life” (2004, 30). I locate my
notion of the private in the context of a history of surveillance and
enforced visibility that mark ways of knowing in South Africa.
There are precedents for thinking about the way Africans have
negotiated technologies of domination and surveillance through a
careful navigation of the private and the public, and the individual
and the collective. An example can be found in a study by Kerry
Bylstrom of a “public private sphere” in post-apartheid South
Africa and post-dictatorship Argentina in which those who have
lost relatives to political violence have been given the public space
to grieve their personal losses in ways that “have been emplotted
and mobilized to construct democratic publics” (Bylstrom 2010,
139). Less visible examples are also helpful for examining new
ideas about private lives on the African continent. Recent scholar-
ship about personal African archives constituted by letter writ-
ing, diaries, obituaries, and other forms of “tin-trunk” literacies
(Barber 2006) have expanded how we can think about private lives
on the continent.
The literary scholar Karin Barber writes about a set of African
“hidden histories” through what she calls “ ‘tin-trunk texts’: let-
ters, diaries, obituaries, pamphlets, and other artifacts often stored
in boxes hidden under their beds” (2006, ix). Barber argues that
these “obscure but important uses of literacy, often overlooked in
favor of the more visible and public writings, of the political and
educational elites” represent an important source of insight into
ordinary lives (2006, ix). Importantly for my theory of the private,
Barber calls these practices “a privacy that borders on secrecy”
(2006, 9). What we see at work in such “privacy” is a complex
negotiation with language, individuality, authority, and power that
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76 Gabeba Baderoon
occurs through these texts. Barber points out that a wonderfully

subtle process is functioning here, one that expands how we think
of autobiography and the making of the self. Through such writ-
ings, Africans were trying to negotiate huge disparities of power
during the colonial period, but:
they were also assembling and consolidating selves . . . in many cases

not constituted . . . as autonomous agents founded upon an individual
interiority and subjectivity. Often instead, what we find is a form of
exteriorization and projection, or a text that goes behind the scenes
rather than into the interior of personhood. (Barber 2006, 9)
All of these processes reframe what we think of as the archive, the

self and the individual. In fact, these “tin-trunk texts” show us
the thin and porous line between the individual and the collective,
and the “hoarding” and collection of letters and other precious
texts constitute “a kind of local, do-it-yourself archiving” (Barber
2006, 9).
One fascinating area is the line between the authentically con-
stituted self, separate from other selves and separate from the col-
lective. Barber suggests that by “adopt[ing] the established textual
genres of diary and letter [Africans in the colonies] refashioned them
to express new forms of social being” (2006, 12). In complex ways,
such social beings were simultaneously individual and social, private
and public. An example can be found in collective letters. Barber
suggests that these literary practices “evoke forms of personal pub-
licity and collective privacy . . . for which we still need to develop a
vocabulary” (12). Barber notes that the elite texts constitute a far
larger and more visible corpus, more at ease in colonial languages
and infinitely better represented numerically and in terms of rep-
resentativity. In contrast, “tin-trunk texts” are a far more compli-
cated, liminal and occasional genre. To what extent can we theorize
more broadly about African lives on the basis of such texts, Barber
asks, “in what sense do the lonely, isolated, one-off inventions of
tin-trunk literates constitute a history?” (2006, 20).
Other studies in the same collection support Barber’s subtle
hopes for the tin-trunk genre. Keith Breckenridge writes about
another genre that crosses the apparent divide between the indi-
vidual and the collective and the private and public in the form
of love letters written by professional scribes and shaped by con-
ventions established in working class mineworkers’ compound
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communities. These letters, Breckenridge contends, are examples

of the “multiply-authored nature of working- class private lives”
(2000, 29). As with Barber, Breckenridge finds that in these let-
ters working class African men formed a private sphere that was
“simultaneously personal and collaborative” (2000, 30). The epis-
tolary form here does not generate the individual subjectivity that
is familiar from the formation of the European bourgeois self, but
marks a private life that negotiates the public in the form of shared
authorship of letters shaped by illiteracy, distance and class.
The above practices of “tin-trunk” literacies by Africans during
the colonial and postcolonial periods suggest complex views of
African subjectivities that go beyond resistance, complicity or pas-
sivity. These studies generate new ways to think about the dividing
line of the private and public, the authentic and the crafted, truth
and fiction, and self and persona in Africa. Archives that record
these “tin-trunk” literacies, as well as the long history of autobiog-
raphies in South Africa that have unsettled and expanded the rela-
tion of private lives to larger national narratives, such as Native
Nostalgia (2009) by Jacob Dlamini, means that the post-colony
may be the site of particularly sophisticated engagements with the
genres of biography and autobiography.
“I see Sara Baartman as a lover because I refuse to talk about pain . . . .

I love Sara.”
—Zanele Muholi, 2010
I end this essay by discussing an image of Sara Baartman seen not

through the themes of resistance and reclamation, and not as a
redemptive or redeemed figure but as a beloved one. This possibil-
ity was envisioned in a presentation by Zanele Muholi, an inter-
nationally renowned lesbian activist and photographer from South
Africa, at “The Meanings of Sara Baartman” colloquium held at
Pennsylvania State University on March 1, 2010. Muholi’s work
since Visual Sexuality (2004) has been crucial in crafting new
ways of seeing lesbian and gay life in South Africa, both individu-
ally and collectively and through intersecting and layered concep-
tions of identity.
Sexuality is one of the main themes through which a national-
ist mythology formulates its codes of inclusion, authenticity, and
belonging. The notion of homosexuality as “unAfrican” gives a
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78 Gabeba Baderoon
deadly license of violence against lesbians and gays. It also poses a

complex challenge to ensure that activist responses are not solely
reactive, so that this theme does not unwittingly continue to frame
the ways lesbian and gay lives become visible in South Africa. This
insight is central to Muholi’s work. She sees her photographs firstly
as an activist project that engages the formula of exclusion and
denigration through which dominant images of lesbian, gay and
transgendered lives are produced in South Africa. She is insistent
on conveying a wholeness to such lives, including, for instance,
evidence of official neglect that enables systematic sexual vio-
lence against Black lesbians to continue and, as importantly, pro-
duces compelling portraits of ordinary life, intimacy and sexual
pleasure.
Because of this, Muholi’s photographs of Black lesbian, gay and
transgender communities in South Africa have also made it pos-
sible to re-imagine ways of seeing the Black body more broadly.
Desiree Lewis locates Muholi’s images of lesbian bodies within a
broader history of visual representation, “Historically, black wom-
en’s bodies have often been the subject of voyeuristic consumption,
the consumption not only of black women’s sexuality, but also of
black women’s trauma and pain” (2005, 15). How one looks is
therefore crucial. Muholi shows that a repeated focus on the viola-
tion and trauma suffered by lesbian and gay people becomes part
of a dangerous formula that entraps people in the community in
narratives of violence, rendering them vulnerable to further viola-
tion, and distancing those who see such images from the possibil-
ity of empathy and exchange.
Therefore her work consciously enlarges the visual language
through which lesbian and gay lives become visible. At the level of
content, Muholi interrupts the insistence on untrammeled access
to Black female bodies, particularly Black lesbian bodies, predi-
cated on repeated themes of violation, estrangement, and trauma.
Beyond the radically expansive thematic content of her images,
Muholi also creates new a form of documentary photography,
what Desiree Lewis calls a “documentary dialect” that “create[s]
cognitive space for the subjectivity of the woman in her photo-
graph” (2005, 15). This is suggested primarily by the relationship
she creates with the people she photographs. This relation is as
much a theme of the photographs as the subtle modes through
which Muholi approaches the people she photographs-she declines
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to call them her subjects, insisting instead that she and they form a
community, are equals, and co- creators of the photographs. This is
important not only for its egalitarian ethos, but because histories
of sexual violation manifest themselves in interior psychological
spaces, as Hine showed in the case of United States slavery and
Wicomb illustrated in her analysis of Baartman’s contemporary
meanings in South Africa. For Muholi to see her work as mutually
constituted by those she photographs is therefore to create a space
in which Black lesbians and gays in South Africa imagine them-
selves in a hitherto uncharted way. Below, I explore this sense of
the photographic relationship by reading a specific photograph.
Muholi’s photos also manifest a strong aesthetic of pleasure.
They are characterized by the play of natural light and shadow,
and the texture of skin and fabric. In her work, she carefully navi-
gates rules of access to intimately domestic and private spaces in
which she can convey an unafraid sensuality, yet there is also room
for opacity and paradox in her images. These simultaneously doc-
umentary and aesthetic modes convey “a process of imagining,
circling, uncovering and implying . . . an unwaveringly nuanced rep-
resentation of Black lesbian identities that gestures to the impos-
sibility of effective containment” (Gqola 2005, 85). In their varied
approaches, Muholi’s photographs constitute a “self-archiving” of
lesbian and gay life in South Africa that contests dominant pat-
terns of intrusive and hostile visual logic.
Muholi memorably applied this approach to her view of
Sara Baartman. In her presentation at “The “Meanings of Sara
Baartman” colloquium, Muholi proposed a new way to look at
the woman who has been too much seen—through a gaze that
does not allude to the history of violation that generally charac-
terizes images of Baartman, even if only to contest it, but which
sees her instead as a lover, with desire, admiration for her beauty
and a promise of what the poet Robin Becker calls “perfect affec-
tion. “I want to see Sara as my lover,” Muholi said during her pre-
sentation, pointing to the photograph “Nomshado, Queensgate,
Parktown, 2007” part of her Being (2007) series, as exemplifying
how she saw a beloved person.
How does the photograph teach us to look at Baartman the way
Muholi does?
As Muholi describes in her statement about the series, Being tes-
tifies to “existence” and its complexities (2007). The photograph
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80 Gabeba Baderoon
Nomshado, Queensgate, Parktown 2007

Permission granted by Zanele Muholi
Courtesy of Michael Stevenson, Cape Town
“Nomshado” conveys the scale and also the multiplicity of this

assertion. Simply to exist and to name oneself as lesbian and African
is already a claim of vertiginous importance, but beyond this is the
task to envision new possibilities, the realm not only of politics
but of art. The dominant theme of the photograph is the interplay
between what is revealed and what is hidden. All the photographs
in the series are named for the women whom they portray and the
place and year when they were photographed. Muholi echoes the
familiarity and affection of using a lover’s first name by calling
Baartman “Sara.” Despite the identifying details in its name, as a
portrait, “Nomshado” one observes a certain discretion about the
9780230117792_06_ch04.indd 80 6/20/2011 1:34:02 PM

woman in the photograph. In it, we are invited to look at her from

slightly behind and to the left. She is naked, sitting on a white mat-
tress set close to the floor and covered by a thin, almost transpar-
ent white sheet, layered and folded beneath her. Her body is full
and her dark skin gleams in the light that comes from the same
direction as the camera.
Though naked, she does not convey a sense of vulnerability or
exposure. Instead, she is tilting her head slightly toward her raised
left shoulder and holds a loc of her hair between the fingers of her
left hand. These gestures carry a meditative and unwatchful tone.
The photograph has been taken at eye level, as though there is an
equitable relationship between the woman and the photographer.
This is echoed in the comfort the woman seems to feel in the pres-
ence of the camera, and the freedom she expresses in her contem-
plative state. Her back is to us. In front of her is a net curtain, its
interlocking pattern of small squares obscuring the room behind it
though the outlines of what may be a more public part of a house
are faintly visible. The curtain recalls the soft and layered sheet,
thin enough to see through, on which the woman sits. The curtain
and white cloth proclaim a line of access and discretion, what we
are invited to see and what we cannot.
What else can we know about this woman? This is small inte-
rior scene-the photograph contains only the woman on the mat-
tress and the white curtain in front of her, yet the space inside the
photograph does not limit her. The curtain, wall, mattress, cloth
and floor are close but not claustrophobic. Light flows from the
outside over her skin, covering her, touching her, folding along the
lines of her body. On her left side, she and the light become each
other, melding where her skin glows. In a pale gleam on dark skin,
the light disappears into her and her skin has a translucent sheen.
She is sitting on the soft folds of white sheet that hangs over its
edges onto the floor. The light flows over the soft folds of her skin.
The photographer and, through her, we are standing close by. The
woman trusts the photographer. She composes her body to be seen
by the photographer. Together they create what we see.
The setting may be a bedroom. Certainly, it is a domestic space,
yet despite the fact of the camera, the temper of the photograph is
not exposing. Instead, the photograph shows a woman in a place
where she is exquisitely at ease. It reminds us that this is how a
woman can inhabit her body and her home. The translucent white
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82 Gabeba Baderoon
curtains hide the other parts of the house. We cannot see beyond
it. Inside these translucent boundaries, we are allowed into pri-
vate, unprotected spaces. This is an image of intimacy not only in
the presence of the woman’s nakedness but because we are also
allowed close to her when she is unwatchful and undefended.
Everything in the photograph is modulated. There is a before to
this image and an after. We have entered this picture at a particu-
lar moment. The more we look at the image, the more detailed and
layered our understanding of the woman’s relationship with her
self and between the woman and the photographer becomes. The
posture of the woman’s body is angled away from the camera but
not against it. We see only the side of her face and the angle of her
eyelashes indicates that she is looking down. The left side of her
body is visible from head to toe, yet there is a great discretion in
what we see of her. Her posture does not suggest that she is reveal-
ing herself to the camera but in her nakedness she is at home; a
space in which the photographer is also present.
The white lace curtain divides the private space from another
area and yet also points to the parts that are hidden and not for
us to see. The woman in the photograph may be looking just at
the dividing line where the curtain meets the floor. She may be
thinking about precisely this. She appears to be comfortable with
what she has allowed the camera to see and not to see. She has
chosen where this line falls. The photograph creates a sense of
at-home-ness about her in this space. The curtain in the photo-
graph speaks back to a history of seeing. The photograph is against
simple transparency, against pulling down the curtain. Instead, it
is intrigued by what the woman is thinking. It asks us to wait to
find out what she will share with us. This photograph is about
boundaries, where they lie and who chooses them. We follow the
angle of the woman’s head, the orientation of her body; see who
she will allow near. Our eyes track the play of light on the curtain
in front of the woman, the pale wall, the space around the photo-
graph, the translucent white cloth beneath her, and the light that
makes her skin gleam. We see again what is hidden and shadowed
behind the curtain-all of these are about borders and nearness and
distance.
The woman’s skin looks smooth and it seems to invite both
touch and thought. Her fingers stroke her hair like the light touches
her skin. This is an intimate photograph but it also signals to us
9780230117792_06_ch04.indd 82 6/20/2011 1:34:03 PM

the rules of a necessary discretion. The photograph tells us how

to be close. This photograph allows one to be near but not too
near. The photograph seems to be about who can be inside, and
the rules for being invited there. In the photograph the woman
holds the posture of the lover who retains her selfhood, not the
one fully occupied by the presence of the beloved and therefore
who is herself empty and invisible. The photograph is also about
the past and how it is evident in the body. This woman’s image has
been invoked in the name of Sara Baartman, a woman who was
looked at too much. The photograph teaches us how to look at her
differently. The curtain in front of her is a border to mark the line
where the inside ends, and also an acknowledgement of what lies
beyond. The light on her skin suggests that the outside can also be
felt inside, softly and beautifully.
The image is a paradoxical portrait of the woman. It does not
look directly at her face and yet it deeply reveals her character
and even what we might call the atmosphere, or the relationship,
between her and the photographer. She does not hide from the
photographer and yet not everything is shown. The photograph
portrays her through her expressive back and through the pres-
ence she conveys to the camera. Perhaps we can say it is a portrait
of two people: the woman and the photographer. In this portrait,
which is usually an image that explores one individual’s inner self,
the photograph allows us to puzzle out something we do not know,
how two people can create a mutual presence that is visible in one
body.
What has Muholi taught us by asking us to look at Sara
Baartman as a lover? For one, the possibility of unbounded affec-
tion, and also the necessity of boundaries. The photographs show
us what it is like to be invited inside, and also how to recognize a
line of discretion. Perhaps most important of all, it shows us how
to accept that there are places where we cannot look. In this essay
I have proposed that this is a crucial question that emerges from
South African feminist writing and art on Baartman. What we
will do in order to pursue the imperative to know? I have shown
that the life of this most visible of icons offers us a theory of the
private as a way to understand the complexity of African subjec-
tivities. The private realm, the exemplary text of love with which
this essay ends, invites us to learn the languages through which
self-archives convey the complexity of African lives.
9780230117792_06_ch04.indd 83 6/20/2011 1:34:03 PM

Chapter Five
Placing and Replacing “The Venus

Hottentot”: An Archeology of
Pornography, Race, and Power
Sheila Smith McKoy
In 2009, The New York Times included Sarah Baartman on its

list of “Top Ten Plundered Artifacts.”1 The list was created as a
side bar to the well-publicized conflict between the government
of Egypt and the Louvre concerning the return of fragments of
ancient Egyptian frescos. The thrust of the article was twofold:
to examine the value of “plundered art and antiquities” and the
conflicts their contested ownership created. Baartman appears as
number four on the list, sandwiched between the Elgin Marbles
and Ramses’s mummy, the only other “item” on the list of the
plundered artifacts that is a human body. Unlike Baartman, whose
body and genitalia were exhibited for over a century before her
burial, Ramses’s body is immortalized and complete; he was rev-
erenced and buried appropriately before his body became a cap-
tive. In short, her body was dehumanized while his was deified. In
the expanded story about Baartman, The Times adds that “The
Hottentot Venus was not a piece of art at all. Instead, it—rather,
she—was a person named Sarah Baartman.”2 The article is an
interesting commentary on the value of Baartman’s body and her
place as an object, even contemporaneously. Nearly 200 years after
her death in 1815, Baartman’s body is easily defined as an object
before she is revealed to be a “person.”
As an African American female scholar of South African and
African American trans-cultural studies whose body has been
placed in a particular sexual box because of these kinds of long-
standing racial and physiological mythologies, I find it difficult
not to internalize Baartman’s odyssey from free woman to col-
onized “coloured” slave to sexual curiosity. My response to her
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86 Sheila Smith McKoy
victimization is as fresh and familiar as my first trip to South

Africa in 2002 when I was “mistaken” for a colored woman in the
immigration line. And for me, that mis-identification came with a
history that included being marked as sexually available. It is also
clearly echoed in the words of one of my male students upon his
first encounter with the fabled “Hottentot” hips, with their lush
concentration and protrusion of body fat, on the streets of Cape
Town: “Professor,” he said, “I can kind of understand why the
British couldn’t stop looking at ‘that lady’.” Those hips that had,
for centuries, inspired poetry, prose, scientific, and pseudoscien-
tific inquiry represented more than an accumulation of body fat.
In the Western mind, these hips marked the boundary between self
and racialized “other”; they also demanded correction. Identified
by Western science as the deformity “steatopygia,” these hips were
markers of race that simultaneously legitimized theories that sci-
entifically “proved” the supremacy of white manhood and its con-
comitant sexual dominance. I include these examples because my
own encounters with sex, race, and anatomy indicate that there
are similarities between the cultural mores that placed Baartman
into the position of sexual artifact and those that defined her in
terms of sexual oppression and gender inequality when she was
repatriated and buried in South Africa in 2002.
Baartman’s own, particular history, with its nuanced and secret
knowledge of what defined her as a KhoiSan woman, was obscured
when she was infamously immortalized by Europe as something
alien, inhumane, but as also uniquely sexually positioned. Anyone
familiar with the cartoons and prints that advertised Baartman’s
exhibitions should recognize that these images were designed to
titillate both male and female voyeurs. To the contemporary eye,
these images are as arresting as they are uncomfortable because
we cannot immediately access their meaning. What history is
obscured by these images? What is the dialogue that we, as con-
temporary viewers and consumers of these images, are missing
regarding Baartman’s sexual captivity in Europe? What made
it possible for the sexual proscriptions of the era to be ignored
while men and women paid extra money to be allowed to touch
Baartman’s buttocks in public?3 And how can we “read” these
depictions as “real” when the image of Baartman is so skewed that
she appears taller than her audience when she was only four and
a half feet tall?4 The focus of my discussion here is to uncover the
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Placing and Replacing “The Venus Hottentot” 87
mechanisms that made Baartman’s body so sexually caricatured

and so pornographically appealing to both nineteenth- century
European sensibilities and twenty-first-century consumers of her
image, nearly 200 years after her death.
Even two centuries removed, the uncomfortable history of “The
Venus Hottentot” is one that can only be contained within the
margins of quotations marks. She was and is so clearly a colo-
nized subject, one so completely contained within an entire list
of categories created by colonization—racial, sexual, scientific,
gendered, and national—that history has yet to uncover her real
name. And, although I will refer to her throughout this chapter
as Sarah Baartman, I must emphasize the fact that, though less
objectionable than “The Venus Hottentot,” the name that we have
for her is a misnomer. Born in the Gamtoos River basin around
1770—although the paucity of birth records for people of color
in the era make it difficult to determine her exact birth year—
Baartman’s time in South Africa was dominated by British and
Dutch settlers who were battling for control of the Southern Cape,
its mineral resources, and the colonized peoples upon whom this
battle was waged. Because of the racial, political, and national
upheaval that defined life in the Southern Cape of the late eigh-
teenth century, Baartman can only be accessed through the lens of
her various colonized identities. As “Sartje,” “Saartjee,” “Sarah,”
or “Sara” Baartman, she is forever detached from her indigenous
KhoiSan name and cultural moorings. Instead, she is called out of
her name in ways that emphasize her enslavement, bondage, and
servitude.
Baartman scholars cannot ignore the dual and competing histo-
ries of Baartman’s story because her body is displayed in both the
nineteenth century as a sexual oddity and in the contemporary era
as a museum artifact. In the nineteenth century, Europeans of both
genders were enthralled by the nearly naked bodies of enslaved
blacks. And their bodies were desired precisely because they fed
into the English erotic culture of flagellation and sexual pleasure.
As Collette Colligan suggests, this genre of erotica dominated
early nineteenth- century Britain.5 Baartman certainly provided
entertainment that fulfilled this demand. However, Baartman is
not without kinswomen in this regard. Frederick Douglass, who
obtained both sexual freedom and manumission in England,
recounts the connection between sexual desire and eroticized
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violence in his description of his Aunt Hester’s flagellation in The

Narrative of Frederick Douglass.6 Baartman’s closest counterpart,
Mary Prince, the Antiguan woman whose enslavement in “free”
England was transcribed in 1828 and published as The History
of Mary Prince was brought to London as a slave just a decade
after Baartman arrived in London; she was sexually coerced by her
“master” who enjoyed requiring her to bathe him. This coercion is
absent from the legal proceedings for both women. Instead, court
records suggest that Baartman came to London of her own free
will to exhibit herself for profit. Likewise, documents created by
Prince’s enslaver, John Wood, indicate that she was brought from
Antigua “at her own request and entreaty.”7 Like contemporary
pimps, the men who profited from Baartman’s and Prince’s bod-
ies claimed that these women were willingly engaged in their own
enslavement. It is clear that Baartman was not the only sexually
objectified black woman in Europe in the early nineteenth century,
yet she could not escape a history of pornography, power, and race
after her death.
Baartman’s body was not “naturally predisposed” to be a sexual
curiosity. She only became so because she was used to support the
scientific, political, and racial hierarchies that defined nineteenth-
century England. When Georges Cuvier, the French anatomist
who dissected her body because of its “unique” scientific signifi-
cance, he did so to prove his theory that species were “fixed” and
“divinely” created. His beliefs were supported by European scien-
tists and philosophers who had determined that white Europeans
represented the perfect species, and that they were distinct from
those of other, inferior racial groups. Carolus Linnaeus, the
“father” of genus categorization—the practice of differentiating
species by categories—in biology, who also believed that racial
hierarchies were divinely created and unchangeable, sent two of his
students to study the “Hottentots.” Without any acknowledgment
that the term “Hottentot” was as degrading as it was grounded
in Western racism, they subsequently “scientifically” proved that
“Hottentots” were on the bottom rung of the evolutionary lad-
der.8 It is not surprising, then, that Cuvier’s scientific inquiry into
Baartman’s genitalia “proved” her inferiority; that decision had
been made long before her body was used to cement what had
already been predetermined in a science based on European “nor-
malcy” and racial superiority.
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No matter how we might read this racialized science, its timing

is noteworthy. Its appearance coincides with the expansion of the
British Empire in South Africa. In 1795, a decade before Baartman’s
first appearance in London, the British took the Cape Colony from
the Dutch; it was returned to the Dutch in 1803. However, in 1806,
just four years before she was brought to England, the English
finally defeated the Dutch in the region and officially colonized the
Cape of Good Hope. As with any transition from one government
to another, the British government enforced its power most explic-
itly on people who had the least legal and political rights. And in
South Africa, the KhoiSan and the Dutch both had an abundance
of legal rights that only served to make them subject to British
colonial rule. The Dutch were socially displaced and dispatched to
the hinterlands. The KhoiSan had the right to live and work in the
Cape, primarily because they provided the domestic labor needed
to build the colony. They had few property rights, and extremely
limited political rights, a situation that made the KhoiSan women
particularly subject to sexual slavery and victimization. There is
a clear connection between the social and political organization
in the Cape Colony and Baartman’s London exhibitions. When
Baartman first appears on stage at 225 Piccadilly, she is nearly
naked and “being ordered by her keeper,” Hendrick Cezar. Her
“act” provided entertainment that simultaneously supported the
racial and sexual realities that characterized the British ascendency
in South Africa.
However, Baartman cannot be clearly defined by her KhoiSan
identity either because it, too, is complicated. Generations of the
KhoiSan had been murdered and displaced when Dutch South
Africans fled to the hinterlands. Adults were hunted and killed
while the children were taken into captivity as servants. KhoiSan,
with their pastoral lifestyles and nomadic tendencies, were tar-
geted as objects of sexual desire and as proof of the “superior-
ity” of Europeans. As I note in When Whites Riot, there were
two groups classified as “coloured” in the Cape Colony. The first
were the KhoiSan; the second were “coloureds” who appeared in
South Africa approximately nine months after the first encoun-
ter with Europeans (2001, 28). Because the first white settlers in
the region were all male, intermarriage between KhoiSan women
and Dutch settlers was initially legal in the Cape. And, long after
these unions were outlawed, KhoiSan women were frequently
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described for a European audience in terms of their sexual desir-

ability. Travelogues like François le Valliant’s Voyage de F. Le
Vaillant dans L’Interieur de L’Afrique (1796) depict “Hottentot”
females as beautiful, graceful women who allowed their white lov-
ers unlimited sexual access (Crais and Sculley 2009, 14). By the
time Baartman was taken to England and accused of “exhibiting
herself” as a ethnological oddity, her people—variously called the
KhoiSan, the San, the Nama, and the Griqua—had been intermix-
ing with the Dutch and British settlers of South Africa for almost
200 years. Many of the KhoiSan not only had Dutch names, but
they also had begun to form their own “Baster” villages, claiming
their mixed racial heritage even as they rejected the bastard status
from which the name “Baster” is derived. Several Baster communi-
ties fled South African altogether, settling in neighboring Namibia
to escape the oppression they faced in South Africa. Those who
remained in South Africa and escaped the genocide ongoing in the
South African hinterland, like our Sarah, were often displaced from
their cultural origins. Baartman’s hips, her “Hottentot apron,” her
Dutch name, and her racially ambiguous handler highlighted the
British victory over both the Dutch and “Hottentot” bodies it had
conquered in South Africa. She had the perfect body to represent
this cultural mastery.
When Baartman arrived in France—thanks to press coverage
she received during her time in London—she was already a well-
known “exhibition.” She had lost even the comfort of bearing the
colonized name of “Sarah Baartman” (Crais and Sculley 2009,
116). She was “The Hottentot Venus,” completely without the pro-
tection of even an assumed, inferior humanity. Like London in
1810, Paris was undergoing significant political upheavals. France
was recovering from the reign of Napoleon, who was exiled to
Elba the same year that Baartman arrived in Paris. She entered
the country as an oddity, but she did so in a country accustomed
to racialized images of black and other women of color. Just prior
to Baartman’s arrival in Paris, Josephine Bonaparte—Napoleon’s
wife from 1796 to 1809—captured the attention of the French
public because of her identity as a sexual paramour and an exotic,
racially ambiguous Martiniquian. Clearly, the French fetish for
the erotic, exotic woman of color, which set the stage for France’s
embrace of Josephine Baker in the 1920s, had already been estab-
lished with the fetishes that arose from French colonization in the
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Caribbean and in Africa. This fetish opened a space that Baker

occupied by choice; however, it was space that afforded Baartman
no means of escape.
Crais and Scully note that just over 1300 people were legally
recognized as being mulatto or black in France in the early nine-
teenth century (2009, 121). However, despite the lack of historical
records attesting to their presence in nineteenth-century France,
as the existence of Alexandre Dumas, his lettered offspring, and
people of African descent who “escaped” race in France suggest,
people of African descent were there. While the male members of
the Dumas family lived openly in their racial otherness in France,
women—as Sarah Baartman reminds us—were not afforded the
same freedoms. When Baartman arrived in Paris, both celebrated
and denigrated as “La Venus Hottentote,” she performed at the
Palais Royal, which was dominated by exhibitions of oddities and
brothels. In Paris alone, 180 brothels, whimsically called “mai-
sons de tolerance,” were licensed to operate in 1810, and many of
them were located in the Palais Royal. When Baartman arrived in
Paris, as Sander Gilman reminds us, the groundwork linking the
Hottentot female and the prostitute had already been laid (1985,
206). And, though Gilman’s assertions can be seen as intensely
problematic, his focus on the displacement of white sexuality and
sex onto bodies of color is quite useful in reading Baartman’s expe-
riences in France. As bell hooks notes, this kind of exploitation
grows out of the pornographic mutilation of the female other into
constituent, sexualized parts (1997, 115). What Baartman finds
in Paris is a social landscape in which her space is sexualized; her
geography is consigned to hypersexualized hips and the fabled
“Hottentot apron,” and neither would belong to her as the display
of her body, brain, and disembodied vagina would later prove.
Clearly, the European fascination with her body grew out of
sexual fetishes that were excited by her buttocks, her breasts,
and her labia—the constituent parts of her anatomy that, along
with her taxidermied body, were displayed in Paris’ Musée de
l’Homme for over 160 years. It was the public commodification
of her body—the sexually suggestive exhibitions that defined her
life in Europe and the race-based pseudo-science that defined
her death—that has sustained the intellectual and political inter-
est in “Baartman’s” life. The incomplete history of her life and
the focus on her anatomy represent a wider colonial history in
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which Africans and other peoples of color were commodities as

well as objects of sexual titillation and domination. The image of
the “Venus Hottentot’s” womanhood is, in essence, institutional-
ized by twin shadows of European colonization and white African
nationalism. And, although the South African government was
finally able to repatriate Baartman’s remains, it has proven to be
difficult to separate “Baartman” from the images that defined her
during her lifetime.
The discussion that I now undertake is difficult because
Baartman’s repatriation—certainly something to be celebrated—
also demonstrates that upon her return her “home” to South Africa,
the images of her remains, of her gutted genitalia, and the cast of
her preserved body, are also vexed by a contemporaneous, race-
based pornography. The pattern of political upheaval and its racial
othering that dominated Britain, France, and South Africa during
Baartman’s lifetime also describe the racial and political palette
of postapartheid South Africa when Baartman was repatriated in
2002. As I turn to the narrative of Baartman’s repatriation, recall
that South Africa in 2002—like the Britain that she encountered
in 1810—was in the process of reconstructing its own hierarchies
of race and sexuality. When Nelson Mandela, the first president of
the “non-racial” South Africa, made the initial diplomatic request
for her repatriation, the French government refused to return her
body because of its vast holdings of human artifacts from around
the colonized world. In fact, Mandela had completed his term in
office before the French government passed the appropriate legisla-
tion that freed Baartman from her captivity in Europe. Mandela’s
successor, Thabo Mbeki, was the one responsible for facilitating
her return.
Although postapartheid South Africa is politically defined by
a constitution based on “non-racialism” and political and social
power, it now resides with the country’s black majority. Colored
South African identity had been located in the “middle” of the
country’s long history of black disempowerment and white priv-
ilege. Even for the millions of South Africans who identified as
colored who supported this new ascendency, the social arena was
vastly changed by this new South Africa. With the national focus
on reclaiming Baartman’s personhood and the rituals of purifica-
tion that accompanied her interment on National Women’s Day on
August 9, 2002, she was also reclaimed as an ancestral mother, one
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whose experience was linked to the national body of the country;

this placement is emphasized in Mbeki’s assertion that “a particle
of each one of us will stay with the remains of Sarah Bartmann.”9
However, the repatriation of Sarah Baartman could not have
escaped being impacted by the visual representations of black
and colored South African women who were overrepresented in
both Internet pornography and among the ranks of sex workers.
Simultaneously, rumors that having sex with a virgin could cure
HIV/AIDS led to stark increases in the rape rates in the coun-
try. I must ask, then, if it is possible that the process of repatria-
tion and relocation could avoid being characterized by the same
pornographic impulses that had defined Baartman’s life among
the Europeans? After all, is it possible that South Africa—post-
apartheid or not—recognized Baartman as a person, rather than
the sexual other she represented during her life?
The answer to these questions can be found in the media cover-
age surrounding her repatriation, in the place that women of color
occupied in South Africa in 2002, and in the politics of sexual
power that defined the country even as it welcomed Baartman
home. While in France, Baartman was acquainted with the ways
in which her race and her position as an African woman “of color”
was located in the taboos of sexual desire. Similarly, when her
body was brought “home” to South Africa, the country had been
so inundated by Internet pornography that a 2001 psychological
case study suggested that the preoccupation might rightly be diag-
nosed as a new pathology of hypersexual disorder (Stein et al.,
2001, 1593) The most comprehensive study of sexual vice in South
Africa, Ted Leggett’s Rainbow Vice: The Drugs and Sex Industries
in the New South Africa, suggests that these sexual preoccupa-
tions were focused on the very bodies that Baartman’s represented.
Leggett’s statistics certainly support his thesis that their customers
prefer a “taste of Africa” (2002, 116); he notes, “Ethnically, street
sex workers in inner Durban are about half black and about 15%
(each) white, Indian and coloured. Durban is atypically diverse
in this regard; surveys done in Cape Town have found a much
higher percentage of coloured sex workers, while those done in
inner Johannesburg are more black” (Leggett 2002, 98). These
distinct, but related, examples of how Baartman’s contemporary
counterparts became the register upon which the anxieties about
race, sex and HIV/AIDS were measured.
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This anxiety is neither ahistoric nor antithetical to Baartman’s

sexualized history. Her repatriated body provides a commentary
on the new South Africa. It is true that the South Africa in which
she is buried is a racial inverse of the one in which she was impris-
oned in the pornographies of white, English sexual oppression,
and desire. However, the script written onto the bodies of black
and coloured women, the racial and gendered prototypes of white
patriarchal rape, has not proven to be rewritable. This prototype is
clearly molded by the kind of sexual violence Baartman sustained
in her lifetime. If, as Helen Moffett suggests that the legacy of
apartheid is best characterized by the violence employed against
women in both intimate and domestic spaces, then the bodies of
women of color like Baartman’s remain most at risk (2006, 12).
Although South Africa’s transition to a nonracialized democracy
was not marked by widespread ongoing racial violence, it has cer-
tainly been marked by a social predilection for the rape of women,
in a society where women, and particularly women of color, are
coerced into a sexual economy built upon their bodies (Abrahams
2004, 4). Baartman’s remains did not, in fact, could not, elide this
history. Though one might trust that the rituals performed at her
funeral produced spiritual wholeness, her physical body is forever
historicized into its constituent parts. This dis-integration is the
pornographic legacy that exists alongside the celebratory dynam-
ics of her repatriation.
Even her gravesite, vandalized in the years following her burial,
echoes this dismemberment. It was originally encased in a fence
that the official governmental report on the site admits is defined
by a sense of “imprisonment and alienation.”10 Tellingly, the
gravesite was selected in order to use Baartman’s history as a tour-
ist attraction through which to bring economic development to the
area. Like the unfulfilled promise of financial gain that Baartman
never realized in her lifetime, her gravesite has not contributed to
growing the local economy in part because the proposed Sarah
Baartman Center of Remembrance has yet to be built (though
funding has been made available, as has the land in 2010). In both
its symbolic dismemberment and in its physical dismemberment,
Baartman is at the center of an economy dependent upon the dis-
play of her body.
It is difficult to erase a history of oppression that has had the
shelf life that Baartman’s has had. Her history, as Mbeki rightly
9780230117792_07_ch05.indd 94 6/20/2011 1:35:42 PM

contends in the funeral oration for Baartman, is “the story of the

African people of our country in all their echelons. It is a story of
the loss of our ancient freedom. It is a story of our dispossession of
the land and the means that gave us an independent livelihood.”11
However, even as Mbeki declares, “We are South Africans . . . We
do not have to recall a European history” to understand the mean-
ing difference, he sabotages this sentiment as he variously cites,
denigrates, and celebrates European thinkers throughout the ora-
tion.12 Most significantly, even as Mbeki calls upon South Africa
to manifest as the nonracial and gender-equal nation it constitu-
tionally ascribes as being, he admits that antisexism is still a goal.
And, despite the rituals performed for Baartman at the funeral
to assure her wholeness, Mbeki continually referred to Baartman
in terms of her remains and as an object, rather than as Sarah
Baartman who, despite the complications of pornography and his-
tory, had seemingly regained her personhood in the public space of
South African national memory.
Sarah Baartman’s body has sustained more theoretical, ana-
tomical, academic, and cultural critique than almost any other
body in modern human history. Situated as she was between
the colonial and the colonized and between sexual freedom and
sexual enslavement, Baartman could not escape being defined
by the unique matrix that historically characterized black wom-
en’s bodies. And, as I have suggested the contemporary images
of colored South African women, clearly demonstrate how
African diasporan women are sexually objectified in the shifting
power structures of Baartman’s Europe as well as those in post-
apartheid South Africa. Since Baartman’s body was acquired,
examined, dissected, and used to support European illusions of
race, our exploration of her life have brought us no closer to her
complete history, to her indigenous name, nor to how she under-
stood the cultural crossroads onto which her body was mapped.
Sander Gilman’s exploration of Cuvier’s “research” on Baartman
exposes how his study places her at the intersection of racism and
science. Likewise, as Sadiah Qureshi notes, the literature about
“Baartman” from the earliest studies of Bernth Lindfors and
Richard Altick to more contemporary inquiries fail to provide
a nuanced reading of her life, though they assure that Baartman
will remain a focal point of our discussions about the colonized
and the colonizer (2004, 233–234).
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However, my focus here is on the ways in which any reading

of Baartman is entrapped in some way by the cultural framework
into which she was placed by Cuvier. And his findings, teetering
between science and pornography, lock Baartman’s narrative into
the racial and social paradigms that tortured her in life. They also
led to her early death that was ascribed to various causes—from
alcoholism, smallpox, prostitution, and exposure—all of which
were fashioned by a European hunger for the sexual and racial
tastes that her body fed, but could not satisfy.
She is now buried at “home” near the small town of Hackney,
chosen because of its proximity to the Gamtoos River and—as I
indicated previously—for its possibilities as a tourist site. Clearly,
then, her return to South Africa is complicated by the cultural poli-
tics of the moment. Just as clearly, her body—even repatriated—is
still ripe for commodification. Baartman’s sexual enslavement
was possible only because nineteenth- century Europeans placed
her on exhibition, replacing her identity with an inaccessible his-
tory. “The Venus Hottentot” still exists as a dis-membered por-
nographic image, one that is shaped in sexual and racial fantasies
that link two cultures and the two continents on which Sarah
Baartman tried to live. Given the radical social and political shifts
that defined the South Africa that welcomed her “home,” she
could not escape the unfortunate mold into which she was cast
in Europe.
Notes
1. New York Times, “Top Ten Plundered Artifacts,” http://74.125.47.132
/search?q=cache:7X0ggDpDIcJ:www.time.com/time/specials/packages
/article/0,28804,1883142_1883129_1882999,00.html+nelson+mandela
+formal+request+baartman&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us#ixzz0av3Q
Jtc5 (accessed November 30, 2009).
2. Ibid.
3. Testimony of William Bullock, November 21, 1810, quoted in Clifton
Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the “Hottentot Venus” A
Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2009), 80.
4. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural
History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985), 296.
5. Colette Colligan, “Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English
Vice, Transatlantic Slavery, and England’s Obscene Print Culture,”
9780230117792_07_ch05.indd 96 6/20/2011 1:35:42 PM

International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography,

1800–2000 (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 76.
6. Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DouNarr.html (accessed
October 5, 2009), 5.
7. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, http://digilib.nypl.org
/dynaweb/digs/wwm97262/@Generic__BookView, (accessed January
10, 2009).
8. Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot
Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009), 12.
9. Thabo Mbeki, “Speech at the Funeral of Sarah Bartmann, 9 August
2002,” http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/speeches/2002/mbek0809.htm
(accessed August 1, 2009).
10. “Final Draft: Sarah Bartman Burial Site Conservation Management
Plan,” http://www.sahra.org.za/sbaartman/Final+DRAFT+Sarah+Bart
man+CMP+2.3.09b.pdf (accessed March 1, 2010).
11. Thabo Mbeki, “Speech at the Funeral of Sarah Bartmann, 9 August
2002,” http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/speeches/2002/mbek0809.htm
(accessed August 1, 2009).
12. Ibid.
9780230117792_07_ch05.indd 97 6/20/2011 1:35:42 PM

Part Two
Troubling the “Truth”:

Corporeal Representations
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9780230117792_08_ch06.indd 100 6/20/2011 1:36:46 PM
Chapter Six
Writing Baartman’s Agency: History,

Biography, and the Imbroglios of Truth
Desiree Lewis1
Truth and the Trope of Victimization

“Baartman belongs to all of us,” states the central character in Zoe
Wicomb’s novel, David’s Story (2000, 135). An activist who believes
he can tell his own story only by meshing history, memory, and
imagining, David insists that a story of Sara Baartman must be told
in relation to his own locations and politics. In explaining his fus-
ing of biography and autobiography, he comments on an enduring
discursive role for Baartman. Whether configured in terms of gro-
tesque physicality in the late 1800s and early 1900s, or as a figure
testifying to colonial domination from the late twentieth century,
Baartman has provided a reference point in the autobiographical
narratives of those who represent her, with storytelling about her
functioning to convey collective or individual desires in the present.
As the “Hottentot Venus,” the spectacle for nineteenth-century
observers, writers, and scientists, her status as hyper-corporeal
“other” is well known. Far more complex though is the function
she serves in various cultural representations from the middle of the
twentieth century. From this time, there has been a global surge of
creative and scholarly work on her; the deluge of artwork, poetry,
autobiography, documentaries, drama, and academic writing deal-
ing with Baartman reveals how much of a transnational icon she has
become. Much of this work dwells only on her painful entrapment.
Scholars such as Sander Gilman 2 and Yvette Abrahams3 or a film-
maker such as Zola Maseko4 represent very different theoretical
and political positions. But like many other cultural and scholarly
projects produced from the late twentieth century, they foreground
Baartman’s victimization in conveying her “true” story: whether
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102 Desiree Lewis
represented as the innocent who became the “Hottentot Venus” as

in Maseko’s film and much of Abrahams’s writing, or as a speci-
men for consolidating nineteenth-century evolutionary and racist
thought, as in Gilman’s study, the truth about Baartman is the
truth about the individuals, relationships, institutions, and struc-
tures that dehumanized a black South African woman and created
the “Hottentot Venus.”
My emphasis in this study is on two texts, Suzan-Lori Parks’s
Venus and Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully’s Sara Baartman and
the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, both of
which seek to transcend the definition of Baartman merely as a
casualty of her times. Clearly, other authors have also been con-
cerned with portraying Baartman’s humanity: Abrahams’s writ-
ing and Maseko’s documentary insist on her erased humanity by
stressing the tragedy of her exile and display. What makes Venus
and Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus distinctive is their
effort to uncover something about human complexity and ambigu-
ity beyond the all-determining influences of social structure and
relations of domination.
These are not the only recent works that do this. Rachel Holmes’s
Hottentot Venus as well as a number of recent historical stud-
ies, such as writings by Robert Shell5 and Carmel Schrire6 have
sought to shed light on the intricacies of the history of Baartman’s
departure from the Cape, the identities and motivations of those
involved in her departure from South Africa and her life in England
and Paris, the details of the milieu in which she lived and worked
before her removal from the Cape, and her personal possibilities
in the face of oppressive circumstances. I intend to show, however,
that these two texts are especially revealing in testifying to the
entanglement of history and imagining in the present.
Biographical narrative is particularly important here. Life sto-
rytelling, whether in the form of Crais and Scully’s historical proj-
ect or Parks’s drama, organizes elements of a life to construct a
coherent narrative of the self. How the “life” in biographical nar-
rative is represented in relation to its history and society, and how
biographical construction reveals agendas about the present is the
burden of much of this essay. As Hayden White observes,
the transformation of biographical fact into narrative involves patently

fictive strategies: the suppression and selection of certain events, and
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Writing Baartman’s Agency 103
the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, vari-

ation of tone and point of view . . . in short all of the techniques that we
would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or play.
(2002, 200)
White makes it abundantly clear that the textual devices in biogra-

phy, whether these appear in fictional works like Venus or scholarly
projects such as Crais and Scully’s, can be subjected to the close
textual analysis usually reserved for interpreting literary texts.
Despite the related interest between the two texts, they reveal
radically different philosophies about “truths” and Baartman’s
life story. Parks’s play, a blatantly fictional invention of a charac-
ter based on Baartman, teases out themes about her life to focus
on storytelling in the present. Fully acknowledging the claim of
Wicomb’s character that Baartman has been collectively laid claim
to, Parks intervenes into a maze of storytelling by explicitly defy-
ing the narrative rules of stories told from the nineteenth century
to the present day. The historical project of Crais and Scully is
motivated by very different aims. Working to lay ghosts conclu-
sively to rest, the authors claim to write a book “about discovery,
about what really might have happened” (2009, 6). As I go on
to show, however, it reflects narrative conventions and ideological
assumptions that merely repeat earlier accounts. While the authors
stress the veracity of their account, their methods of emplotment
and symbolic patterning are strikingly similar to those of histori-
cal fiction: in producing what they see as a corrective story, they
not only resort to the mythologizing that they associate with other
accounts, but also testify to their locations in the present.
Multiple Truths and Contested Meaning

Parks tells the story of a black South African woman (Venus) try-
ing to transcend a life of servitude in colonial South Africa by find-
ing fame and wealth in the West. Exhibiting herself in England,
she meets up with a white doctor and becomes his lover. Venus
fantasizes about the depth of their relationship:
He will leave that wife for good

and we’ll get married
(we’d better or I’ll make a scene). (Parks 1997, 135)
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104 Desiree Lewis
But she overestimates his feelings for her. Realizing the social cost
of the discovery of his affair with a black South African woman,
the doctor kills her and then dissects her body. The implausibility
of this tale is characteristic of obvious fictionalizing. But this story
also powerfully thematizes familiar social forces: the combination
of attraction and revulsion in colonial fixations with black female
bodies, associated especially with the obsessive work of Georges
Cuvier, the scientist who dissected Baartman’s body.
Parks’s play has been the subject of considerable controversy,7
possibly because the playwright is a black woman. Parks uses tre-
mendous license in reconstructing Baartman’s story, and the play
is not intended to be realistic. Rather, the playwright has selected
themes that are deemed central to the story of a figure, often imag-
ined only as a target of oppressive forces, as someone with contra-
dictions, weaknesses, and desires. The central character based on
Baartman wants money, sexual pleasure, and a relationship with
the white man who uses her and because of this becomes complicit
with the circumstances of her subjugation. In presenting Venus in
this way, Parks is concerned with dislodging narratives that ren-
dered Baartman a guileless innocent. Determined to unravel the
function of an icon in many black consciousness writings, Parks
insists that Baartman’s symbolic meaning has erased a sense of her
humanity. Consequently, her interpretation of Baartman does not
reproduce a trope of the oppressed black female body, but con-
veys an imaginary figure exceeding neat containment. Moreover,
in dramatizing the figure of an iconized black woman, the play-
wright avoids the impulse to capture a “real” Baartman. However
ambiguous and complex, Venus is far from a realistically conceived
historical figure: Parks’s primary concern is to deconstruct—from
the perspective of her vantage point as an African American wom-
an—the discursive role of a symbol who has consistently served
the purposes of others.
Jean Young argues that “Parks’ historical deconstruction pres-
ents a fictitious melodrama that frames Sara Baartman as a . . . sov-
ereign, consenting individual with the freedom and agency to trade
in her human dignity for the promise of material gain” (1997, 609).
Yet to speak commonsensically of either Baartman’s or Venus’s
“characterization” in this play is misleading. Avoiding human-
isms’ freely willing subject, Parks squarely confronts processes of
subjectification created through performance and representation.
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As a culturally constructed subject, Venus defines herself in rela-

tion to available scripts of identity. These open up possibilities
for action, behavior, feeling, and thought at the same time that
they set limits on these: Venus may act according to her “own”
thoughts and desires, but these have discursive, institutional, and
political matrixes. The dualism of “victim” and “agent” is there-
fore transcended, with Venus’s personal choices and action always
occurring through and within cultural conventions, social codes,
and relations of domination.
Yet it is these choices and actions that define the human, as
opposed to the sign or symbol. Early in the play, Venus’s dialogue
with those often seen only as her villainous captors reveals aspects
of a social subject that the victim image totally erases: complicity,
greed, naiveté, and, as the use of dialogue clearly indicates, some
degree of instrumentality in her own fate:
The Brother
Come to England./ Dance a Little.
The Girl
Dance?
The Brother
Folks watch. Folks clap. Folks pay you gold.
The Girl
Gold.
The Brother
We’ll split it 50-50
The Girl
50-50?
The Brother
Half for me. Half for you/ May I present to you: “The African Dancing
Princess”
The Girl
A Princess. Me?/ A princess overnight . . .
(Parks 1997, 15)8
Parks’s play draws on historical material such as newspaper

reports, broadsheet ballads, extracts from anatomical studies
undertaken on Baartman, legal documents, and allusions to fig-
ures and events in historical records of Baartman’s life. In the
extract above, “the brother” refers to the man for whom Baartman
worked in Cape Town, brother of the “Free Blacks”9 who bought
Baartman on behalf of his white employer. “The Man” possibly
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106 Desiree Lewis
alludes to Alexander Dunlop, the surgeon primarily respon-

sible for Baartman’s display in Britain. Yet Parks’s presentation
of Venus constantly alludes to her being chimeric—hypervisible
in the collective imagination and yet also curiously absent. The
opening statement by a narrator who partly conveys the play-
wright’s voice is therefore telling, particularly since this statement
recurs throughout the play: “I regret to inform you that the Venus
Hottentot is dead . . . there wont b inny show . . .” (Parks 1997, 3).
While this functions partly as prolepsis, it is also a philosophical
comment on Baartman’s “meaning” in relation to the audience
and all those who presume to “know” about her.
Sara Warner’s study of Parks’s play draws attention to its intri-
cate discursive and political effects (2008, 2). Focusing on how the
playwright works consistently against closure and interment, she
stresses that the play exposes the homogenizing effects of conser-
vative and ostensibly progressive nationalist, feminist, or black-
conscious storytelling. With these overtly partisan narratives, the
coherence of the fiction is achieved at the cost of acknowledging
the messiness of history. This coherence also reinforces the cul-
tural meaning of the black female body as serviceable signifier.
Parks refuses the catharsis of telling a tragic story, instead oblig-
ing the spectator to confront the muddled motivations and forces
that propel stories about pasts and presents. In the process, the
audience is confronted with the unsettling truth that the meaning
of life narratives is integrally bound up with the circumstances of
their creation and reception, that meaning is contingent on how
particular figures are represented and read, that beyond the pro-
cess of fictionalizing there can be no essential meaning: Venus is
dead; she is alive only in the constructed worlds of the playwright
and the spectator.
The play’s obviously postmodernist use of a “chorus of specta-
tors” reinforces its emphasis on processes of meaning-making and
the artificiality of theatrical representation. As Warner observes,
the play’s self- consciousness about its status as discourse is evi-
denced when the narrator announces that Baartman is dead, and
the chorus cries out: “Outrage. It’s an outrage. Gimmie gimmie
back my buck!” (2008, 3). The demand uncomfortably conjures
up the voracious desire embedded in the gaze directed at black
women’s bodies. It alerts us to the fact that the problems associ-
ated with the need to know about Baartman may be as obscenely
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self-serving in nineteenth- century specularity as they are in the

present need to know her in different ways. Historically, dominant
textual and visual representations of black women have concealed,
silenced, or denied their humanity and voice, with the black female
body coming to signify masculinist and white racist desires and
struggles. As Pumla Gqola puts it in her study of black women in
much black South African fiction, “Black female characters provide
the slate on which the chalk marks of history and Black patriarchy
are inscribed . . . place for epistemic battles between white men and
Black men” (2009, 108). Parks’s response to the projection of the
black female body as surface for inscription is to develop a story of
disinterment, of unraveled black female personhood.
The process of narrative construction in the play is part of this
effort, and functions to draw attention to how storytelling is in
many ways a dramatization of the obdurate cultural effort to tame
the immensity of “fact.” Explicitly defying realism, the play uses
a heavily contrived style and schematic structure. Parks fuses ele-
ments of Greek theatre, absurdism, and hip-hop, and delineates
characters and narrative by unsettling spectators, by prompting
disquiet similar to the effects of theatrical alienating techniques.
The register used in the play also alludes to some of the satires
produced in Baartman’s times, texts which explicitly stereotype
Pidgin English in ostensibly mirroring black psychology. The bla-
tant intertextuality of the play consequently foregrounds its status
as artifact, and it is within the artifice of texts echoing other texts
that the audience must confront the figure of Venus. The delin-
eation of Venus as an enigmatic, often baffling, and frequently
infuriating character helps to achieve the alienating effect created
by the play’s commentary on its status as text. Venus is described
as being courageous, actively acting on her desires, astute, but also
often manipulative and avaricious. Far from arousing our unquali-
fied sympathy, she often appalls us. In interviews and responses
to criticism of her play, Parks has insisted that to depict Baartman
simply as the object of persecution of others is to underscore her
subhuman status. Thus, her rendering of a dialectic in which social
structure contends with Venus’s response can be seen as central to
the playwright’s refusal of Baartman’s convenient symbolic mean-
ing in both racist and ostensibly radical accounts.
Commenting on the meaning of the repatriation of Baartman’s
remains to South Africa, Meg Samuelson writes, “Healing,
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108 Desiree Lewis
recovery and wholeness . . . were the eagerly sought results of

Baartmann’s return” (2007, 99). We can think about the effects
of much Baartman storytelling in the same way. Drawing con-
nections between stories told about Baartman and nationalist
narratives, Samuelson argues that nationalism has been a “deriva-
tive discourse . . . Postcolonial nationalism reiterates the colonial
demand for unified ‘covered and enclosed’ bodies to reflect the
unified subject of nation” (Samuelson 2007, 97). The partisan sto-
rytelling about Baartman can be explored as a metaphor of her
covering—in opposition to her exposure in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Yet rather than constituting an act of talking back to past
myth-making, this covering connects myth-making in the past to
the present. It is this totalizing myth-making, the effort to tell the
story of a unified subject that Parks refuses to pursue.
From the perspective of her present as an African American
woman acutely aware of the politics of race, gender, voice, and
representation, Parks is concerned first and foremost with the
messiness and complexity of storytelling about socially marked
and situated bodies. Most critics who applaud Parks’s play argue
that its strength revolves around her reinvention of a historical fig-
ure who must have had human desires and motivations. This view
misses the political force of her dramatic intervention: its power
revolves around her interrogation of discursively constructed
“truths” enlisting the black female body as signifier, rather than
her offer of new definitive truths about Baartman. Rather than
proposing her own story as an alternative truth, Parks comments
incisively on the fraught process of truth construction. Instead of
correcting existing records of a historical figure with her own, she
unravels the manipulative process of truth-telling.
Discovering Truth: Sara Baartman and

the Hottentot Venus—A Ghost Story
and Biography
Historical biography is never the biography of a life. It is not even,
as many would argue, a biography of available texts and docu-
ments. It is first and foremost a story driven by the authors’ will
to truth. In Crais and Scully’s historical biography, the authors set
out to settle the question, Is it possible for scholarly biography to
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transcend re-presentation and allow for storytelling of Baartman

that reveals more than subjective truths? From the very start, they
insist that their reconstruction is singular in achieving this aim. I
argue in what follows that, despite the writers’ exultant conclu-
sions about the purpose and effects of their study, much of its con-
tent reveals the manipulative devices that Hayden White describes
in linking the writing of history to the writing of fiction. However
persuasively the study may appear to be faithful to the past “as it
really was,” it conveys information in a particular way and with
particular cultural effects. I deal with these by focusing on three
areas associated with obviously textual reconstruction: emplot-
ment in the narrative, the conception of the “self,” and the empha-
sis on Baartman’s agency.
The most striking evidence of the constructedness of Crais and
Scully’s text is its preoccupation with compelling storytelling. On
one hand, the authors criticize many Baartman fictions in which
“someone comes to stand for too much, when the past can stand no
more” (2009, 6). On the other, their own historical record routinely
exploits long established narrative models and ideological assump-
tions. One of these models is the captive narrative, a model—rooted
in the genre of tragedy—in which an innocent becomes enmeshed
in an overpowering and materialistic world. The start of the text
therefore invokes a fantasy past in great detail. The precolonial
world of Sara Baartman’s childhood is portrayed as a pastoral ideal,
with the account including florid details such as the following:
The Gonaqua gazed upon the stars and moon and danced to the eland,
turning their arms into horns and their feet into hooves stamping
the ground. They danced because all the animals were once men and
women in the time of the First People. The great antelope was both
ancestor and oneself. As a young child Sara would have watched as
kith and kin danced to the eland, became the antelope and she listened
to the stories of her parents and elders. (Crais and Sculley 2009, 11)
The start of the study portrays Baartman’s birth into a commu-

nity rich in customs (but without much history).10 She may have
heard stories that Gonaqua had told for generations, “of the eland
and the moon and of the meaning of the bit of tortoiseshell hung
around her neck” (Crais and Sculley 2009, 22).
Such imaginative narrativizing sits oddly with the claims to
definitive truth-telling elsewhere in the text. As the story proceeds,
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110 Desiree Lewis
it becomes clear that descriptions of the geography that Baartman

negotiates convey certain themes, moods, and emotions. The pre-
occupation with conveying mood and framing events often grossly
distorts what is plausible. This is clear in the account of Baartman’s
putative relationship, shortly after she arrives in Cape Town, with
a white man. Contesting the familiar story of Baartman’s pain-
ful subjection to white patriarchy, the authors hone in on obscure
“evidence” of her relationship with a European man, Hendrik van
Jong, who lived in Hout Bay, far from where she lived and worked.
We are told that “for nearly two years they lived happily together
as husband and wife,” and that “Each week or so Sara returned
to her masters, washing clothes, spending a few nights in the shed,
then passing through stands of yellowwood and silver trees as she
walked back to the bay” (Crais and Scully 2009, 46).
Considering that Baartman would have walked this distance
between 1804 and 1805, and that she would have had no roads
to “pass through,” she is unlikely to have leisurely strolled among
“stands of yellowwood and silver trees.” Apart from the great dis-
tance, the terrain at the time would have been extremely dangerous.
Implying, as this section of the text does, that Baartman leisurely
traversed a scenic landscape is outrageous. The assumption here
is that she was a free woman. But apart from the outrageousness
of this claim (anchored by a footnote that does not really lead
the reader anywhere), the mode of storytelling is revealing. This
kind of narration echoes the conventions of romantic storytelling,
replete with picturesque setting and atmosphere, and sentimen-
tal purpose and action. And it is this formula that the reader can
recognize over and above the inexactness (even implausibility) of
the idea of Baartman freely travelling a very great distance and in
difficult terrain “each week or so.”
Generally, the description of setting in the text frequently con-
veys the tragic story that the authors often associate only with oth-
ers’ myth-making: the way Baartman has been ensnared by diverse
people’s expectations (Crais and Sculley 2009, 6). I have shown
that a vivid picture of the first stage of Baartman’s life is conveyed
through description of the pastoral world she is seen to inhabit
before she travels to Cape Town. The image of the Gonaqualands
is of a static precolonial idyll in which, “Mostly they would have
kept to themselves, watching over their own animals and trying to
live much as they always had except for an apprehension that their
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world was changing in ways they could neither identify or control”

(Crais and Sculley 2009, 19). In stark contrast, Cape Town is por-
trayed as a space of rupture and turmoil, with Baartman’s location
within it implying the tumultuous turn in her life experience.
As the fictional account of her imagined sea sickness implies,
Baartman’s emotional and psychological trauma intensifies when
she leaves South Africa, “Just out of sight of Table Mountain a
malaise would settle in, followed by cold sweats and then the
nausea and vomiting. Dehydration, sleeplessness, and fatigue led
to dry retching and vertigo, the small cabin spinning round and
round as the waves ricked the ship” (Crais and Sculley 2009, 60).
The implied trauma of her arrival in England is conveyed by the
account of this new geographical space. Even more than Cape
Town, it invokes turmoil, corruption, and industrial contamina-
tion—especially in the description of the Old Kent road, which
Baartman supposedly travels along immediately after arriving in
England. Using a Dickensian trope of early industrial London, the
authors write:
[They] entered London . . . through one of the poorer, rougher parts of

the city, passing brick kilns, clothing manufacturers, breweries, and
some of the earlier factories of the Industrial Revolution. These were
among the meanest of streets. The road became ever more squalid
and overcrowded, with people as well as animals living in the houses.
(2009, 62)
The description of the road connotes moral and cultural degrada-

tion; it invokes Baartman’s descent into a depraved world of chaos,
creeping modernity and dehumanization in contrast to the idyllic
ethos previously described. The heavily figurative description of
detail masquerading as a slice of life is characteristic of nineteenth-
century realism, and it is often this tradition that Crais and Scully
draw on. What is therefore striking about their study as a text
is the way it reconfigures models, narratives, and tropes in the
emplotment of events. Even when it seems most strongly to resist
conventional Baartman storytelling, it falls back on the charged
meanings embedded in familiar modes of narration.
Peter Burke proposes “thick narrative” as a progressive alterna-
tive to naïve historical narrativizing as well as the unsatisfactori-
ness of attention to rigid structure in more recent historicizing.
Drawing on Clifford Geertz’s ideas about the anthropological
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112 Desiree Lewis
value of “thick description,” he commends the scholarly value

of “making a narrative thick enough to deal not only with the
sequence of events and the conscious intentions of the actors . . . but
also with structures—institutions, modes of thought and so on-
whether these structures act as a brake on events or as an accelera-
tor” (Burke 1991, 240). Crais and Scully set out to do this. In so
doing, their study aims at being a work of historical revisionism,
overturning the blunt and reductive preoccupation with social pro-
cess and structure toward acknowledging complexity, multiplicity,
and most importantly the agencies of social actors.
One central example of this is the authors’ explanation of the
roots of Baartman’s exhibition not in Britain, but in colonial Cape
Town. Their argument is that Baartman gradually became a “per-
former,” rather than an exhibit, starting her “career” with early
self-displays for small groups of sick seamen in Cape Town. It is
this iconoclastic revisionism that has generated not inconsider-
able acclaim for Crais and Scully’s work. In her laudatory Sunday
Independent review, for example, Maureen Isaacson writes,
“Ignoring the Sara Baartman fatigue that set in after her emo-
tional return to this country in 2002, two energetic historians and
authors of a new book, Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, rescue
our long-suffering sister from the sameness of narratives about her
momentous final years in Europe” (2010). Writing for the journal
Biography, Nadja Durbach applauds the study’s rigorous response
to most academics’ preoccupation with Baartman to “interrogate
early nineteenth-century understandings of race and sexuality,
as well as to critique the practices of science and imperialism”
(2009, 4). Isaacson’s claim that the biography radically departs
from the “sameness of [previous] narratives” is revealing about a
tendency to applaud only the revisionist intent of a text that often
repeats familiar narrative strategies and ideological assumptions.
Crais and Scully express a scholarly impatience with the tragic
mode that has dominated accounts of Baartman. Yet their own use
of formulae and conventions betrays the overwhelming need to “tell
a good story,” a story that resonates in the repertoire of stories that
we recognize as meaningful fictions. The biography’s intertextual-
ity is often quite explicit, with this intertextuality revealing their
need “to make sense of a set of events which appears strange, enig-
matic or mysterious in its immediate manifestation . . . to encode the
set in terms of culturally provided categories . . . to familiarize the
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unfamiliar”(White 1978, 196). In straining to reconstruct a world

so different and distant, they resort to the anachronistic tropes they
have imbibed from a particular education: Dickens’ portrayal of
industrialized London to describe Baartman’s arrival in London,
Romantic notions of innocent childhood and the noble savage, and
popular, early anthropological fictions of an eternally innocent and
static precolonial Africa. By reconfiguring plots of capture, dis-
placement, and degeneration, along with the formulaic figurative
description often used to symbolize these processes, the authors
situate their story in a repertoire of other familiar stories. The effect
is not so much to reveal new knowledge about Baartman’s past as it
is to convey meanings that reverberate in our present.
If the narrative strategy of this biography reveals White’s claim
that historical writing creates arguments, plots, and ethical impli-
cations through tropological formations, its preoccupation with
the self illustrates the authors’ reliance on a culturally specific
humanist definition and exploration of subjectivity. The notion of
the politically significant and culturally important “self,” of the
individual whose life is valuable, gripping, and worthy of narrative
reconstruction is deeply rooted in a humanist conception of subjec-
tivity. Originating with the Enlightenment emphasis on free will,
this conception assumes that the individual, as well as the depth,
desires, and thoughts of the individual, clearly distinguish one self
from others. For the leading humanist thinkers of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, society was the creation of individual
subjects with unique desires. The subject was believed not only to
be distinct, but also uniquely layered. The subject was thoughtful
and reflective, retreating from the world into contemplation and
privacy and therefore able to act willfully and autonomously.
Much Western contemporary fiction is rooted in this philosoph-
ical belief, with the novel form especially focusing on the fascina-
tion of the individual subject as he/she navigates a complex world
of other selves and an external environment. However much these
externals may affect the self, the notion of an essential, bounded
self remains central to novelistic storytelling. Interestingly, at the
start of their book, Crais and Scully provide commentary on the
discursive status of the “self” in Western biography:
“Biography”, we are told, “emerged at a particular time and place in

Europe’s imagining of the self . . . It emerged along with the idea of the
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114 Desiree Lewis
possessive individual, that person who has agency, autonomy a vision

of the self. This idea of the person is not so easily transferred to any-
time and anyplace and to worlds where there is no clearly possessive
subject, no ‘me’, ‘myself.’ ” (2009, 5)
Curiously, this acute theoretical reflection is entirely abandoned

elsewhere, with the writers consistently working with the idea of a
clearly possessive individual.
Overall, it is striking how the authors struggle to recreate this
culturally sanctioned construct with the limited evidence that they
have laboriously discovered and, of course, transformed to suit
their purposes. At times, modality gestures toward Baartman’s
interiority in phrasings such as, “she may [have],” “she would
[have],” “she might [have],” “she could [have].” For example, when
Baartman travels to Cape Town there is this description, ostensi-
bly of the environment, but mainly of Baartman’s implied state of
mind as she encounters and processes what she sees, “Rock cairns
marked people who had died in the great small pox epidemic of
the 1750s . . . This could have been a terrifying sight . . . The land
no longer held the stories and souls of the Khoekhoe: it was alien-
ated land, alienated from heart, from history” (Crais and Sculley
2009, 29).
Elsewhere, the speculativeness established by modal auxilia-
ries gives way to direct accounts of her inner world. In describing
Baartman’s feelings during her sojourn in England, for example,
the conjecture yields to overtly ascribing feelings. Here the authors
use a mode of describing consciousness that the literary critic,
Dorrit Cohn, describes as “psycho-narration” (1978, 11):11
Dunlop had income; Sara Baartman was busy. Alexander promised

lots of money, and the crowds were coming. And if Hendrick beat her
was that so different from his chastisements in Papendorp? Here there
was money in the beating . . . Life had not been perfect for Sara. It was
far from perfect here, but it was perhaps a bit better than eking out a
living at the edge of colonial society in Papendorp, three babies dead,
one love vanished, only drudgery to fill the days. (Crais and Sculley
2009, 81)
In this section of the narrative, Baartman is seen to think certain

thoughts and draw particular conclusions, with the reader being
persuaded that she is following the inner workings of her mind. The
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biography’s attention to Baartman consistently reveals an autho-

rial need to convey the depth, complexity, and uniqueness that
has been a singular source of interest in Enlightenment philosophy
and cultural production. While the authors clearly battle with the
challenge of constructing interiority about a figure shrouded in
myth-making, their narrative also reveals a dogged determination
to deliver to the reader the promise of the coherent and plausible
“self.”
The cultural value attached to narratives centering on the self
endures in the present. Currently, biographies assume that indi-
vidual lives are valuable and compelling human experience. This
value has been encoded in our social imaginaries, the stories that
stimulate and inspire us, that move and persuade us. Our cul-
tural life is saturated with the production and consumption of
stories about remarkable or unique lives. Biography is an influ-
ential site of popular meaning-making and a symbolic route for
making sense of our lives and our worlds. In gaining access to
the life of Sara Baartman especially, as observers we have unique
insight into a subject previously shrouded in mystery. Our curi-
osity is satisfied in similar ways to finding pleasure and being
entertained by the revelation of the private lives of contemporary
public figures.
The fixation with the knowable and complex human subject
in Crais and Scully’s text is linked to the bifurcation of self and
society, a splitting that has been central to Enlightenment notions
of free will and human liberty. The authors’ fixation with the self
is therefore connected to their exploration of agency. On one level,
this is again introduced as a revisionist effort to supplant the deter-
minism of some writers’ attention to structure and process. Yet it
also reveals the authors’ ideological entrapment in a specific way
of codifying their world. The exhaustive research associated with
their scholarly biography highlights, much more than Parks’s play,
a tension between social structure and individual agency. The his-
torical study seeks to give evidence of an actual person’s complex-
ity and agency, an individual with passions, desires, beliefs, and
choices. It seeks to show that beyond the symbol of victimization is
a complex human being who made choices and had freedoms that
other truth-telling does not allow for. We can think about this as
allowing for a shift away from the “Hottentot Venus” as symbol
and icon, to Sara Baartman, as an individual and human being.
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116 Desiree Lewis
Clearly, Crais and Scully do not jettison theoretical and political

attention to nineteenth-century colonialism. What is noteworthy is
the narrative space that they devote to agency. In their effort to pro-
duce a corrective history, the authors repeatedly affirm Baartman’s
choices and scope for personal choice. Stressing agency as a theme
and privileging this over the social structure in which it occurs
means obscuring why and how certain structures define what we
understand by choice, freedom, independence, passion, attach-
ment, affection, intimacy—the feelings and actions that they often
associate with Baartman. Overall, the main events that are seen
to mark Baartman’s agency do not conceive of the social content
and meaning of her “individual” acts. Baartman is defined as an
autonomous being with individual will, and episodes that convey
her agency assume a clear boundary between the self-possessed
individual and an exterior world.
The text deals with three events in ongoing debates about
Baartman’s agency: the circumstances of her removal from Cape
Town, her display in the West, her remaining in England despite
the controversy there about her slave status. In contrast to many
stories about Baartman, this study insists that Baartman was not
the unwilling dupe she is often presented to be. In the detailed
account of the advertising of her display in London, the authors
are at pains to stress that Baartman “had the rights to her repre-
sentation” (2009, 75), that she in fact chose the fetishised dress in
the well-known broadsheet advertisement of her freakishness. One
other significant incident meant to establish the authors’ triumphal
revisionism is the inquiry, following the intervention of Macauley,
the antislavery campaigner, into the terms of Baartman’s sojourn
in England. In dealing at considerable length with this, the authors
discover that Baartman was far from an unwilling and silenced
captive in England, but chose to remain in this country. How this
startling fact is disclosed in the text is worth quoting:
Ah what a lovely picture Sara Baartman painted. The court offices . . . did
she want to want to go back to the Cape of Good Hope or stay in
England? “Stay Here”. (Crais and Sculley 2009, 100)
With a sleight of hand that reestablishes the authors’ progressive

orientation, they interpret this response as complex subaltern resis-
tance, “In saying she was content to exhibit herself for money in
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London, Sara Baartman refused what was to become one of the

most potent sites of self-representation for the British public in
the early nineteenth century, that of liberators of black women
from the abuses of slavery” (2009, 101). Crais and Scully there-
fore reinforce Holmes’s revisionist claim that Baartman’s response
to those who presumed to defend her “suggests a combination of
naïve obstinacy with sanguine practicality. The white wigs might
argue over whether she was slave or freewoman, but Saartjie knew
that she was seller and commodity in one, and must take care of
herself” (Holmes 2007, 107).
These “revisionist” accounts of Baartman’s agency, respond-
ing provocatively to key contested themes in Baartman scholar-
ship and storytelling, convey the complacent assurance of certain
historians’ discovery. Yet they are also extraordinarily naïve in
reinforcing the idea that the subject is, in the first place, a proper
self-possessed individual, not a social subject who has not only
never been “autonomous,” but whose value as a driving force in
history and society is itself culturally constituted.
“We do not live stories”

(White 2002, 120)
Globally, there has been a growing impatience with dualisms and
dichotomies, with polar opposites and certainties in accounts of
political oppression, freedom, and struggle. Multiple truths, incom-
plete conclusions, insubstantial, and spectral stories are the new
truths of a world of fragmentation, a world that can and should
no longer be clearly understood as having a coherent “structure.”
Superficially, Crais and Scully deliver on the promise of this spec-
tral story, seeming to promise the reader the “thick history” and
revisionist narrative that refuses neat certainties provided by many
Marxist, nationalist, or feminist accounts. Yet their marshaling of
evidence, which seems to bring mystery firmly under control, does
not transcend the way in which Baartman continues to provide
scope for configuring a historicizing present.
Baartman storytelling raises the extent to which uncertainties
about truth haunt cultural practices including obviously imaginative
writing and scholarly productions. Baartman stories also raise the
way that pasts are always locked into presents. Most importantly,
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118 Desiree Lewis
they show that life storytelling can be the basis for reinforcing
certain perceptions or actions, and for constituting, rationalizing,
and reinforcing certain perspectives on reality. Many critical stud-
ies of Parks’s Venus focus on the “problem” of this playwright’s
crediting Baartman with agency, and especially with her insulting
or insensitive representation of Baartman’s complicity. Jean Young
writes, “Parks’s stage representation of her complicity diminishes
the tragedy of her life . . . [and] reifies the perverse imperialist mind
set, and her mythic historical reconstruction subverts the voice of
Saartjie Baartman” (1997, 701).
This lambasting of Parks strikingly echoes the tone and assump-
tions of Crais and Scully’s writing. Like the historians, Young
speaks in the name of a definitive truth, accessible in the present,
about Baartman. Where the historians’ truth is the agency and
complexity that most have ignored, hers is the truth of the racism
and misogyny seen from the present. In Young’s articulation of
this truth, Baartman is rendered symbolic, a cipher through which
the critic articulates her present concerns. Maybe, as Parks sug-
gests, the most powerful revisionism, the most radical intervention
into truth-telling about Baartman may not be projections about
what the “actual” Baartman thought or experienced, but the rec-
ognition of her role in textualizing others’ subjective and cultural
needs—both in the past and in the present.
Notes
1. I am indebted to Angelo Fick for comments on a first draft.
2. See Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography
of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and
Literature”, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Race, Writing and Difference
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
3. See Yvette Abrahams, “The Great Long National Insult: “Science”,
Sexuality and the Khoisan in the 18th and early 19th century”, Agenda,
32 and Colonialism, Dysjuncture and Dysfunction: Sarah Baartman’s
Resistance, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cape Town, 2000.
4. See Zola Maseko, dir. The Life and Times of Sara Baartman, 1998.
5. See Robert Shell, Children of Bondage (London: Wesleyan University
Press, 1997).
6. See Carmel Schrire, “Native Views of Western Eyes,” ed. Pippa Skotness
(Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1997).
9780230117792_08_ch06.indd 118 6/20/2011 1:36:48 PM

7. See Young, Jean Young, “The Reobjectification and Recommoditization

of Sara Baartman in Suzan Lori Parks’ play Venus,” African American
Review, 31( 1997), 609
8. Venus’s echoed words in this dialogue are of course symbolic indica-
tions of the limits of her capacity for true dialogue. This reinforces the
play’s attention to her scope for action only within the confines of her
entrapment.
9. “Free Blacks” in the colonial Cape had economic possibilities that slaves
did not, although they were invariably controlled by white employers
and landowners. Crais and Scully focus mainly on the autonomy of this
group as, for example, employers of others’ domestic labor or property
owners.
10. Landeg White comments incisively on “the image of a culture with cus-
toms but no history” in the romantic nationalism of Chinua Achebe’s
early novels. See Landeg White, “Literature and Society in Africa,”
Journal of African History, 21 (1980), 540.
11. Cohn’s use of this neologism addresses both subject-matter and the activ-
ity it denotes, and is a way of analyzing “the plainly reportorial, or the
highly imagistic ways a narrator may adopt in narrating consciousness.”
See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Representing
Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
1978, 11).
9780230117792_08_ch06.indd 119 6/20/2011 1:36:48 PM

Chapter Seven
“I Wanna Love Something Wild”: A

Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus
Ilaria Oddenino
The story of Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman brought to

Europe in 1810 to confirm the racial inferiority of her people,1 is
emblematic of how colonial relations of dominance can be repro-
duced independently of contexts of political and territorial occu-
pation. Within the very heart of Western civilization, her body
became the equivalent of a far away land to conquer and rule,
conveniently transformed by the “cartographers” of the race into
a morbidly detailed “map” of otherness. Being reduced to a mere
assembly of parts, Baartman’s body was transformed into a site of
inscription for the values of the dominating culture. The coloniza-
tion of her body naturally resulted in the creation of a colonized
corpus, “body” of literature, which ranged from caricatures, to
scientific writings, to ballads and vaudevilles. It is through this
heterogeneous ensemble of texts that the image of the “Hottentot
Venus” was cemented in the European collective imagination, in a
way that made her “other” and yet “entirely knowable and visible”
(Bhabha 1994, 71).
Within this body of texts there are hints to a parallel dis-
course, more socially dangerous and therefore less explicit, where
Baartman’s body is revealed as a repository for the erotic fantasies
of Western men. This is clearly evident (although never seriously
dealt with) in La Venus Hottentote, ou haine aux françaises, the
1814 French vaudeville that I will take as a starting point for the
exploration of the gray area where these two seemingly incom-
patible perspectives coexist; I will then move to an updated and
reinterpreted version of the vaudeville in the play within the play
of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus. Some other aspects of her extremely
dense drama will be an occasion for looking more closely at the
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122 Ilaria Oddenino
complex dynamics of attraction and repulsion aroused by the sex-

ualized female “other,” and they will be considered as part of a
more general attempt to free the memory of Baartman from the
previous eurocentric discourse. Discussion of the playwright’s suc-
cess at creating a decolonized narrative (freed from the projections
of the desires and fears of the beholders, and therefore, represent-
ing nothing but her own existence as a woman) will conclude this
work.
La Venus Hottentote, ou haine aux françaises opened in Paris on
November 19, 1814. While Sarah Baartman was gracing private and
public rooms alike with her “wondrous” presence, a French actress
was delighting masses of theatre-goers with her leading role in this
highly entertaining one-act vaudeville, whose plot can be summa-
rized as follows: Adolph, a young man whose heart has been bro-
ken twice, is determined never to love a Frenchwoman again, and
with the support of his “traveler” uncle (who, in fact, has hardly
ever left France) he is ready to begin his search for an “exotic”
inamorata. When Amelia, his wealthy cousin and, therefore, his
expected future wife, discovers the terrible news, she is determined
to find a way to trick him into marrying her. She hears of the soar-
ing popularity of the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” a woman of
“frightening beauty” (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 138), 2 as she is told,
and a solution to her worries is suddenly revealed; she will disguise
herself as a “Hottentot” lady by the name of “Liliska” and seduce
him with her mysterious, foreign appeal. The trick seems to work,
and both the young man and his uncle are instantly ravished by her
charms, “what a marvelous woman . . . that smile without treach-
ery, in Europe such a one is never seen . . . Oh blessed is the day that
led you to our rivers” (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 150). Adolph and
Amelia/Liliska thus engage in a lengthy amorous interplay, which
culminates in a hasty betrothal and a wedding ceremony to be held
that very same night. However, an unexpected element of disrup-
tion bursts on the scene; it is “the chevalier,” Amelia’s suitor, who,
to definitively scoop the competition, has found Adolph the savage
woman he appeared to be longing for:
“Here, look at her,” he says as he unrolls a large scroll of paper he had

in his pocket with a portrait of Sarah Baartman, the “real” Hottentot
Venus3. At the sight of her “savage monstrosity,” to which Liliska
clearly bore no resemblance, everyone cries out in fright: “What a
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“I Wanna Love Something Wild” 123
strange thing! Such features until now unknown! With such a face she
cannot be a Venus.” (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 161)
And so the conspiracy is revealed, but now that he has been awak-
ened to the uninviting reality of the facts, Adolph is well happy to
renounce his exotic fantasies in favor of his civilized white French
cousin. Order is thus reestablished and everyone will live happily
ever after.
Although the play clearly testifies to the astounding, and infa-
mous, popularity that the “Hottentot Venus” rapidly attained in
Paris (Badou 2000, 123), I believe its main significance is to be
found elsewhere. It seems to me that this vaudeville, blithe, and
unproblematic as it may be exposes some fundamental contradic-
tions that lie at the core of not only Sarah’s personal story, but of
the era as a whole. While the idealized image of the noble sav-
age was still very much part of the Western collective imagination
(Liliska is alternatively referred to as “a new Atala” (Badou 2000,
160) or “the child of nature” (Badou 2000, 150)), the so- called
“Age of Reason,” imbued as it was with a new faith in Western
man’s capability to rationally decode and organize the chaos of
creation, had mainly invested its energies in finding a rather less
flattering collocation for the “savage” Other. Indeed, following
the trend of taxonomic frenzy inaugurated in the first half of the
eighteenth century,4 a number of (pseudo) sciences (from phrenol-
ogy, to physiognomics, to social anthropology) began to prolif-
erate, aiming in their specific ways at isolating and rationalizing
all tangible signs of physical and temperamental difference in the
hierarchical order of mankind.
The stigmatization of such signs as racially inferior and/or clini-
cally pathological often justified, rather than dismantled, wide-
spread popular preconceptions, the most insidious and prurient
of which regarded African sexuality. The perception of the libido
of Africans as unrestrained, “dirty,” and animal like, had inhab-
ited European imagination since the first moments of explora-
tion and “discovery,” so to speak, of those territories. However,
as Blanchard has underlined, it is from the seventeenth century
onwards that this idea consistently began to gain ground (1995,
27), and the subsequent “siècle des Lumières” saw eminent schol-
ars such as Buffon working toward supposedly scientific explana-
tions for these peoples’ intrinsic attitude of debauchery. On the
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124 Ilaria Oddenino
other hand, the very same “primitive” bodies that so reprehensi-

bly symbolized the all-instinct nature of Africans (as opposed to
the rational, sophisticated mores of Europeans) also represented
an accessible contact zone for white men with (African) female
nudity, thanks to the growing number of ethnographic images
available in the West. These can be said to have actually worked as
“ersatz pornography” (Pieterse 1992, 94), and Baartman’s display
as “The Hottentot Venus” is the quintessential example of the sco-
pophilic instinct (i.e., the “pleasure in looking at another person
as an erotic object” (Mulvey 1989, 25)) aroused by the sexualized
female Other.
Alternatively disguised as biological specimen and wondrous
freak, Baartman could in fact be considered “the anthropo-erotic
sensation of nineteenth-century Europe” (Pieterse 1992, 94), epit-
omizing a type of desire that was socially unacceptable and, as
such, utterly unavowable. This is the gray area that the vaudeville
hints at but simplistically resolves by conveniently reestablishing
the uncomplicated Manichean order of the world. As effectively
put by T. Deanan Sharpley-Whiting, “La Venus Hottentote, ou
haine aux françaises opens with a show of reverence for exotic
difference and ends literally in incestuous sameness: Adolph and
Amelia are united in marital bliss—members of the same race,
culture, nationality, and family” (1999, 41).
Little less than two centuries later, the vaudeville returns in
Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus as part of a more general process of his-
torical re-reading. Indeed, following her typically unconventional
approach to literature and performance, the Fort Knox-born play-
wright has tried to dig out the most stubbornly hidden pages of
Baartman’s controversial story. The word “dig” is particularly rel-
evant in the approach to Parks’s theatre, since the way she under-
stands her task as an author is closely connected with this act of
searching and bringing to light what lies underground, buried
under dusty documents or years of unchallenged truths. In this
regard, she writes:
A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting his-

tory through the medium of literature. Since history is a recorded or
remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to “make” his-
tory—that is, because so much of African-American history has been
unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as playwright
is to—through literature and the special strange relationship between
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theatre and real life—locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones,
find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. (Parks 1995, 4)
In Venus, Parks offers her personal rendering of several aspects of

Baartman’s life in Europe, but the bones she has found in this spe-
cific process of archeological digging seem to have sung primarily
of love. She has thus made this controversial, slippery ground the
heart of her complex work, stretching her speculations from
the merely physical interest of the “highly civilized” Europeans
for the Venus (this is how she is always referred to), to the possibil-
ity of a love affair between the alter ego of Georges Cuvier and
the Venus herself. The first of the two hypotheses is the one she
explores in the play within the play (For the Love of the Venus)
modeled on La Venus Hottentote, ou haine aux francaises, but
departing from the original in minor aspects of the plot and in the
use of more overtly sexual overtones.
It consists of six scenes unevenly distributed within the main
play, and once again it depicts a “young man” and a “bride-to-be”
whose relationship is on the verge of falling apart; the young man’s
fantasy has been set off by his father’s and uncle’s stories about the
“dark continent.” What excites his sexual desire is something quite
different from the white, middle-class young lady who is standing
before him, offering him some tea. “Ahhh me: unloved!” sighs the
bride-to-be at the end of the first scene (Parks 1996, 37), where he
turns down everything she offers him (with a slight hesitation only
when presented with chocolate). He first reveals his new fascination
with “otherness” by saying; “Uncle took Dad to Africa. Showed
Dad stuff. Blew Dads mind” (Parks 1996, 35). This time (unlike the
original) the young man, having seen a picture of the “Hottentot
Venus” in the paper, knows exactly what he wants to “love”:
THE YOUNG MAN.

[B]efore I wed, Uncle, I’d like for you to procure for me an oddity.
I wanna love
Something Wild.
(. . .)
THE UNCLE.
Be a little more specific.
THE YOUNG MAN.
In the paper yesterday:
“In 2 weeks time
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126 Ilaria Oddenino
For one week only”

Something called “THE HOTTENTOT VENUS”
Uncle. Get her for me somehow. (Parks 1996, 58)
Again, the bride-to-be has no choice but to dress up as “the

Hottentot Venus,” and here too she easily fools both of them. She
and the uncle then engage in an elaborate clicking and clucking to
simulate a conversation in a Khoi language, and this is the enthusi-
astic “translation” he reports to a mesmerized young man:
She sez she comes from far uhway where its quite hot.
She sez shes pure bred Hottentot.
She sez if wilds you desire
She comes from The Wilds and she carries them behind her. (Parks
1996, 136)
With the Uncle’s “translation” of the fake Venus’s5 “self-

description,” Parks effectively summarizes all stereotypes sur-
rounding the “Hottentot” woman’s sexuality. She is “wild”
because she comes “from where it is quite hot,” namely Africa.
Anne McClintock reminds us that “[l]ong before the era of high
Victorian imperialism, Africa and the Americas had become what
can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination—a
fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected
its forbidden sexual desires and fears” (1995, 22). One of the recur-
ring traits of the so- called “freak shows” in history6 was the need
to invent a background story that would collocate the “extraordi-
nary” people exhibited in a quasi-legendary realm, which was then
confirmed in the moment of the performance through the exasper-
ation of all features connoting them as unquestionably “different.”
Hence the “vast enterprise in picture postcards of human exhibits
and “true life” pamphlets, which purported to be biographical
sketches of freaks, but were usually elaborate fictions” (Gerber
1990, 17), and the stereotyped costumes, scenery and exotic tin-
sels employed on stage.7 Sarah’s display as the “Hottentot Venus”
is no exception, and the set of implications evoked by the porno-
tropics she came from (which her performance—from the “pasto-
ral African scenery and verdant, exotic plants” (Holmes 2007, 2)
placed behind her, to the skin-tight costume revealing every inch
of her sinuous body—constantly underlined) was enough to sur-
round her with a veritable aura of myth.
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The white men’s morbid curiosity was thus easily titillated, and
the fact that the revelation of what the young man wants to love
meets with no shocked reaction, not even a hint of surprise on his
male relatives’ side (as opposed to the bride-to-be, who receives
it with disgust) is emblematic of a Euro-masculine, shared (but
repressed) sexual desire. Furthermore, although she has grown
accustomed to the Western civil ways, she still unmistakably car-
ries the signs of her wildness, that is to say her lasciviousness:
“behind,” in her posterior, “large as a cauldron pot,” as a popular
ballad of the time described it (reprinted in Lindfors 1996, 210);
“inside” in her savage temperament; “in front” in the peculiar
shape of her genitalia, commonly known as “Hottentot apron”
or “curtain of shame.”8 In any case, as Gilman points out, “for
most Europeans who viewed her, Sarah Baartman existed only as
a collection of sexual parts” and her “genitalia and buttocks sum-
marized her essence for the nineteenth-century observer” (1985,
87–88).
For the white civilized world to proceed on the tracks of fixed,
easily recognizable, and safely uncontaminated truths on which
it was founded, it was vital that the erotic pulsations aroused by
someone who embodied precisely what that world was not, remain
hidden. Being obscene, they belonged off-stage, outside the scene.9
In other words, for Western men to lie to themselves about their
own civility, they needed to dissimulate their erotic leanings toward
Baartman10; the attraction provoked by her shape was a feeling that
had to be banished in order for these individuals to exist socially.11
Julia Kristeva argues in her essay on abjection, from the margins
to which it is relegated “the abject does not cease challenging [its]
masters” (1982, 2); the fact that it has been forcibly obliterated
does not mean that it is not there. Quite the opposite, in fact.
With this in mind, there is one more element, trivial and insig-
nificant as it may appear, that I believe should be taken into con-
sideration, and that might stimulate a reflection on what that
particular shape (I am referring, of course, to Sarah’s posterior)
could have really evoked; I am thinking of the extremely wide bot-
toms that respectable European women began to reproduce with
their most “à la mode” dresses. Around the time of Sarah’s Parisian
display, skirts were beginning to become “more voluminous and
bell-shaped” (Bratting 2003, 45), and through the first half of the
nineteenth century “the volume of torso and sleeves . . . continued
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128 Ilaria Oddenino
to be reduced so that, with the disproportionately vast dome-

shaped skirt, the feminine silhouette came to resemble the shape
of a dinner-bell” (Bratting 2003, 47). Furthermore, the history
of European fashion tells us of beautiful dresses featuring the so-
called “cul de Paris” bustles, which seem to have been a recur-
ring characteristic of women’s clothing, reaching a peak in the late
eighteenth and then in the late nineteenth century (Bratting 2003,
54). Should not this seemingly marginal fact (not obscene and
therefore un-banished and clearly visible) make us reconsider the
potential appeal of Sarah’s natural “cul” to the eyes of the Western
onlookers?
The natural curves of the Venus might have been irresistible,
but the play within the play ends with the young man’s decision
to stand by his civilized white bride-to-be, as long as she “keeps
her core” once she shrinks back to her original size. The young
man gives her a red heart box of chocolates, the curtain falls and
the Baron Docteur, the only spectator of the play, applauds. The
Baron Docteur is the fictional counterpart of Georges Cuvier, the
French scientist who dissected Sarah’s body in Paris and meticu-
lously described every inch of it in his search for a precise collo-
cation for this boundary-blurring Other. He is also the one who
matched his supposedly scientific measurements with partial and
purely aesthetic judgments12 describing her appearance as brutal,
her physiognomy as repulsive, her lips as monstrously swollen, and
so on (Cuvier 1817, 262–264). The main body of the play is built
around the suspicion, which soon becomes a certainty, that the
Baron’s real interest for the Venus is indeed rather unscientific, but
on an altogether different level.
It all begins when, to make his offer to follow him to Paris more
tempting, the Baron gives the Venus a red heart box of chocolates
(Parks 1996, 90), the same one that the young man gives to his
beloved at the end of the play within the play. From that moment
onward, although the “medicolonial discourse” (Thompson 2007,
179) is never abandoned, it becomes inextricably entwined with
a discourse of romantic love (ibid.). Despite any historical records
to support this curious scenario, it is nonetheless quite easy to
guess where the seeds of the development of this idea might have
come from; against all reasonable predictions, I believe this fer-
tile ground can reasonably be found precisely in Cuvier’s original
description of Sarah’s body, which Parks reproduces in a scene
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called The dis(re)memberment of the Venus Hottentot (1996,

95–102). The Baron, on a podium, delivers details on the Venus’s
dissection:
THE BARON DOCTEUR.

The condition of the flexor brevis digitorum pedis presented rather
anomalous characters
It might be said to form 2 distinct muscles.
This condition interests us
Because of the well known fact that in the chimpanzee,
And in all inferior Primates, a considerable portion of this muscle
Always arises from the long flexor tendon . . .
Her shoulders back and chest had grace.
Her charming hands . . . uh hehm.
Where was I? (Parks 1996, 102)
Georges Cuvier had indeed described Sarah’s hand as “charming”

(Cuvier 1817, 264), an undoubtedly unscientific consideration
whose value is however diametrically opposite to the derogatory
ones I mentioned before. This apparently insignificant detail is in
fact very eloquent, and Parks’s rendering of this “incident” is effec-
tive in underlining how, for a moment, the scholar’s unconscious
could have slipped in to expose what the person actually thought.
The obscene inadvertently infiltrates on the scene through the
cracks in the Baron’s stream of thoughts, and it takes him a con-
scious effort to recover his composure (“uh hehm. Where was I?”).
How could a man whose task was to scientifically demonstrate
that this woman belonged to the lowest rungs of humanity find
some of her features “charmantes”? In Venus, Parks sets out to
explore a broader spectrum of questions stemming from that first,
crucial one: what if the Baron’s attraction for the Venus was not
a merely uncontrolled sexual impulse? What if it turned out to be
real love? What if that love was reciprocated? And how can love
and reason, “amor et timor,” and again, attraction and repulsion
coexist?
If the two people in question were simply Georges, a man, and
Sarah, a woman, the hypothetical outcomes of this love scenario
would probably be less problematic. However, the author intro-
duces the characters of her play with a list that she significantly
entitles “the roles” (Parks 1996, 4), and roles are indeed what each
is called to represent. Instead of Sarah there is “the Venus,” instead
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130 Ilaria Oddenino
of Georges Cuvier, there is “the Baron Docteur” and so on. The

real person is thus always hidden behind the mask of a socially con-
structed persona, and reality is founded on the fixed, predictable
relationships between these masks; it is through these certainties
that Sarah’s contemporaries “know” the world. In Venus, Parks
further exasperates this condition by making her actors conve-
niently slip from one role to another, keeping her audience always
fully aware of the artificiality of the parts performed. Again, as in
the play within the play, this stylistic choice is aimed at underlin-
ing that the impossibility for this love to truly blossom is social:
the scientist cannot love the specimen; the respectable European
doctor cannot love the “Hottentot.” Therefore, even though the
two do become lovers in the play, their relationship (apart from
a few moments of forgetful happiness) is marked by the Baron’s
unresolved sense of guilt and shame. This scene evokes his torment
particularly well: the doctor, with his back to the Venus, sneaks
little looks at her over his shoulder and masturbates, in a vain
attempt to deny the object of his arousal:
THE VENUS.
Whatre you doing?
THE BARON DOCTEUR.
Nothing.
VENUS.
Lemmie see.
THE BARON DOCTEUR.
Dont look ! Dont look at me.
Look off
Somewhere
Eat yr chockluts.
Eat em slow.
Touch yrself.
Good.
Good. (Parks 1996, 109–110)
The conflict is never resolved, and the two spheres continue to

stand side by side in an irreconcilable juxtaposition. Even linguisti-
cally, the areas remain separate, as shown by the Baron’s oscillation
between standard English (the language of formality and colonial
power) and a more colloquial English, closer to the spoken word
(the language “of the heart,” used when talking to his beloved).
The play’s two focal discourses, running parallel and therefore
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never touching, find their perfect metonymical representation in

the very last pages, where a glossary of medical terms stands side
by side with a glossary of chocolates (Parks 1996, 163–167).
The brief extract quoted above confirms one of the distinguish-
ing features of Parks’s theatre, namely the fact that, as she explains,
“[t]here is a lot of watching going on” (Jiggets 1996, 313) onstage.
In Venus, this takes on a special relevance, since Baartman’s exploi-
tation consisted precisely in having her parade in front of an audi-
ence who watched her and, as often repeated in the play, “exposure
iz what killed her.” Not only does the playwright reexpose, if not
“over-expose, the Venus to the ‘poking eyes’ and probing stares of
spectators” (Warner 2008, 194), she also reexposes her to the lust-
ful gaze of the man who had once disguised his voyeuristic pleasure
as minute medical observation (Fausto-Sterling 1995, 41). Here, the
“visual” relationship he entertains with her is explicitly sexual and
in many ways similar to a peep show, or, more generally, to porn.
It shares with pornography the physical distance from the object of
desire, the excitement that derives from the mere act of looking, the
sense of doing something improper, wrong, and dishonorable. With
this scene Parks seems to be making a comment not only on the
Baron’s personal interest for the Venus, but also, more generally, on
the nature of European men and their collective role as viewers (of the
“Hottentot Venus” herself, but also, for instance, of performances
such as La Vénus Hottentote, ou haine aux françaises). However,
while being observed by the Baron, the Venus also expresses her
desire to see what he is doing, and so, implicitly, to “study” his sex,
to observe him while he is masturbating. This brings to the fore
another crucial aspect that needs to be addressed, which is in fact
the most controversial facet of the entire work. In Venus, Sarah is
not simply depicted as the passive recipient of the white man’s love;
on the contrary, she is a desiring subject, so to speak, just as much as
she is a desired object. This has attracted some very harsh criticism,
as Elizabeth Brown-Guillory points out:
Parks’s fictionalized version of the story, namely the love scenario, has
shocked and angered some critics who feel that Parks romanticized
the utterly reprehensible Baartman story by constructing Venus as a
subject of complicity in her own destruction. (2002, 193)
Among those who most vehemently opposed the author’s choice is

Jean Young, according to whom Parks has depicted Sarah as “an
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132 Ilaria Oddenino
accomplice in her own exploitation” (1997, 699), and has there-

fore diminished “the tragedy of her life as a nineteenth-century
Black woman striped of her humanity at the hands of a hostile,
racist society that held her and those like her in contempt” (1997,
700). Young is also in utter disagreement with (white male) New
York theatre critics such as Ben Brantley or Robert Brustein, who
“unsurprisingly” praised the play’s “lack of societal indictment”
(ibid.), a position that implicitly seems to turn them, and part of
the audience, into complacent witnesses of the reenactment of the
dangerous dynamics that the play does not overtly subvert.
When confronted with such critiques, Parks insists that her por-
trayal of Sarah as a woman of agency has to be seen as part of a
more general picture of black women refusing to simply submit to
the victim mentality. Sarah was a victim, no doubt about that, but
Parks believes that reducing her to this static role alone would deny
her complexity as a woman, and explains her refusal of what she
perceives as a too simplistic vision:
I could have written a two-hour saga with Venus being the victim.
But she’s multi-faceted. She’s vain, beautiful, intelligent, and, yes, com-
plicit. I write about the world of my experience, and it’s more compli-
cated than “the white man down the street is giving me a hard time.”
That’s just one aspect of our reality. As Black people, we’re often
encouraged to narrow and simply address the race issue. We deserve so
much more. (Williams, 1996)
The weight of the social and historical responsibilities of Sarah’s

exploitation is crushing, and placing it all on somebody’s back
would undoubtedly be liberating. Yet, allowing a convenient pro-
cess of catharsis would merely cast a blinding light on the foggy
areas that enfold such an intricate matter, ignoring the “greys,”
the nuances. This would also mean perpetrating imperialistic
binary logics that typically define relations of dominance on the
basis of clear-cut distinctions (self/other, civilized/savage, etc.) that
fail to take into account the interstitial spaces between opposites.
Furthermore, being true to the facts (and, in this case, righting
historical wrongs) is not necessarily the prerogative of theatre
(Warner 2008, 196–197) even more so when the playwright her-
self declares that she conceives theatre as “an incubator for the
creation of historical events”13 (ibid.), a process which involves
dis-membering and reassembling the “carcasses” she finds in her
9780230117792_09_ch07.indd 132 6/20/2011 1:37:43 PM

“digging” in ways that may have seemed up until that moment

incongruous or unfathomable.
Yet, all these plausible explanations for the play’s re- (or mis-)
interpretation of the role of the Sarah Baartman seem to crumble
when one looks more carefully at Parks’ declaration. In explaining
the reasons behind her refusal to characterize Sarah as a victim,
she tells us that it is the world of her own experience that she
writes about. This is what tells her that things are more compli-
cated than white men being the villain and black women being the
victim. But her own life is not that of an early nineteenth-century
African woman who was clearly exploited by Western society, and
this has to be regarded as a major limitation of her work. Parks
snatches the representation of Sarah Baartman from the hegemony
of the European lens only to place it under that of her own African
American sensibility; where is the real woman, when yet another
filter has been placed between herself and her representation?
Funny enough, Venus ends up retrenching some of the stereotypes
that weighed upon previous renderings of Sarah: here, too, the real
person is never truly there, and becomes a projection of how the
playwright could imagine herself within Baartman’s narrative. In
this sense, the play does not fully succeed in freeing her from the
burden of representation, and the de-colonization of her story is
not fully accomplished. Nevertheless, Venus does succeed in prob-
lematizing crucial issues, and it does effectively unearth the (more
or less implicit) sexual subtext that lies beneath her general Euro-
historical narrative. Despite its limitations, it has to be regarded as
an important step toward the establishment of a fully decolonized
body of literature.
Notes
1. “Hottentot” is the racist, derogatory term used to describe the Khoi
peoples of South Africa. In some hypothetical reconstructions of the
Great Chain of Being, “Hottentots” were collocated in a liminal posi-
tion between humans and apes, as the following example illustrates:
“Animal life rises from this low beginning in the shell-fish, thro’ innu-
merable species of insects, fishes, birds, and beasts, to the confines of
reason, where, in the dog, the monkey, and the chimpanzee’, it unites so
closely with the lowest degree of that quality in man, that they cannot
easily be distinguished from each other. From this lowest degree in the
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134 Ilaria Oddenino
brutal Hottentot, reason, with the assistance of learning and science,

advances, thro’ the various stages of human understanding, which rise
above each other, till in a Bacon or a Newton it attains the summit.”
(Jenyns 1822, 17).
2. All quotations from the vaudeville are taken from the translation
Sharpley-Whiting provides in the appendix to Black Venus.
3. There is clearly nothing real about the “Hottentot Venus.” Sarah
Baartman is the person. The Hottentot Venus is her constructed and
imposed persona, a simulacrum, a projection of the Western man’s fears
and fantasies. We can imagine the picture mentioned in the vaudeville
as one of the many caricaturized portrayals of Sarah as the “Venus,”
exoticized and eroticized representations which, far from being faithful
depictions of Sarah (the woman), merely reproduced what the spectators
wanted to see (the freak, the ethnographic curiosity, the “missing link”,
the sexualized female, the exotic goddess of love etc.).
4. Most notably with the publication of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae,
1735.
5. This is, in fact, the fake version of a fake, since the “original” Venus was
nothing but a Western construction. See note 3.
6. I am here using the phrase “freak shows” in its more generic conno-
tation to refer to the public display of a person for profit, a person
deemed racially inferior and/or physically deviant. The logics behind the
advertising (and therefore the “selling”) of these “products” are at the
basis of the most successful industries of such shows, whose evolution
Rosemary Garland Thomson summarizes as follows: “The early itin-
erant monster-mongers who exhibited human oddities in taverns and
the slightly more respectable performances in rented halls evolved in the
mid-nineteenth century into institutionalized, permanent exhibitions of
freaks in dime museums and later in circus sideshows, fairs, and amuse-
ment park midways. The apotheosis of museums, which both inaugu-
rated and informed the myriad dime museums that followed, was P. T.
Barnum’s American Museum, which he purchased and revitalized in
1841” (Garland Thomson 1996, 4-5).
7. Rosemarie Garland Thomson explains: “An animal-skin wrap, a spear,
and some grunting noises, for example, made a retarded black man into
the Missing Link. Irregular pigmentation enhanced by a loincloth and
some palm fronds produced the Leopard Boy” (1996, 5).
8. See, for example Holmes 2007, 140-9.
9. Although referred to a completely different context, I am thinking here
of Elizabeth Costello’s reflection on the word’s etymology: “She chooses
to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain
things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!)
must remain off-stage” (Coetzee 2004, 168-9).
10. This is perhaps more clearly evident during Sarah’s British period, where
a higher level of morality was always maintained. In Paris, the interest
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around her was more explicitly sexual, and this is where she truly meta-
morphosed into “a tragic heroine and showgirl manqué, a fallen god-
dess of love, the epitome of the African exotic” (Holmes 2007, 128).
This could also explain the existence of a vaudeville such as La Vénus
Hottentote, ou Haine aux françaises. However, the vaudeville also
shows the need to still relegate the erotic to a socially acceptable area,
where fears are exorcized through laughter and a final celebration of the
French woman. The same is true of the medical theatre, where a morbid
interest for Sarah’s sexuality is turned into scientific investigation, thus,
again, becoming socially acceptable.
11. “The abject is everything that the subject seeks to expunge in order
to become social; it is also a symptom of the failure of this ambition”
(McClintock 1995, 71).
12. This was a recurring feature of the new sciences that flourished in the
eighteenth century: “The observations, measurements, and comparisons
that were basic to the new eighteenth- century sciences were combined
with value judgments following aesthetic criteria derived from ancient
Greece. The Enlightenment passion for the new sciences and the reli-
ance upon the classics as authority were fused in this manner. Whatever
the physical measurements or comparisons made, in the last resort the
resemblance to ancient beauty and proportions determines the value of
man” (Mosse 1978, 2).
13. My italics.
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Chapter Eight
“Just Ask the Scientists”: Troubling

the “Hottentot” and Scientific Racism
in Bessie Head’s Maru and Ama Ata
Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy
Z’étoile Imma
In her essay “African Sexuality/Sexuality in Africa: Tales and

Silences,” Signe Arnfred discusses how the conflicting narratives
surrounding Sara Baartman exemplify European attempts to con-
solidate white supremacist discourses of race as facts of science.
Indeed, in the life and death of Sara Baartman, science was the
overwhelming mechanism through which she was racialized, gen-
dered, and sexualized. As Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais discuss
in their recent biography of Sara Baartman, soon after her death,
the leading French scientist of the nineteenth century, George
Cuvier, examined, weighed, and dissected the corpse of Baartman,
directing most his attention of her buttocks and genitals—that he
excised and set in a jar for preservation (Crais and Sculley 2009,
139, 140). Cuvier later reported his findings in his Treatis Memorie
du Musée d’Histoire Naturalle and Baartman’s body parts were
placed in the museum’s permanent collection. In this chapter, I
explore how the colonial tales about Sara Baartman and the spec-
ter of scientific racism haunt Bessie Head’s and Ama ata Aidoo’s
postcolonial novels and how these writers attempt to make visible,
and ultimately disrupt, the painful history of European objectifi-
cation of the African female body.
For Cuvier and his contemporaries, science was the primary
imperial mechanism through which black bodies could be defined
as Other and objects. In the Darwinian system of classification, the
indigenous peoples of South Africa, the KhoiSan, renamed as the
epithets “Bushmen” and “Hottentot,” were commonly understood
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138 Z’étoile Imma
as the “lowest of the savage races” (Dubow 1995, 21). While popu-
lar depictions of the “Hottentot” in cartoons, performances, and
travel narratives continued to reify the KhoiSan’s degraded position
in the colonial imagination, scientific disciplines such as physiog-
nomy and anthropology provided the foundational discourses and
institutional continuance for European constructions of race typol-
ogy and difference. As Saul Dubow’s book-long study of scientific
racism in modern South Africa suggests, the consolidation of these
discourses in the racist policies of apartheid is but one vestige of
an evolutionary theory that positioned the European in the most
superior position and Africans in close developmental proximity
to animals. Thus animalized, Africans—more particularly, the
KhoiSan of Southern Africa—were targeted as racialized bodies to
be studied, observed, and dissected. While some experts attempted
to disseminate a more sympathetic view of the “Hottentots,” such
attempts at compassionate critique of the hegemonic theories that
placed the KhoiSan as the missing link between man and higher
primates was most often imbedded in the language of race and
racial development and therefore relegitimized scientific racism.
The heartbreaking story that centers on Sara Baartman, whether
cast as an agent complicit in her expose or as naïve victim of impe-
rial whim, illustrates that the shaping of the KhoiSan as either
wild animal or infantile savage, follows a coconstitutive trajec-
tory, one that silences, objectifies, and dehumanizes the African
subject. More than a century later, for African womanist writers
Ama ata Aidoo and Bessie Head, fiction is utilized as a means to
rewrite and contest the ubiquitous, yet often understated, scientific
discourses regarding African bodies. Our Sister Killjoy (1977) by
Aidoo and Maru by Head (1971) were written in the decade when
Baartman’s remains were removed from public display at France’s
Musée de l’Homme—after a century and half as part of the col-
lection—and set in the museum storage rooms. They significantly
trouble the racist and sexist underpinnings of hegemonic scientific
paradigms.
The “coloured” daughter of a white woman who was institu-
tionalized for having a sexual relationship with her black stable
hand, in 1937 South Africa, Bessie Head’s work is often obscured
by her wrenching biography. Raised in foster homes, educated by
missionaries and later disgusted with apartheid, Bessie Head left
South Africa when she was twenty-eight and lived most of her
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“Just Ask the Scientists” 139
writing years in a remote village in Botswana where she died at the

young age of forty-nine. As many critics have suggested, Head’s
exile was both a profoundly alienating and liberating experience
and it was during these years of struggle that Head’s third novel
Maru was written.
Maru, set in a rural village in postcolonial Botswana, grapples
explicitly with the treatment of the KhoiSan in Southern Africa. The
narrative centers on the orphaned protagonist who is ethnically a
KhoiSan and according to majority population, the Batswana, she
is therefore an untouchable, a Bushman, a Masarwa, a term Head
defines as “the equivalent of nigger, a term of contempt which
means, obliquely, a low, filthy nation” (1971, 8). From early in the
novel, Head attempts to make visible the violence and dehuman-
izing impact of racism and hierarchical caste systems. While she
focuses on how indigenous African groups construct and support
hegemony and hierarchy intraracially, the text also examines how
eurocentric subjects use science as a primary paradigm to con-
sistently classify, categorize, and objectify African bodies. In the
“documentary preamble” to the novel (Lewis 2007, 160) Head
states:
In Botswana they say: Zebras, Lions, Buffalo and Bushmen live in the
Kalahari Desert. If you catch a Zebra, you can walk up to it, forcibly
open its mouth and examine its teeth. The Zebra is not supposed to
mind because it is an animal. Scientists do the same to Bushmen and
they are not supposed to mind, because there is no one they can still
turn around to and say, “At least I am not a-”. Of all the things that
are said of oppressed people, the worst things are said and done to
the Bushmen. Ask the scientists. Haven’t they written a treatise on
how Bushmen are an oddity of the human race, who are half the head
of a man and half the body of a donkey? Because you don’t go pok-
ing around into the organs of people unless they are animals or dead.
(1971, 7)
Significantly, Head makes clear that the dehumanization of the

KhoiSan peoples by European imperialists culminates in scien-
tific experimentation. Constructed as penetrable and animalized
by scientific discourse, “poking into the organs” of the KhoiSan
becomes a normalized activity of modernity. In contrast to the
invasive politic of eurocentric scientific culture that Head impas-
sionedly describes, she shapes the local response to the Bushmen
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as a hatred of distancing. When the protagonist’s malnourished

mother dies on the roadside after giving birth, the local Batswana
refuse to touch the body or the child crying beside her mother’s
corpse. The community calls upon the British missionaries, and
it is finally the priest’s wife, Margaret Cadmore, outraged by the
Batswanan treatment of the mother and child, who demands that
the body be carried to the hospital, washed, and later buried in
the churchyard. While supervising the nurses preparing the body
for burial, Cadmore observes the dead KhoiSan woman and is
inspired by her peaceful expression to draw a sketch of the body
to which she adds the note, “She looks like a goddess” (Head
1971, 10). While this reverent tagline might suggest a reversal
of the hegemonic colonial gaze on the degraded Masarwa body,
Cadmore is not altogether freed from an imperial perspective as
the labeling of Sarah Baartman as the “Venus Hottentot” reflects
a similar colonial practice in which both awe and disgust amal-
gamate in the othering of the African body. Cadmore remarks that
dead woman “had the same Masarwa thin, stick legs and wore the
same Masarwa . . . dress that smelled strongly of urine and outdoor
fires” (Head 1971, 8), so despite the woman’s exceptional beauty
in death, as a member of her ethnic group she is as defined by
Cadmore as “the same Masarwa”—a filthy body to be recorded,
examined, and objectified.
Cadmore’s colonial ambivalence is reaffirmed as her attentions
turn toward the child; she promptly names the child after herself
and decides that the girl will serve as the object of her own experi-
ment of social engineering. Head writes:
[Cadmore] was . . . a scientist in her heart with a lot of fond, pet theo-
ries, one of her favourite, sweeping theories being: environment every-
thing; heredity nothing. As she put the child to bed that night in her
own home, her face was aglow. She had a real, living object for her
experiment. Who knew what wonder would be created? (1971, 11)
Head’s tone turns ironic as she writes Cadmore’s giddy titillation in

imagining the child as the site of her new project; she is enlivened
with the possibility of testing her theories on the body and mind
of the orphaned girl. Given Head’s earlier unpacking of science as
imperial projection, the problematic of Cadmore as a scientist can-
not be disengaged from her seemingly progressive characterization
as compassionate foster-mother. Indeed, Head shapes Cadmore as
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a complex figure, whose noble intention to deconstruct the local

caste system is embedded within the arrogant assumption that
only by displacing the young Margaret Cadmore from her ethnic
culture, language and community will her foster-child be empow-
ered and intelligent.
Cadmore never considers what value or good might come from
KhoiSan culture, as she is confident that positioning herself as
Margaret’s mentor, along with a missionary education and an
upbringing within a European context will solidify Margaret as
a victorious contributor to Botswana despite treating Margaret
as a “semi-servant” in the household. Naming the girl “Margaret
Cadmore” is a consolidation of the missionary’s arrogance and
self- centeredness, a reminder to the reader throughout the narra-
tive, that despite Cadmore’s claims that she is committed to the
young Margaret one day “helping her people,” the senior Cadmore
can only imagine progress for the “Bushmen” shaped as cultural
disassociation tethered to a polite subservience to whiteness.
Ultimately the objective of Cadmore’s experiment is to frame colo-
nial mimicry as empowerment for her adopted Margaret, thus a
colonial Frankenstein.
Ama ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections of a
Blackeyedsquint is a multigenred work of fiction that follows the
journey of Ghanaian protagonist, Sissie, on her travel from West
Africa to Europe. Set in 1968, Aidoo’s text is a post-/neo- colonial
protest narrative in that she employs a voice tinged with sardonic
humor and rage to interrogate the impact of and resistance to colo-
nialism and racism on/by the bodies and subjectivities of African
people. The text performs a series of reversals to this end, as Head
rewrites the travel narrative outside the bounds of European expe-
dition and exploration: Sissie travels to Europe, gazes at white
bodies in both disgust and awe, recontextualizes European his-
tory from a Pan African perspective, and passionately urges her
peers in exile to return home to bring to fruition the project of
decolonization. As she travels and reflects, Sissie attempts to dodge
the objectifying gaze as she articulates her critique of imperialism,
colonization, and white supremacy:
Suddenly, she realized a woman was telling . . . her daughter: “Ja, das
Schwartzed Madchen” From the little German she knew that “das
Schwartze Madchen” meant “black girl.” She was somewhat puzzled.
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Black girl? Black girl? So she looked around her, really well this time.
And it hit her. That all that crowd of people going and coming . . . had
the colour of pickled pig parts that used to come from foreign places
to the markets at home. Trotters, pig-tails, pig- ears. She looked at so
many such skins together. And she wanted to vomit. Then she was
ashamed of her reaction. Something pulled inside her. For the rest of
her life, she was to regret this moment when she was made to notice
differences in human colouring. (Aidoo 1968, 12–15)
Through Sissie’s musings, Aidoo renders the falsity of race visible

yet she shows how despite its constructedness, racial difference will
continue to be the scale on which the value of life is measured; the
medium through which power articulates itself. Throughout the
narrative, Aidoo critiques via Sissie’s poetics, the many variables of
power. She grapples most overtly with science as a violent cultural
mechanism enacted on the black body when she turns to the case
of Clive Haupt and the use of his body in the second world heart
transplant surgery as it was performed in 1968 South Africa.
Having left Germany, Sissie travels to England where she
reunites with her lover, and through him meets a large number of
his African migrant friends studying and working in London. One
cold evening she meets her “precious something” and his relative
Kunle who was “practically a Londoner, having lived in that city
for seven years” (Aidoo 1968, 95). Assuming that they would be
preoccupied by the Biafran war in Nigeria, Sissie is surprised to find
the conversation is entirely focused on “The Heart Transplant”:
The evening papers had screeched the news in with the evening
trains . . . Of how the Dying White Man had received the heart of a
coloured man who had collapsed on the beach and how the young
coloured man had allegedly failed to respond to any efforts at resus-
citation and therefore his heart had been removed from his chest, the
Dying White Man’s own heart having been cleaned out of his chest
and how in the meantime the Dying White Man was doing well blah,
blah, blah! It is funny. But among certain rural Fantis it is believed that
cutting the throat of a pig is simply useless: the only way to get your
good pork is to tear the heart out of the chest of a squealing pig—the
louder the squeals the better the pork. The Christian Doctor’s Second
Triumph. (Aidoo 1968, 95)
While Kunle eagerly celebrates the heart transplant as triumph of

“SCIENCE” and “the type of development that could solve the
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question of Apartheid and the whole COLOUR Problem,” Sissie is

under no such illusions (Aidoo 1968, 96). Her position reflects the
tentative critiques in the US media outlets that reported the success
of the transplant, but also put forward questions of race, power,
and consent into widespread circulation. With a state sanctioned
color- caste system thoroughly entrenched in late 1960s South
Africa, and a highly visible and increasingly militant struggle for
rights and self-determination by both black South Africans and
African Americans in the United States, the use of a colored man’s
organ to save the life of an ailing white man, made the remark-
able transplant quite a newsworthy controversy for the popular
media worldwide. Yet as the author of the article in the January
12, 1968 issue of Time magazine notes, in the context of apart-
heid, Dr Barnard faced a “delicate problem” when it was realized
soon after Clive Haupt suffered a stroke and remained in critical
condition—“that Haupt was of a complicated racial mixture (part
white, part Bantu, part Malay, perhaps even part Hottentot, that
is classified as Colored under South Africa’s race laws” (Aidoo
1968, 32).
Signifying several centuries’ worth of representations of the
“Hottentot,” the article reinvigorates the Western concocted
primate-related Bushman. For Sara Baartman, it was her sexual
organs that inspired the dehumanizing attentions of nineteenth-
century scientists, for Clive Haupt his heart made headlines. It was
of utter importance that the white patient was asked if he would
agree to have a Colored—perhaps even Hottentot—man’s heart.
Given that from the eighteenth to early twentieth century, it had
been a widespread opinion within Western scientific discourse that
the European and the Hottentot were certain not to have derived
from the same origin (Dubow 1995, 22), it is understandable that
an optimistic opinion (such as Kunle suggests with the use Haupt’s
heart in Wasinsky’s body) could be read as the dramatic demise of
scientific racism. As a result, Alexandria Niewijk notes that, “for-
eign headlines read ‘Brothers Under the Skin’ and ‘The Heart That
Knows No Color Bar’ accompanied by comments that heart trans-
plants made nonsense of apartheid legislation” (1999, 112). When
faced with ongoing ridicule from the international press regarding
the irony of “a white man with a black heart” living in apartheid
South Africa, a member of Nationalist Party responded by say-
ing, “The relief of suffering knows no colour bar . . . The heart is
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merely a blood-pumping machine and whether it comes from a

white, black or coloured man—or a baboon or giraffe, for that
matter—has no relevance to the issue of race relations in the politi-
cal or ideological context. The question of colour is not at issue
here” (Malan 1968, 115).
Given that whites in South Africa often used the term “mon-
key” to disparage the black majority, there is more than a tinge
of double speak in this state-licensed commentary, nonetheless, as
Sissie correctly perceives, Dr. Barnard and his medical team’s use of
Haupt’s body cannot be understood outside a cultural context and
a historical trajectory that deemed experimentation on the black/
KhoiSan body by European/white experts of science as acceptable
and normative. Furthermore, that Haupt’s body was under surveil-
lance and his condition was being closely monitored by Barnard’s
team from the onset of his arrival at the hospital raises important
questions as to whether Haupt received the comprehensive care
necessary for his full recovery. Indeed, Haupt was still alive when
his recent bride was asked to sign consent forms for the use of his
heart in the transplant. When she collapsed, unable (and unwill-
ing?) to sign the documents, the medical team approached Haupt’s
mother, a widow due to her husband’s fatal stroke several years
earlier, who agreed to donate her son’s heart. Several hours later,
Haupt was pronounced dead and his heart removed. Aidoo writes,
“And anyway, the Christian Doctor has himself said that in his
glorious country, nigger hearts are so easy to come by . . .” (1968,
97). White, black, colored, or baboon, science as a practice and
discourse has been long-invested in the construction of race and
type.
In a short essay published posthumously, Head states that in
South Africa “there is only one race of humans . . . the white race.
Anything black or tainted with black has been abhorred, detested,
reviled, abused and exploited” (2007, 124). Writing during the
final years of apartheid, Saul Dubow’s text, which studies the
cultural impact of scientific thought in South Africa, is a power-
ful extension of Head’s claim, in that he illustrates that scien-
tific racism, a foundational ideological compound in the matrix
of global white supremacy, was born and institutionalized not in
government buildings of Johannesburg or Cape Town, but in the
intellectual chambers of European Enlightenment scholars and sci-
entists. In those intellectual spaces, both material and discursive,
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the body of the “Hottentot,” the dehumanized KhoiSan figured

prominently.
As this collection attests, postcolonial and Africanist scholars
continue to excavate the ways in which Sara Baartman’s experi-
ences in Europe serve to demonstrate how scientific racism gave
license to cruel and violent enactments on the KhoiSan body.
However, the ongoing and often structural violence against the
KhoiSan, and more broadly, on the African body, and the dis-
courses that normalize and naturalize that violence, continue to
be obscured by intellectual histories that fail to consider the role
that science persistently plays in constructing racist paradigms.
Despite this disinterest, or perhaps because of it, two African
women writers, Head and Aidoo, use their fiction as a space to
interrogate the uses of science as a mechanism to dehumanize
African people. Their work, while staunchly critical of scientific
racism, uses irony, sarcasm, and humor to deliver a narrative strike
against long-standing assumptions that fix a dehumanizing mask
cast on subjectivities and bodies of African peoples. Importantly,
with Maru and Our Sister Killjoy, Head and Aidoo, remind the
reader that science as a modern philosophy and cultural practice
speaks volumes on how the imperial imaginings of the so-called
Hottentot, and says more about whiteness and European colonial
and existential anxieties, than they do about the interior lives of
Sara Baartman, Clive Haupt, and the countless other Black people
who continue to be the objects of scientific apartheid.
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Chapter Nine
Staging the Body of the (M)other:

The “Hottentot Venus” and the
“Wild Dancing Bushman”
Karlien van der Schyff
For many years, Sarah Bartmann, cast as the infamous “Hottentot

Venus,” symbolized nineteenth-century European discourse on
scientific racism and its blithe fascination with the sexualized body
of the Other, especially with regard to the positioning of Khoesan
genitalia. More recently, Sarah Bartmann gained fame not only as
a symbolic subject of African exile and exploitation, but moreover
as a South African icon of nation building and national healing.
On December 15, 1995, Dr. Ben Ngubane, then South African
minister of arts, culture, science and technology, released a state-
ment to the press in which he claimed that “the return of Saartjie
Baartman for a decent burial that a human being deserves would
contribute to the collective sense of pride and dignity of all South
Africans” (1999, 112). The subsequent funeral in 2002, described
by Meg Samuelson as a “spectacle of nation building” recast Sarah
Bartmann, already an iconic symbol of the exploited and dispos-
sessed Khoesan, as a national figure of healing and homecoming,
as her body “traversed . . . the imperial stage of the early nineteenth
century to the nation-building theatre of the transitional era”
(2007, 85).
However, as both the hypersexualized “Hottentot Venus” and the
postapartheid “National Mother,” Sarah Bartmann is most often
cast as a symbolic representation of various cultural and academic
discourses, rather than the individual Khoekhoe woman who was
taken from her home and exhibited as a sideshow curiosity. Yvette
Abrahams argues that “we lack academic studies that view Sarah
Bartmann as anything other than a symbol. Her story becomes
marginalized, as it is always used to illustrate some other topic . . .”
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148 Karlien van der Schyff
(2000, 143). Many contemporary scholars have since attempted to

recover Bartmann’s “true” story, either by highlighting her status
as a victim of imperial racism1 or through an attempt to grant
her a measure of agency.2 This chapter, however, is interested in
the construction of Bartmann’s iconic status. It explores possible
answers to the question as to why Bartmann came to occupy such
an important place in the South African national imagination,
while the names and histories of so many other exploited Khoesan
were forgotten and lost.
While Bartmann was without doubt the most famous Khoesan
to be taken from South Africa and exhibited on stage, she was by
no means the only one, yet hers is the only name that is widely
remembered and commemorated as a symbolic representative of
Khoesan exploitation and suffering. Annie Coombes notes that
“[i]n the early part of the nineteenth century, groups of Khoisan
variously described as ‘earthmen’, ‘Bosjemans’, ‘Hottentot’ or
‘Bushmen’ were popular crowd stoppers at many European travel-
ing ‘freak’ shows” (2003, 210). Historian Neil Parsons writes that
in 1826 a “ ‘genuine’ live Bushman” was exhibited at a holiday fair
in Elberfeld, Germany (2009, 14). Two children, a boy of about
thirteen and a girl of about six, were displayed in England from
1845 to 1847, before they were ostensibly returned to their home
country. A company known as the Bosjemans, consisting of two
men, two women, and a baby, traveled through Britain, Ireland,
and France from 1846 to 1855 (Parsons 2009, 15). In 1852, a boy
roughly fourteen years old, named Martinus, and a girl about six-
teen, named Flora, were displayed in England (Parsons 2009, 15).
Flora became part of P.T. Barnum’s “Little People” in America,
where she was advertised as the “missing link” between apes and
humans. Barnum obtained six more Khoesan from the Kalahari
between 1884 and 1885 for his sideshow circus. They were also
displayed at the Folies Bergère in 1886 and in Germany in 1887
(Parsons 2009, 14–15). It thus seems as if Bartmann’s exhibition
sparked an “acceptable” trajectory of what Bernth Lindfors has
called “ethnological show business” (1999, 207), paving the way
for numerous exhibitions to follow.
Moreover, exhibitions of Khoesan were by no means restricted
to the nineteenth century. A group of Khoesan, known as Dave
Meekin’s Pygmies, toured Australia for a staggering thirty-five
years in the early twentieth century, even returning to tour South
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Staging the Body of the (M)other 149
Africa in July 1951 (Parsons 2009, 32). As late as 1952,3 a group

of Khoesan was displayed in South Africa at the Jan van Riebeeck
Tercentenary Festival, presented to the public as a “primitive peo-
ple on the edge of extinction” (Coombes 2003, 211). Given the
number of Khoesan people displayed in Britain, Europe, Australia,
America, South America, and South Africa over the course of
roughly 150 years, one has to wonder why and how Bartmann’s
memory came to occupy such an important place in South Africa’s
national imagination, while so many other names faded into
obscurity.
Some measure of Bartmann’s fame (or infamy) could be attrib-
uted to the fact that she appears to have been the very first Khoesan
to be taken from South Africa and exhibited in the West. However,
it is doubtful that the impact of Bartmann’s legacy on the South
African national imagination can be dismissed as the product of
mere novelty value. It is more likely that the nature of her tragic
fate, with her dissected remains still subjected to the scrutiny of
strangers long after her death, might be the reason for her iconic
status, especially since the discourse of nation building surround-
ing her funeral in 2002 focused on awarding her the dignity of a
proper burial and thus sparked a veritable torrent of national empa-
thy. However, while the extensive media coverage surrounding
Bartmann’s burial certainly contributed to her iconic status, it still
does not answer the question as to why Bartmann, rather than any
of the other Khoesan men and women exhibited overseas, became
the symbolic representative of Khoesan exploitation. For example,
Parsons notes that a full-body, nude plaster cast of a Korana male,
named Franz Taibosh, was on display in the American Museum
of Natural History until the 1990s, when “the nude plaster fig-
ure was relegated to the storage attics . . . with obscenities scrawled
around its genitalia” (2009, 91). While the cast is, of course, not
Taibosh’s mortal remains, as in the Bartmann case, it is neverthe-
less a clear example of an exploited African body being subjected
to the scrutiny of the Western “scientific” gaze.
A more likely explanation for Bartmann’s iconic status might
thus be found in the nature of her exhibition and in the way her
body was (re)presented on stage. Very little is known about either
the content of the “show” or the eventual fate of most the Khoesan
exhibited in the nineteenth century. It is therefore interesting to
consider the way in which recent scholars have represented and
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appropriated Bartmann’s (rather sketchy) (Euro)history in an

attempt to access her “true” story, whereas the fragments of his-
torical evidence surrounding the lives of other nineteenth- century
Khoesan “performers” have not sparked nearly the same amount
of academic and/or popular interest. While there is very little fac-
tual documentation of Bartmann’s life and no evidence of her own
voice, her life story has become the subject of a host of academic
and cultural texts, which further highlights the question as to
why Bartmann became such an important symbolic representa-
tive of nineteenth- century exploitation. For example, even though
Parsons notes that six Khoesan were exhibited in P.T. Barnum’s
sideshow circus as “lovable Earthmen” (2009, 15) for a period of
roughly four years, he nevertheless does not—or, perhaps, cannot,
due to lack of information—describe either the content of the exhi-
bition or their subsequent fate.
The Carol of “Clicko,” the

“Wild Dancing Bushman”
The life story of one of Barnum and Bailey’s “Earthmen” does
unexpectedly crop up in Laurens van der Post’s loosely fact-based
novel, A Mantis Carol (1975). In the novel, the “unconfessed
spirit” of the exiled “Bushman” circus performer, Hans Taaibosch,
contacts Van der Post through a series of dreams and fantastical
coincidences, since Van der Post believes himself “without egotism
or arrogance to be the only person alive with the kind of expe-
rience necessary” (1989, 126) to tell Hans Taaibosch’s life story
and thus restore his memory. Van der Post begins Taaibosch’s
tale when an unnamed American lawyer, employed by a like-
wise unnamed American circus, visits “a variety show in a rather
shabby Kingston theatre” while on holiday in Jamaica, where he
sees “Hans in the limelight, naked except for a sort of skin bikini,
dancing and prancing and displaying his remarkable little figure
for the delight of a bored, well-nourished and well-wined audi-
ence” (Van der Post 1989, 62). After the performance, the law-
yer manages to gain entry to the dressing room, where he finds a
“profoundly forlorn, sad, dejected, even humiliated little person,”
who was “most unhappy and in a plight from which he had long
since despaired of ever escaping” (Van der Post 1989, 62). The
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lawyer “rescues” Hans from the clutches of the “large, red-faced,

beery, moustached Englishman” who was showing him in Jamaica
and in whose power Hans was “as firmly as any slave of a slave-
owner in the days when slavery was legal and respectable” (Van
der Post 1989, 63), only to exhibit him in an American circus in
turn. According to Van der Post, however, “Hans was immediately
at home in it” and that
the clowns mattered most to his own warm and spontaneous heart,
as if in their tumbling, constant humiliation and incorrigible capac-
ity for laughing at their misfortunes, he saw his own unrecorded fate
portrayed, and thus felt accompanied, needed, wanted and so became
content. (1989, 65)
A Mantis Carol is Van der Post’s highly romanticized and some-

times factually incorrect version of the life story of the Korana man
mentioned earlier, named Franz, rather than Hans, Taibosh. To
recount his history in brief, Franz Taibosh (Taaibosch or Taibos—
literally tough bush) was most likely born between 1860 and 1870
in the Middelburg district of the Cape Colony, roughly one hundred
years after the birth of Sarah Bartmann. The Taibosh family was
employed by a tenant farmer named Christiaan Willem Roberts,
with Franz Taibosh specifically employed as a shepherd and domes-
tic servant (Parsons 2009, 4–5). During the South African War
(1899–1902), Taibosh began his career as an entertainer, dancing
for the amusement of British troops and “making a little money for
Willem Roberts” (Parsons 2009, 11). After the war, severe drought
made sheep farming unprofitable and Roberts became a traveling
salesman, installing windmills on farms. Parsons speculates that
Roberts probably took Taibosh with him on his travels, exhibiting
him as a “dancing Bushman” along the way (2009, 15–16). It is
also likely that Roberts exhibited Taibosh in Kimberley in 1911,
when a large funfair was erected to celebrate the coronation of
King George V. It was probably while in Kimberley that Taibosh
was spotted by Morris “Paddy” Hepston, also known as Captain
Epstein, an Irish-Jewish entertainer who “purchased” Taibosh from
Roberts and convinced him to go to England with him (Parsons
2009, 17). Parsons notes that Hepston most likely
painted a tantalizing picture of the world beyond Kimberley and the

veldt, enticing the little Bushman with tales of a place where the most
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luscious food was plentiful, beer flowed in perpetual cascade and cigars
were smoked in chain . . . a world populated by endless white “dollies,”
who would be his for the taking. (2009, 21)4
Hepston exhibited Taibosh in Britain and Europe from 1913 to

1916. The performance always started with a short speech by
Hepston, dressed in hunting clothes, in which he claimed to have
captured Taibosh during a hunting trip in the Kalahari and then
“tamed” his captive by tying him to a post and beating him six
times a day. Hepston further claimed that, when putting on a
gramophone record one day, he discovered to his great surprise
that his “savage” could dance and thus decided to exhibit him.
According to Hepston, Taibosh was the only “Bushman” still alive,
that he was over a hundred years old and that he could not com-
municate in any language except incomprehensible clicks. Because
of this, Taibosh became known as “Clicko, the Wild Dancing
Bushman.” Hepston’s insistence that Taibosh could not speak any
language known to man effectively meant that his voice and his
own account of his experiences were not only marginalized, but
completely lost.
From 1916 to 1918, Hepston and Taibosh toured North America
and South America. It was during this time that Taibosh met Frank
Cook, the legal adjuster for the Barnum and Bailey sideshow circus
and the real person behind the fictionalized American lawyer of
Van der Post’s A Mantis Carol (Parsons 2009, 87). Parsons, how-
ever, gives a very different account of the first meeting between
Taibosh and Cook from that of Van der Post:
Frank Cook’s daughter Barbara has confirmed that her father first
learnt about Franz Taibosh from William Mann, who excitedly
brought the Wild Dancing Bushman to Cook’s attention . . . Cook was
persuaded to rush down to Havana [. . .] to sign up this peerless new
attraction for the Barnum & Bailey circus sideshow. Because of the
war in Europe, there was a shortage of new circus acts and of “freaks”
in particular . . . (2009, 88)
Cook’s initial interest in Franz Taibosh thus seems to have stemmed

more from a keen business sense than from his “New England
conscience” being “repelled” by the “arrogant and contemptu-
ous” (Van der Post 1989, 62) nature of the Kingston audience and
show. Van der Post was, however, correct in depicting Taibosh
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as unhappy in Hepston’s care, since Hepston did not really con-

cern himself with Taibosh’s welfare and comfort. On Wednesday,
December 11, 1918, Cook and his chauffeur broke into Hepston’s
unheated apartment, where they found Taibosh huddling
semi-naked under a horse blanket in a bare room, looking miserably

cold and ill-fed, with the bones left over from previous meals scattered
across the floorboards . . . They wrapped him up in Frank’s fur coat,
and carried him downstairs and outside to the car. (Parsons 2009,
107)5
In 1919, Cook became Taibosh’s legal guardian. From then

onward, Taibosh worked for Barnum and Bailey, spending the
winter months of the circus off-season with the Cook family
(Parsons 2009, 118–119). Even though the above-mentioned depic-
tion seemingly serves to highlight the extent of Hepston’s abuse, it
is also significant that when Cook intervened, he carried Taibosh
out of Hepston’s care, immediately inscribing Taibosh in a vulner-
able and childlike position and casting Cook as the one in power.
The image can be read as an accurate summary of their relation-
ship; while Cook undoubtedly took care of Taibosh, he also con-
trolled Taibosh’s money, infantilizing an adult man to the extent
that he could not even be in charge of his own earnings. Taibosh
was also billed as a loveable, childlike clown figure in Barnum and
Bailey, further highlighting the extent of his infantilization. While
the Cook family never cast Taibosh in the role of domestic servant
or child-minder, they nevertheless had complete control over his
money. Parsons notes that “in return for Taibosh’s summer pay
minus pocket money,6 Cook would provide Taibosh with a win-
ter home” (2009, 118). Even after Frank Cook’s death, Taibosh’s
salary was sent to his wife, Evelyn Cook, rather than to Taibosh
himself.
On his deathbed, Cook asked his wife to give Taibosh the choice
of returning to South Africa if he so wished. “Instead,” Parsons
notes, “Franz chose to stay in America and pursue the only career
he knew. He enjoyed the security of the circus and its sideshow,
and he took very seriously the idea that he was now ‘the man’ in
the depleted Cook household” (2009, 166). Shortly before his own
death in 1940, Taibosh was baptized and received into the Roman
Catholic Church. He died on August 31of congestive heart failure
9780230117792_11_ch09.indd 153 6/20/2011 1:38:55 PM

and is buried with Cook’s daughter, Frances Cook-Sullivan, in

New York (Parsons 2009, 195).
While Van der Post depicts the character of Hans Taaibosch as a
passive, naïve victim, Parsons writes that “the picture that emerges
from Franz Taibosh’s later career in America is far more complex.
He was perfectly capable of making vital decisions, notably his
decision not to go back to Africa, but to stay on with the Cook-
Sullivan family” (2009, 197). Also, while his earlier career with
Hepston was marked by ill-treatment and neglect, his later career
with Barnum and Bailey, and, most importantly, his inclusion into
the Cook-Sullivan household, seems to have provided Taibosh, by
all accounts, with a comfortable lifestyle. Family photographs of
Taibosh on holiday with Barbara and Evelyn Cook, for example,
show him to very much a part of their family: included, cared
for, and cherished. While there is no doubt that Taibosh suffered
exploitation and humiliation in the West, it also seems as if he
was able to retain a sense of his humanity and to make a relatively
content life for himself.
Staging the Body/the Body on Stage

While there are obvious and substantial differences between the
lives of Taibosh and Bartmann, quite apart from the fact that they
were exhibited roughly a hundred years apart, their respective
time in the West also share a number of corresponding events. For
example, both were subjected to the scrutiny of European scientists;
Bartmann was examined by Georges Cuvier, Henri De Blainville
and Ėtienne Saint-Hillaire at the Museum of Natural History in
Paris in 1815 (Crais and Scully 2009, 134–135), while Taibosh
was examined by W. H. L. Duckworth at the Anthropological
Laboratory at Cambridge in 1913 (Parsons 2009, 46) and again by
J. Kirchner at the American Museum of Natural History in New
York in 1918 (Parsons 2009, 90). Furthermore, humanitarian soci-
eties argued that both Bartmann and Taibosh were being exploited
by their managers; Zachary Macauley, a leading abolitionist, con-
cerned himself with Bartmann’s case in November 1810, inquiring
whether or not she “willingly made a ‘public spectacle’ of her-
self or ‘whether she was compelled to exhibit herself’ ” (Crais and
Scully 2009, 83), while in 1915, John Harris of the Aborigines’
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Protection Society investigated claims that Hepston was abusing

and exploiting Taibosh (Parsons 2009, 60).
The most significant similarity between Taibosh and Bartmann,
however, is the likelihood that they were both already exhibited
by their respective employers while still living in South Africa. As
was already noted, Parsons believes that Willem Roberts exhibited
Taibosh as a “dancing Bushman” in the early twentieth century,
while Crais and Scully speculate that Hendrik Cezar began show-
ing Bartmann to sailors in the naval hospital in Cape Town in 1808
(2003, 50). While there is no concrete evidence to support either
claim, both Roberts and Cezar were poor, struggling to make ends
meet, and might very well have relied on the additional income
made by exhibiting their “slaves/servants.” It is thus noteworthy
that both Taibosh and Bartmann were already used to being sub-
jected to inquisitive, prying eyes, long before they left for England.
One could even speculate that neither of them might have ended
up overseas had their employers not first exhibited them in South
Africa and, in so doing, brought them to the attention of the men
who would eventually took them to England. Furthermore, even
though Taibosh and Bartmann are popularly represented as young,
naïve victims, they would, in fact, have been roughly in their thir-
ties if exhibited in South Africa, which suggests that they would
have understood very well what a life on the stage might entail
once they left for England. While Parsons and Crais and Scully
respectively try to argue that both Taibosh and Bartmann were not
simply childlike, inexperienced victims, but rather mature adults
who would have understood the nature of their exploitation, one
still has to point out that neither of them would have had the social
and political agency to control or avoid these exhibitions, even if
they might have understood very well what a life on stage would
entail.
The precise nature of their exploitation is, however, one of
the most important differences between their exhibitions and is
closely connected to gendered representations of the African body.
Even though Bartmann and Taibosh were exhibited a hundred
years apart, both the nineteenth- century “freak show” and the
early twentieth-century American circus, with its accompanying
sideshow, were grounded in the construction of representations of
racial and sexual otherness. The very word “show,” both in terms
of the “freak show,” and the sideshow, highlights the constructed
9780230117792_11_ch09.indd 155 6/20/2011 1:38:55 PM

nature of these public spectacles, in which people were represented

in certain stereotypical ways. The different stereotypes to which
Bartmann and Taibosh were subjected, however, form the most
crucial difference between their exhibitions; the difference between
their “shows” is therefore not necessarily dependent on the differ-
ent historical periods in which they were exhibited, but rather rests
on the important fact that Taibosh’s body was never cast in the
trope of hypersexuality, as Bartmann’s was. In Bartmann’s case,
Abrahams argues that
the nineteenth century was the heyday of the freak show. The indus-
trial revolution had irrevocably changed the world of the British lower
orders. The freak show, and its accompanying penny prints and adver-
tising leaflets, was one of the many ways in which the disruption of
the social fabric was made to seem a normal, almost enviable, state of
life. (2000, 123)
She also notes that these “freak shows” had a very specific racial
dimension, and that Africans were always represented as “bestial”
and “savage” (Abrahams 2000, 124). Furthermore, as the early
nineteenth century was characterized by Europe’s pseudoscien-
tific obsession with race and its associated discourse of Eugenics,
Bartmann’s exhibition would have provided so-called proof of
European “superiority” and African “inferiority.” However,
Bartmann’s body was (re)presented in terms of racial and sexual
Otherness. Abrahams notes, for example, that the “penny prints
circulated prior to [Bartmann’s] exhibition were almost over-
whelmingly male, and while they represented Blacks as poor and
degraded, they did not stress [their] sexual nature” (1998, 226). It
thus seems as if Bartmann’s exhibition was not only the first time
that a Khoesan woman was shown on the European stage, but also
the first time that the “freak show” cast the black female body
in the trope of “deviant” hypersexuality. Sander Gilman’s widely
anthologized (and also widely criticized) article on Bartmann sug-
gests ideas around the construction of Bartmann’s body as an icon
of sexual otherness in the following way:
The antithesis of European sexual mores and beauty is embodied in

the Black, and the essential Black, the lowest rung on the great chain
of being, is the Hottentot. The physical appearance of the Hottentot
is, indeed, the central nineteenth- century icon for sexual difference
between the European and the Black. (1985, 231)
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Bartmann’s body thus became a symbolic icon of the way in which

not only European scientific and medical discourse, but also quite
often literary discourse constructs images of Otherness.
Taibosh, on the other hand, was performing during the golden
age of the American circus, caught up in the excitement and thrills
of the big top. Even though he was billed as an attraction in a
sideshow and was thus seen as an “exhibit” to a great extent, he
was famous for his ability to dance “with tireless energy” (Parsons
2009, 40), according to a contemporary newspaper review, rather
than simply displaying his body as an example of racial and sexual
Otherness. Nonetheless, advertisements for his dance performance
drew on racist stereotypes of Africans as “wild” and “savage,” still
strongly reminiscent of nineteenth century “freak shows,” while
Taibosh himself was forced to pander to demeaning racial ste-
reotypes. While still under Hepston’s management, Taibosh was
advertised as a simple-minded savage who loved dancing so much
that he would simply continue until he collapsed from exhaustion.
A postcard sold after the show depicts him in a loincloth, sitting in
the branches of a thorn tree. He does not face the camera, but stares
into the distance with his mouth slightly open and an unfocused,
“wild” expression on his face. Across the bottom of the postcard,
the words “Yours faithfully, The Wild Dancing Bushman” are
scrawled in white ink (Parsons 2009, 35). The entire image plays
on, and thus also strengthens, a perception of the so-called uncivi-
lized and savage African male. Even more racially demeaning is an
advertisement for the show, published in 1914:
CAPT. EPSTEIN presents

THE WILD
Dancing Bushman
Captured in the wilds of South Africa
First specimen of THE MOST
PRIMITIVE RACE ever brought
before the public. His hair
stretches like elastic. A natural
Ragtime Dancer. Wild, Weird and
Wonderful. Danced for eight hours
Continuously, a feat which has
never been equaled. The Bushman
is nearly 100 Years of Age. Don’t
fail to see this unique specimen
of human nature. EXAMINED
9780230117792_11_ch09.indd 157 6/20/2011 1:38:56 PM

BY THE UNIVERSITY
AUTHORITIES OF CAMBRIDGE,
And pronounced to be genuine. (Parsons 2009, 56)
When he joined Barnum and Bailey, he was recast as a lovable,

if still rather feeble-minded, childlike, and cuddly clown-figure.
In both cases, though, his body was never displayed as a sexual-
ized object. A poster dating from his time with Barnum and Bailey
shows Taibosh wearing a long, leopard-print smock that covers
his knees, sturdy leather boots and ankle socks.7 While the fake
leopard-print robe draws on a stereotypical image of the “wild”
African, his body is nevertheless completely covered and is never
displayed as some supposed “evidence” of “deviant” African
sexuality. While this clearly illustrates that Taibosh was, without
doubt, exploited and forced to pander to demeaning racial stereo-
types, it also shows that his body was never cast in the trope of
hypersexuality. This fact cannot be dismissed as a mere product of
the different historical times in which Bartmann and Taibosh were
performing, but rather shows how the female body is often cast as
a sexualized object, while the male body—even an exploited and
powerless male such as Taibosh—is still preserved, to some extent,
by a patriarchal discourse of sexual superiority.
Further evidence for this claim can be found in the fate of a
group of Ubangi women8 exhibited in the Barnum and Bailey
sideshow at the same time as Taibosh. Like Bartmann, they were
exhibited only at the level of corporeal difference and performed
topless.9 The women had come to America to earn money for their
children, but they were lonely, homesick, and incredibly unhappy
in the circus, and longed to go home. However, the Ubangi women
were managed by a male patriarch from their village, who con-
trolled their money and would not let them return for two years.
Taibosh disliked the Ubangi women, perhaps feeling threatened by
them. His own attitude to women was grounded in an unmistak-
ably patriarchal point of view that saw women primarily as either
maternal figures or sexualized objects and, sometimes, both at the
same time. Apparently, when asked what kind of woman he pre-
ferred, Taibosh would always shout: “A big fat mama!” (Parsons
2009, 133). Once, while in London, a South African named
Malherbe asked Taibosh what he thinks9 about when he sits on
stage. According to Malherbe, Taibosh replied: “Oh Baas, just of
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food and women (‘kos en meide’ [a racist term for colored women])”
(Parsons 2009, 152). One does not know whether or not Malherbe
invented this little exchange. If it were true, however, even more
telling than Taibosh’s appropriation of such a casual, ingrained
racism, as well as his blatant sexism, would be the fact that he
would think of women and food on equal terms—two utterly inert
objects for consumption and pleasure. A woman named Dorothy
Herbert recalled Taibosh as “a pest to have around,” noting that
“he had an awful habit of suddenly running up behind ladies and
pinching them, then jumping up and down and laughing” (Parsons
2009, 162). Parsons also notes that “a less charitable view [of
Taibosh] might see him as a failure in life and love, reduced to a
bottom-pinching old pest: his grabbing and pestering of women
was obviously sexually aggressive, rather than just a longing for
feminine solace” (2009, 195).
The most significant difference between Bartmann and Taibosh
can thus be found in the different and obviously gendered repre-
sentations of male and female bodies on stage, underpinned by
patriarchal perceptions of the corporeal. It is telling that even a
dispossessed and exploited male, such as Taibosh, was still able to
present himself as, in his own words, an “American gentleman”
(Parsons 2009, 133), while Bartmann was cast as a “sexualized
savage.” It is equally telling that we have a record of Taibosh’s own
words, and that, as a “gentleman,” he was able to claim a (mas-
culine) space of personhood and agency, even when portrayed in
terms of racist stereotypes. Bartmann’s words, on the other hand,
were always mediated by the European men who effectively con-
trolled/owned her, which meant that her account of her life was
silenced and eventually completely lost.
This goes some way toward explaining Bartmann’s and Taibosh’s
widely differing reactions to the experience of being on stage.
Bartmann is said to have “heave(d) deep sighs in the course of [her]
exhibition, and displayed great sullenness of temper” (Samuelson
2007, 86). According to a contemporary spectator, Bartmann was
“exhibited on 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 her” (Samuelson 2007, 86). It seems as
if the exhibition entailed nothing more than what the word itself
suggests—an exhibition of the “deviant,” hypersexualized Other,
being displayed by, notably, a white man in control of the black
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female body. The word “keeper” is significant, as it suggests a

complete lack of freedom on her part; like an animal.
According to Parsons, Taibosh, on the other hand, began to
enjoy circus life when he joined Barnum and Bailey in the sum-
mer of 1918 and that he “relished being such an attraction in the
Big Show” (2009, 104). However, even though Taibosh seem-
ingly enjoyed his performance, it was nonetheless demeaning and
propagated racial stereotypes of Africans. Van der Post’s conde-
scending image of the “tumbling, constant humiliation and incor-
rigible capacity for [laughter]” (1989, 65) of the fictive clowns thus
becomes a surprisingly apt depiction of the humiliation Taibosh
must have suffered as Barnum and Bailey’s ridiculous clown-figure.
However, when one compares Taibosh’s circus experience to that
of Bartmann’s, or even to that of the Ubangi women, it is clear
that, as a man, Taibosh was never seen as a hypersexualized body.
As a fellow man, Taibosh could accompany Frank Cook to parties
and events; they shared the same food, the same drink and made
use of the same brothels (Parsons 2009, 117–119)—a liberty that
was never extended to the Ubangi women. Also, because of the
long tradition of Western assumptions about black female sexu-
ality, intimately connected to Bartmann’s exhibition, the Ubangi
women could only be seen as sexualized bodies, whereas Taibosh,
as a man, could escape the debilitation inherent in patriarchal per-
ceptions of the corporeal. Even though Taibosh was cast as Cook’s
humorous “side-kick” on these occasions, which was, in itself, the
same demeaning role he played in the circus as the loveable, feeble-
minded clown-figure, he was still able to exert a small measure of
agency and freedom, whereas Bartmann could only “heave deep
sighs” as small, silent indications of her own agency.10
It is telling that when Van der Post wanted to portray the char-
acter Hans Taaibosch as a victim, he immediately described him
in terms of his sexualized body, “naked except for a sort of skin
bikini” while “displaying his remarkable little figure” (1989, 62).
In general, Van der Post portrays the Khoesan physique in highly
sexualized terms, describing “steatopygia” as “the satiny creases
where [the] smooth buttocks joined [the] supple legs,” noting the
“tablier égyptien” of the women and “semi-erect position” of the
male genitalia, laughing “with affectionate pride and wonder that
our native earth should have produced so unique a little human
body” (Van der Post 1964, 13–14)—using, in short, the kind of
9780230117792_11_ch09.indd 160 6/20/2011 1:38:56 PM

sexualized imagery and condescending language that invariably

leads to complete objectification of the Khoesan body. However,
it is noteworthy that he only utilizes these sexualized images in
terms of victimhood, but when he wants to restore the dignity of
his character, he rather draws on a Jungian (if rather mystical) dis-
course of rationality, clearly illustrating the underlying patriarchal
stereotypes often encountered in representations of the corporeal,
which equates the female body with the trope of hypersexuality,
and masculinity with rationality.
The reasons for Sarah Bartmann’s iconic status are myriad and
very difficult to reduce to simple, clear- cut facts. Many schol-
ars have grappled with her history, her tragic fate, her status as,
firstly, the “Hottentot Venus,” the symbolic Other, as well as,
secondly, her status as an iconic representative of Khoesan suffer-
ing. However, one cannot help but wonder why there are so many
scholarly and literary works devoted to Bartmann, when there
are hardly any on, for example, Franz Taibosh. In a fascinating
article on the nature of the construction of Bartmann’s status as
the “Hottentot Venus,” Zine Magubane also begs the question as
to why Bartmann specifically “has been made to function in con-
temporary academic debates as the preeminent example of racial
and sexual alterity” (2001, 830). Magubane suggests that con-
temporary scholars are, in fact, “the ones that threaten to finally
succeeded in transforming the ‘Hottentot Venus’ into the central
nineteenth-century icon for racial and sexual difference between
the European and the Black” (2001, 832), and that it is scholarly
analysis—or, in Magubane’s opinion, misanalysis—which con-
fers such iconic status onto Bartmann’s body. Since contemporary
scholars most often cast Bartmann’s body as an example of either
the hypersexualized black female body or that of the new South
African “National Mother,” representations of her body are uti-
lized in the service of a specific discourse, be it to illustrate how
the language of colonial, “scientific” racism constructs Otherness
or to legitimize the project of nation-building. In both cases, how-
ever, the tropes of hypersexuality and motherhood are indicative
of patriarchal assumptions about the female body and could sug-
gest why, in the case of Bartmann and Taibosh, a woman would
function as a symbolic representation of the Other, when even
a powerless and disposed man could maintain a semblance of
agency.11
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When one compares the histories of Sarah Bartmann and Franz

Taibosh, one can clearly see how the female body is cast as a sexu-
alized object, while the male body is preserved by a patriarchal
discourse of sexual superiority. One could thus attempt to explain
Bartmann’s iconic status in terms of the gendered tropes of sexu-
ality and motherhood through which the female body is so often
presented in both literature and the media. As Bartmann’s body
is popularly cast as both the helpless female victim, exploited at
the level of her hypersexualized body by colonial and imperial
racism and then “saved” by (mostly male) politicians, as well as
the National Mother of the “new” South Africa, this discourse
could not profit by depictions of male bodies that are neither in
need of rescue nor able to nurture the new nation state. In other
words, Bartmann’s status as both the “Hottentot Venus” and the
“National Mother” rely on assumptions about the sexualized
nature of the black female body and, accordingly, Taibosh’s patri-
archal agency would be of little use in the construction of these
symbolic references. Even Bartmann’s resilience and small acts of
agency is of little use to a discourse of national healing and home-
coming, which needs her to be the Other, the National Mother,
and very little else.
Notes
1. See Yvette Abrahams, “Colonialism, Dysfunction and Dysjuncture:
The Historiography of Sarah Bartmann” (2000) and “Images of Sara
Bartmann: Sexuality, Race and Gender in Early-Nineteenth-Century
Britain” (1998), as well as Zola Maseko’s documentary The Life and
Times of Sara Baartman (1998).
2. See Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot
Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (2009) and Rachel Holmes, The
Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman, Born 1789–
Buried 2002 (2007).
3. The 1950s also saw the beginning of the construction of the South African
Museum’s infamous “Bushmen Diorama,” using casts of Khoesan men
and women made between 1907 and 1924 by anthropologist James
Drury. One can only imagine the amount of hideous scrutiny, humilia-
tion, and manhandling the Khoesan had to endure while Drury measured
and made casts of their genital organs, especially since Drury notes that
“on separating the lips of the vulva it was easy to grasp the labia minora
with a pair of forceps and pull them out for examination” (quoted in
Coombes 2003, 217).
9780230117792_11_ch09.indd 162 6/20/2011 1:38:56 PM

4. This description was related to Parsons by Barbara Cook, who knew

Taibosh when she was a child. It is highly unlikely that Taibosh would
have told young Barbara that he was lured from South Africa by the
promise of plentiful alcohol, cigars, and sex, and it is even more unlikely
that Hepston would realistically have promised Taibosh that he could
have as many white women as he wanted. One has to conclude that this
description is, most likely, an imaginary exchange invented by Barbara
Cook. It is telling that even someone who knew, and by all accounts
loved, Taibosh, would imagine that an African man would want nothing
better than to have sexual access to as many white women as he wished.
5. Parsons speculates that this description might have been invented by
Frank Cook, so that he could have a valid “excuse” for removing Taibosh
from Hepston’s care and could therefore exert control over Taibosh’s
career and future himself (107).
6. Even the word “pocket money” casts Taibosh as inexperienced and naïve, and
thus in need of a “father figure” who could manage his finances for him.
7. Images of Taibosh dating from his time with Barnum and Bailey can
be viewed online at http://www.missioncreep.com/mundie/gallery
/clico.jpg (accessed September 2, 2009) and http://cape-slavery-heritage
.iblog.co.za/2009/08/25/clicko-the- story- of-franz-taaibosch-yesterdays
- caster-semenya/ (accessed September 2, 2009).
8. The Ubangi women were a group of thirteen “plate-lipped” women from
Ubangi- Chari in French Equatorial Africa, the later Central African
Republic. They were so unhappy in America that two of the women
tried to commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of automobiles.
They were exhibited in America from 1930 to 1932 before returning to
Africa (Parsons 2009, 142–143, 148).
9. One immediately has to add that, in many African cultures, women
often bare their breasts in an effort to shame men. Parson notes that
“when [the Ubangi women] were angry they sometimes stripped off
their tops to shame the offender” (143). However, in the context of their
exhibition, the men who controlled the circus obviously ordered them
to perform topless, drawing on the same stereotype of the “sexualized
savage” that characterized Bartmann’s exhibition. It is thus ironic that
by ordering the Ubangi women to perform topless, the circus managers
objectified them in a manner that would otherwise have been a marker
of female rebellion and agency.
10. It is important to note that Malherbe assumed that Taibosh would be
thinking on stage, whereas this was never assumed in Bartmann’s case.
No record exists of her thoughts or her words while on stage. Even
though this exchange might have been invented, it still illustrates the fact
that a man would immediately grant another man the potential agency
of independent thought, even while being exhibited as a curiosity.
11. The Ubangi women’s options for rebellion were equally limited; they
could either bare their breasts to men who already saw them as nothing
more than sexualized objects or they could attempt to end their lives.
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9780230117792_11_ch09.indd 164 6/20/2011 1:38:56 PM
Chapter Ten
Under Cuvier’s Microscope:

The Dissection of Michelle Obama
in the Twenty-First Century
Natasha Gordon- Chipembere
Who might be a part of a terrorist cell?

...
Whose fist-knocks may summon the devil from hell?
...
Michelle
Rah! Rah! Smear! Rah! Rah!

“A Smear- Cheer for Michelle Obama” (Trillin 2008, 6)
***
Ludicrous as the opinion may seem, I do not think an oran- outang

husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentot female; for what are
those Hottentot. They are, say the most credible writers, a people
very stupid and very brutal. In many respects they are more like beast
than men; their complexion dark, they are short and thick-set, their
noses flat, like those of a Dutch dog; their lips very thick and big their
teeth exceedingly white, but long, and ill set, some of them sticking
out of their mouth like boars tusks; their hair black, and curled like
wool . . . taking all things together, one of the meanest nations on the
face of the earth. (Long 1774, 353)
This is the language one engages when climbing the precipitous

slope connecting the legacy of the colonial [British and Dutch]
“encounter” with the KhoiSan peoples of Southern Africa in the
fifteenth century with contemporary popular culture discourse
on the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. My
chapter posits two arguments, namely that nineteenth- century
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166 Natasha Gordon-Chipembere
European scientific racism etched a language that became the

cornerstone for representations of Sarah Baartman, which in
effect was transferred onto millions of African and African disa-
poric women’s bodies, culminating in the current display, discus-
sion, and dissection (ala Cuvier) of Michelle Obama. Secondly,
I suggest that Michelle Obama has succeeded in disrupting this
lens and language through the ownership of her body. The last
two years (2008–2010) of international media flurry has solidi-
fied the schizophrenic relationship the North has had with black
femininity. Placed on the dissection table of the Western gaze,
Michelle Obama’s body has been serrated with questions of
her human-ness by the simple nature of her black womanhood
(Barack Obama’s dissection is not nearly the same as Michelle’s
and gender plays a central role in the difference. See Karlien van
der Schyff’s (chapter 9) for a focused discussion of gender and
exhibition spaces).
As First Lady, Michelle Obama has been left to defend herself
in the face of, what I consider some of the most insidious, racist
castings of the twenty-first century. She has been charged with
epithets ranging from being “ape-like” to a “terrorist” to a “bit-
ter, angry Black woman” to President Obama’s “baby mama.”
These blatantly disrespectful, linguistic cartwheels have reached
profound and frightening proportions. The most startling is the
fact that such discourse, in both print media and the blogosphere,
exist without someone pulling in the reigns. Michelle Obama’s
final months on the presidential campaign trail with her husband
and his first year in office produced a plethora of voices who
indulged in the absolute freedom of airing their most intimate,
racially disparate thoughts without censure. Historically in the
North, very few had the ability to protect the black woman’s body,
especially in the hands of white ownership. Michelle Obama has
taken on the fight and thus far she remains a disquieting figure
among mainstream narratives of perceived black womanhood.
With her class status and education, Michelle Obama becomes
an elusive and thus a troubling figure to mediate and control.
Thereby, the mere possibility of her presence as First Lady war-
ranted such a reactionary response, one that continues to equate
her with her enslaved forebears of two centuries ago, despite her
modernity.
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Under Cuvier’s Microscope 167
I suggest here that the negative, visceral reaction to the possi-

bility of her as First Lady and the later celebratory role as “fash-
ionista” and domestic “Mom-in- Chief” are all part of a silencing,
insidious trajectory of objectifying her in ways that most white
first ladies (besides Hillary Clinton who was rendered masculine)
have escaped. Michelle Obama’s blackness distinguishes her and
makes her body (one that has been historically viewed as available
and expendable), the landscape upon which the American pub-
lic inscribes their most virulent frustrations about the emerging
power of blackness and the possibilities about the “end” of white-
ness. Though many assert that with the election of Barack Obama
the United States has moved into a “post-Black”/nonracial sensi-
bility, clearly the particular attacks made on the body of Michelle
Obama indicate that race and racism in the United States remain
at its core.
I find much of this troubling public response surrounding
Michelle Obama’s Green Garden agenda and “Let’s Move” pro-
gram for fighting Childhood Obesity. People do not know what to
do with her! Michelle Obama has unconditionally claimed her body
as whole, as beautiful, as black and without shame (see Gabeba
Baderoon’s chapter 4 on black women and shame for a fuller dis-
cussion) while planting lettuce in the White House garden or mak-
ing football moves in partnership with FIFA and South Africa’s
World Cup’s reps in Washington, DC during March 2010. The
statement is clear—Michelle Obama owns her body. She is also in
a consistent struggle with those who have historically assumed the
ownership over black womanhood (from the colonial male gaze to
Cuvier’s dissection of Sarah Baartman to the Trans-Atlantic slav-
ery to the modern day genital testing of South African track star,
Caster Semenya). I suggest this is a brazenly defiant statement in
the face of a Western gaze whose underbelly pines with the desire
to metaphorically lynch her. In owning her personhood and serv-
ing as an active agent of her blackness, Michelle Obama uses the
tactic of responding to these attacks through action, reminding
others of her humanity, which is in constant question because of
her blackness. I ultimately suggest that Michelle Obama disrupts
this trajectory of dehumanization, through a direct movement
from an assumed silence to implicit, directed, and historically and
culturally grounded “alter” acts of celebration and liberation.
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Oh, Sarah Baartman

Jennifer Morgan notes that the British representation of African
(Khoisan) women’s bodies, in particular their genitalia, became
part of a larger racialized ideology of difference:
Confronted with an African they needed to exploit, European writers

turned to black women as evidence of a cultural inferiority that ulti-
mately became encoded as racial difference. Monstrous bodies became
enmeshed with savage behavior as the icon of women’s breasts [and
genitals] became evidence of tangible barbarism. (1997, 192)
The Khoisan peoples (comprising many nations including Khoi,

San, Griqua, and Quena) are indigenous to the Southern African
region. The general European perception of these people was that
they were stammerers, and thought to have no language, voice, or
literary traditions. Essentially, they were beasts, thus informing the
conditions under which Baartman was subjected. The presumption
of inferiority about the Khoisan people by the Dutch and British led
to eventual genocide. Pieterse further states, “Speculation amongst
naturalists about the missing link dated from the beginning of the
eighteenth century . . . and it was the Hottentot . . . [whom many
scientists] considered to be the missing link between apes and
humans” (1992, 41). S.G. Morton, in 1839, labeled the Hottentots
as the “nearest approximation to the lower animals . . . the women
are presented by [European travelers] as even more repulsive in
appearance than men” (quoted in Wiss 1994, 13). German writer,
Gotthold Lessing wrote in 1766:
Everyone knows how filthy the Hottentots are and how many things
they consider beautiful and elegant and sacred which with us awaken
disgust and aversion. A flattened cartilage of a nose, flabby breasts
hanging down to the navel, the whole body smeared with a cosmetic of
goats fat and soot gone rotten in the sun, the hair dripping with grease,
arms and legs bound about with fresh entrails. (Quoted in Aduonum
2004, 290)
Here begins a documented entry point for the black body that must
be controlled and contained; Michelle Obama struggles against its
legacy, as she attempts to define new terms of black personhood.
The uncontrollable, wild black body lingers in contemporary
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perceptions of black women’s sexuality throughout the African

Diaspora, which by default brought their humanity into question.
As European naturalist discourses, which codified racial differ-
ence, gained strength in the nineteenth century, new categories
were constructed in which one’s morality and humanity were
linked with one’s biological makeup. Wiss concludes “by such a
process the sexual difference of Hottentot women came to signify
a form of racialised difference so extreme as to create a new, and
devalued racial type” (2005, 11). The “classical” European body
was morally sound by virtue of its civility. The grotesque body,
in this case Baartman’s, was designated to the margins, a night-
marish construction external to the “normal” European form.
According to Wiss
The classical body—as closed, homogeneous, and symmetrical—came

to be perceived as marking out the identity of progressive rational-
ism itself. These binarily opposed body types constructed the ideal
bourgeois self as individual, progressively rational and self-contained
against the body of the outsider as plural, regressive and incomplete.
(1994, 12)
Thus the non-European, captured, labeled, and exhibited, was

viewed within these categories of difference and pathology that
lent permission to the “salvaging” work of European colonialists
and others who sought to save the souls of “wretched” Africans.
Baartman’s otherness fixed firm the European positionality of
being the norm. Baartman, not seen as an individual woman with
a voice or history, became the entryway to a “systemized radi-
cal otherness—the exotic and foreign other as an example of [her]
race” (Wiss 1994, 13). Rendered monstrous, the “Hottentot Venus”
was a fabrication based on what was beyond the intellectual limits
of Europeans at the time. Baartman/Venus is a myth necessary
for the European imaginings of righteous self-representation and
morality.
Qureshi explains how Cuvier’s writing and observations of
Baartman contain their own pornoerotic perspective:
During the [three day] examination at the Jardin de Plantes, Cuvier

pleaded with Baartman to allow an examination of her tablier; but she
refused and took great care to preserve her modesty. Cuvier only suc-
ceeded when her cadaver lay before him. His meticulous description of
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the tablier, including its length, thickness, and appearance folded and
unfolded, takes up a long passage that is graphic and violating . . . and
makes clear that Cuvier’s attempt in scientific resolution of the tablier
was a personal triumph. (2004, 243)
Hobson adds that the European fascination with Baartman’s but-

tocks and genitals were not for scientific purposes as much as they
were for hidden erotic desire (see Ilaria Oddenino’s discussion on
pornography and the erotic in chapter 7) where white audiences,
both male and female, projected their own sexual desires to exploit
the black female body as a means to create racial superiority. Sheila
Meintjes adds:
The history of this woman’s life is one saga of the humiliation and
brutality of the colonial experience. It captures the bizarre fascination
of colonial scientists with the anatomical differences between racial
types . . . scientific racism. (2002, 1)
The black female body became a location for the forbidden. These
notions continue to be etched into the language used in Western
popular discourse on the body of Michelle Obama; two hundred
years later, one encounters a black female body as a site for the
unspoken, forbidden, monstrous, and hypersexual, the body that
needs to be “redeemed” (or killed) by the civilized observers in
the media, acting as mouthpieces for the American (and world)
public. Indeed the media, using the “world” as shorthand, dis-
guises the extent to which intellectuals and journalists assume to
know/represent public opinion, when in fact they shape the way
people are thinking on an issue. Media analysts drew attention to
Michelle Obama’s physique and made it a necessary problem for
the average person to absorb and dissect.
The Metaphorical Lynching of

Michelle Obama
Because of her sudden (and may I suggest highly unexpected)
emergence onto the international public stage, Michelle Obama,
as potential First Lady, had no place within the imagination of
the dominant culture. Caught unawares, the immediate visceral
response to Michelle Obama, as black woman, as educated, as
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intelligent wife and mother, was rage. How dare she?! In the freedom
of cyberspace, a viral lynching (see image at http://kathmanduk2
.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/michelle- obama-lynching-from-the
-dailykos/) began of Michelle Obama as she was “exhibited” in
cartoons, dissected across front covers, and made “terrorist” in
newspaper headlines.1 The alacrity with which, in particular, the
American media sunk its frothing teeth onto the body of Michelle
Obama, I suggest, is equally as severe as what Baartman’s body
experienced under Cuvier’s microscope and dissecting knife. It is
this particular language, etched into Western racist/sexist scien-
tific memory, which supplied the unrestrained approval that the
universal exhibition of the African/diasporic black woman’s body
was par for the course, dead or alive as it was with Cuvier and
other Naturalists in 1815. From “liberal” scholars to political
pundits to journalists to bloggers, there were no barriers between
those who had the right to engage the body of Michelle Obama.
Her body and therefore her person, as black woman, becomes the
territory of all those who could see it, access it, and dissect it. Who
protected Michelle Obama’s personhood/body during the Obama
Campaign and subsequent first year as First Lady? Why did some
Americans feel they were within their First Amendment rights to
display a cartoon lynching Michelle Obama? The image has a Ku
Klux Klan–based warning intimated that the black body, in this
case Michelle Obama’s, was always the property of whiteness and
one false step beyond its boundaries would lead directly to the
noose and tree.2
Concurrently and reminiscent of the now infamous caricatures
and aquatints of Baartman in London circa 1810, Michelle and
Barack Obama made the front cover of The New Yorker maga-
zine in July 2008. Michelle, dressed in army fatigues, sporting an
Angela Davis–inspired afro and holding an AK47 issues the famous
“terrorist fist bump” to her husband, indicating their associa-
tions with all that is “foreign,” “evil,” “anti-American,” “Islamic/
non- Christian,” and ultimately subhuman. The media was at war
with these black people who presumptuously felt they too could
have a space in the American landscape of power and wealth. The
visual representation and the assumptions undergirding this image
was that Michelle Obama was the initiator of the fall from grace,
like Eve bearing the apple. After much damage control around
intention and humor, The New Yorker quickly removed the image,
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though it was forever a visual imprint of what the media wanted to

shape around the Obama ascension into the most powerful couple
“in the free world.”
Sarah Baartman’s Legacy in the

Twenty-First Century
A legacy of demeaning Western representations of black women’s
bodies continues well into the twenty-first century. Sadly, many
African diasporic women have internalized this oppressive stance,
which, similar to Cuvier’s methods with Baartman’s postmortem
body, neatly dissects their body parts in order to attract—and pos-
sibly gain stardom from—a capitalistic male gaze. Most appar-
ently involved in this process are contemporary African American
models and music video “dancers.”3 Though many black women
identify with the historical figure of Sarah Baartman, questions
about the beauty potential of the black female body remain. Today,
black female bodies are widely excluded from the Western domi-
nant discourse’s celebration of beauty, yet visible in marginalized,
sexualized forums, namely hip-hop music videos and black male
magazines that are semipornographic in nature.
Contemporary black male hip-hop artists and white producers
corroborate with historical myths of the hypersexualized black
woman’s body, refusing to challenge ideas of “grotesque” or “devi-
ant” black female sexuality. These men, in an attempt to capital-
ize on black women’s bodies, which are already encoded with a
legacy of lascivity, reduce black women to one essential body part:
their buttocks. From 2 Live Crew’s 1989 album “As Nasty as They
Wanna Be” to SirMixaLot’s 1992 rap, “Baby got Back,” hip-hop
has sanctioned the pornographic exhibition of fragmented black
women’s bodies through the mainstream music industry. Inherent
in this exhibition is the implicit act of silencing black women and
their realities; they are simply body parts of sexual fantasies.
History repeats itself. What I argue here are two major points,
namely that a eurocentric gaze continues to objectify and exhibit
African and diasporic women’s bodies, marked from the legacy
of Sarah Baartman’s exhibited body (alive and dead). This rac-
ist, patriarchal “othering” has sought to undermine and silence
any resistance by black women. Secondly, I suggest that there is
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no other contemporary Western discourse most encroached in this

language of dissection and silencing as that found around Michelle
Obama. It is this language of deviance and hypersexuality that
has permeated media and the blog space without discretion. The
American public, which initially hated Michelle Obama during
the campaign because of her perceived “anti-Americanism,” has
now shifted to a collective “ohhhhh and ahhhh,” celebrating now
the most “famous” and “beautiful” woman in the “free world.”
What is most interesting is that in more superficial and current
public popular culture discourse on Michelle Obama, she has now
been set apart from other black women in order to be diffused and
“digestible’ to the dominant culture (essentially silenced).
A closer look problematizes how Michelle Obama reached such
iconic status in less than one year—her rise to pop culture fame
rivals the meteoric fame of Michael Jackson and Elmo combined!
From the website www.mrs-o.org, which tracks the fashion prowess
of Michelle Obama, to the countless books, magazines,4 the repre-
sented body of Michelle Obama (her rear, her bare arms and legs,
and the politics of her straight hair) is everywhere. If not properly
interrogated, this coating is incredibly dangerous because it paci-
fies the general public into thinking that the initial sentiments of
racial hatred and objectification have passed and now it is “accept-
able” for the dominant culture to “idolize” Michelle Obama. The
insidious nature of racism slips past the average American media
consumer but a stronger analysis of current discourse on Michelle
Obama assures that the attack is long from over. The exhibition of
Michelle Obama across the American imagination relates directly
to the entrenched assumptions around how black women’s bod-
ies are allowed to enter into this “imagination” and made visible.
Michelle Obama is readily accepted and understood only as a fig-
ure that must remain silent and happily domestic for her to main-
tain her place as First Lady. Making her a “fashionista” is simply
a diversionary tactic.
In Salon magazine, Erin Aubrey Kaplan’s 2008 piece, “First
Lady Got Back” became the centerpiece of a discussion that has
its legacy in the nineteenth century. Here were African American
women writing with ecstasy that:
“Michelle-good God . . . has a butt!”; “Obama’s baby (mama) got

back”;
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“OMG, her butt is humongous!’; It is not humongous, per se, it is a

solid, round, black, class-A boo-tay”. (“Michelle’s booty” 2008)
Patricia Hills Collins identifies “controlling images” (i.e., Michelle

Obama’s oft-displayed rear) as a means in which to distort the
ways black women see themselves and each other (1990, 72). These
images and discourse also create a process of “un-mirroring,” to
quote Janell Hobson, in which struggles for black female subjectiv-
ity constantly grate against the distorted images of the dominant
culture (2003, 88). So, in a breathe, gone are Michelle Obama’s
Princeton and Harvard degrees, her lucrative careers in law and
hospital administration, her political savvy, and territorial protec-
tion of her daughters and family; in its place is a discussion that
renders Michelle Obama into body parts with questions around her
humanity. Sadly, in an attempt at affirmation with the best inten-
tions assumed, Kaplan falls prey to the “un-mirroring” as she is only
able to capture Michelle Obama’s potential in terms of the master
Western narrative that continues to dissect and objectify the black
female body. Kaplan simply exposes herself as a black “pundit”
reduced to mimicry in the struggle to assume media spotlight in the
White-dominated discourse on the Obamas. Once again, nothing
is learned about the personhood of Michelle Obama through this
entire unleashing of the media hurricane. Akin to Sarah Baartman,
Michelle Obama is an observed object who the media takes on and
fills in the gaps of “knowing” based on speculation that is inher-
ently racist and sexist. As much of this is done in cyberspace, the
precedents for censure or moderation are lost to the wind at the
same time that the American and Western public at large has to
discern what to make of black womanhood in power.
Examples of the vilification of Michelle Obama abound. Zoe
Williams, in her article “Michelle and the Media,” stated that
“Conservative [British] press deals with its unease by making
[Michelle Obama] sound like a transvestite, offering the questions
such as ‘is she a woman or a whole person? So hard to say” (2009,
35). Blogger Heather Cross on www.topix.com states:
Michelle Obama looks like an ape! or James Brown’s sister. She is ugly.
Why do some people say she is pretty? Vomit looks better than her. She
has no class and her husband is so gorgeous and the kids are beautiful.
What a nightmare for Obama having to sleep with that woman who
looks like a man in drag! (2009)
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Associations with masculinity and animalistic tendencies are

redundant nineteenth- century assertions about the inhumanity of
African women and thus their bodies become a site to be maligned
at will. Blogger Impatient on www.huffington.post comments that
“Michelle Obama has large ungainly legs” while an anonymous
blogger on www.essence.com states that “Michelle definitely has
man-hands. She should be serving ham sandwiches with those
meat hooks” (“Michelle Obama” 2009). In the 2009 issue of Vogue
where Michelle Obama graced the front cover, photographed by
Annie Leibovitz, the article praises Michelle Obama in the same
breath that it renders her unusual. In discussing the cover photo,
the writer admires “Obama’s lithe frame” though “an uncommon
figure for an American First Lady” (Williams 2009). For those
viewers who find the photos compelling, the writing instructs a
self-doubt that not all is well with acceptance of Michelle Obama
as a beautiful woman; she is made strange and singular by the
nature of her black body (suggestions of masculinity are subtle
but must be read) and certainly not the “material” for what a First
Lady should look like.
In early 2009, the discourse took a sudden shift away from
Michelle Obama’s rear, and the controversy raged around Michelle
Obama’s bare arms. Does she have a right to show her arms, which
begs the question does Michelle Obama have the right to make
choices about her own body—at the expense of a historical trajec-
tory that maintains her as object, never subject of her own agency?
A study conducted at the University of Zululand among young
black South African women in 2004 indicated an unprecedented
high in overall body dissatisfaction and eating disorders where
these black women indicated that they wanted to be “thin” and
have bodies like those portrayed in Western media, without curves
or a rear end, because that is what their men desire (Trainer 2004).
The implications of this shift attest to the profound vilification of
the African/diasporic female body by media’s negative attachment
to all things curvy or non-Western (thereby implicitly ugly and
undesirable, though a site of the hidden erotic). The discourse on
Michelle Obama’s body fits right in the middle of such a trajec-
tory where she must be “dressed” in order to hide the undesir-
able or hypersexual. I concur with Janell Hobson, in her analysis
of Cuvier’s porno-erotic agenda at the dissection of Baartman’s
body, that the impetus driving the dominant dissection of Michelle
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Obama is that of pornographic-erotic desire. Her body becomes

the object upon which unleashed, perverse Western sexual desire
is bonded, implanted with racial hierarchies and sexual fantasy as
this is how slavery was bred.
So when suddenly Western feminists begin to interject demands
for a more “intellectual, militant” Michelle Obama, one who relies
on the excellence of her credentials and not just wallow in her new
role as “the black body to dress,” one wonders where the histori-
cal context or precursor for such a call is. This feminist “call to
arms” (no pun intended) in an interesting juncture to highlight
specific trends in the way the black female body gets “robed” and
by whom. I want to draw attention to the South African artist,
Senzeni Marasela, who uses Sarah Baartman as a profound muse.
Axis Gallery, a white South African run artistic space in New
Jersey, represents Marasela and her art in the United States. In
September 2010, in collaboration with Submerged Gallery, Axis put
up Marasela’s most recent work on the Baartman narrative called
“Beyond Booty: Covering Sarah Baartman and Other Tales.” All
the narratives were constructed on white cotton with red thread,
meticulously embroidered. Marasela provocatively leans on the
British and French nineteenth-century caricatures of Baartman,
with an exaggerated bum, normally in profile, and she engages
directly with her body as Marasela’s character, Theodora (repre-
senting Marasela’s mother) robes with dignity the naked Baartman
throughout the series. What I suggest Marasela is doing in this act
of “dressing” Sarah is in fact an act of profound agency in that she
directly engages Sarah’s body in respectful, caring ways—akin to
how Gabeba Baderoon, in chapter 4, reiterates Zanele Muholi’s
claim to desire Sarah as a lover; she is beloved. Also, with this
simple act of clothing (which has the sensibilities of personhood;
as the assumption is that only living, human creatures are cold or
hot and need care); Sarah’s humanity is fully endorsed through
this act. Marasela takes on the brutality of the pervasive violence
on black womanhood by simply saying that Baartman, as a black
woman, deserves to be covered, and thus protected. She also calls
forward the caricatures of nineteenth-century newspapers and
aquatints and by covering Sarah that history of misrepresentation
is silenced and the external gaze muted.
Throughout her work, Marasela insists that we see Sarah
Baartman differently and provides the visual map in how to do
9780230117792_12_ch10.indd 176 6/20/2011 1:43:06 PM

so with dignity. Since much of the work on Sarah also includes

an imagine of Marasela herself and Theodora on various enact-
ments of journey, the viewer also intimates the profound lessons
Marasela takes for herself in the articulations of a new black wom-
anhood who sits firmly at the crossroads of history using Sarah
Baartman as ancestor who will guide these artistic acts of recov-
ery. Marasela’s “Sarah Baartman Redress Series” is an intentional
project of healing and opening spaces of possibility in how Sarah
can be claimed.
In the exact opposite way, has the body of Michelle Obama,
once vilified in the American public psyche, been “dressed.” There
is no silencing of a colonial history of violence when designers
flock to clothe her and photographers queue to have her photo-
graphs adorn the glossy pages of women’s magazines throughout
the world. These magazines (i.e., Vogue, Glamour, etc), with shad-
ows of Black femininity suggested in its pages, have taken the leap
and admitted Michelle Obama to the agreed field of beauty. Her
body is draped and strewn with jewels, signature pieces created
to indicate a sense of “designer” instinct and knowingness about
her. Within her first year as First Lady, Michelle Obama’s body
becomes the site of increasingly more exclusive, expensive clothing
and she is further removed from the “JCrew” and “Target” woman
that made her recognizable and very appealing to black women
from the beginning of the presidential campaign. Once isolated
from black women who felt she was a “familiar” (i.e., a profes-
sional, well-educated mother and wife), Michelle Obama becomes
the snapshot—the museum relic, as with the now memorialized
dress she wore on the night of Obama’s inauguration. These static
photographs attempt to mute her dynamic personhood; though
she continues to insist on wearing dresses that accentuate her well-
toned arms in daily outings, yet on the pages of these magazines
what the viewer sees is the blanketing of her arms, of her legs; she
is immobilized.
American history etched the place of the black woman into either
the “mammy” or “jezebel”5 —linking a continuous gender-fixed
idea about the role of the black woman. Since Michelle Obama
comes as part of the presidential package, it seems that the best
way to absorb her into the American psyche is to make her “beau-
tiful,” exhibited, silent, and domestic (and only Black when it
counts). However, the powerful “attempt” (because I think they
9780230117792_12_ch10.indd 177 6/20/2011 1:43:07 PM

fail) at silencing her to cloak the more stringent racist discourses,

is entrenched in the language of fashion and entertainment. By
mid-2009, Michelle Obama must have been one of the most photo-
graphed women in the Western media. She graced cover after cover
and many felt a sense of redemption—that finally the American
public was owning up to the fact that Michelle could be “beauti-
ful” once displayed—resplendent in colors to match her perfect
coif—fixed as a museum artifact to once again be exhibited and
observed. In both instances, the overt racial hatred dissecting
all aspects of her humanity and the concurrent “capturing” of
Michelle Obama as icon, as beauty, as different—the act of silenc-
ing, invisibility, and erasure—endures.
Fighting Back
Alice Walker, in her essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden”
remembers how, as the daughter of sharecroppers in the American
South, her mother made it clear that the garden was the central
place in which planting and preparing for the future harvest took
root, in multiple forms. The rumblings of Michelle Obama’s gar-
dening revolution only struck as charges of her failure to be more
aggressive and less domestic became louder. One of the first man-
dates by the First Lady was to plant a White House Garden and
the chief architects were local fifth grade Washington, DC stu-
dents and White House staff (the president also had his appointed
time to come pull weeds with daughters, Sasha and Malia). This
African American woman broke ground and signaled that a dif-
ferent time was coming. Facing a history where African Americans
have done everything in their power to move away from the field
into industrial society because of the ruinous memory of slavery and
sharecropping (and rightfully so), Michelle Obama braved the idea
of disrupting static ideas about black womanhood and embraced
the earth, planting, according to White House reports, over fifty
types of vegetables. With each seed, each drop of water, Michelle
Obama has told children of color that it is okay to want to be alive,
to be healthy, that they can move beyond self-hatred and finally
nourish their bodies. She advances a radical black agenda of moth-
erhood. Joined with this idea, she then asked children to move
their bodies, to exercise in order to live longer. Acknowledging
9780230117792_12_ch10.indd 178 6/20/2011 1:43:07 PM

a time when enslaved African mothers killed their children so as

to prevent them from the ravages of slavery, Michelle Obama has
fought for her body and the bodies of brown and black children
(who, statistics show, are the largest group plagued with childhood
obesity). Multiple frameworks for Black women’s empowerment
need to be employed in order to examine the symbolic power of
Michelle’s Garden and Let’s Move agenda. In the end, only those
who learn how to read the layers and deconstruct the messages
offered by Michelle Obama can understand the profound revolu-
tion she has set to pace—that of the enduring and positive image
of the black family in the United States. For those who willing to
receive the message, she is infusing hope into the idea that Black
families can preserve and thrive though historically, this country
“never expected us to survive.” Most certainly, in the spirit of
black womanhood, her defiance in the face of those who want to
undermine and silence her reality, lays claim to the lives of black
women who have gone before her, including Sarah Baartman.
Notes
1. I am aware of the growing commentary and analysis of the fact that
almost by definition the Internet is allowing and permitting people to
be rude and insulting. One explanation is that by enabling “anonymity”
people feel free to say thing they would not say in person. There are many
examples where authors, politicians, and musicians have been metaphori-
cally “lynched” by the cyber mob. Though it may seem that the Obamas
do not serve as an exception here but rather part of a larger representa-
tion of a decline in public civility, I refute this by saying that the attack in
Michelle Obama is more than just a civic refusal at etiquette. It is her sig-
nificance as a black woman in the most prized, powerful position as First
Lady; her precedent of visibility and ease that makes the cyber attacks
most insidious.
2. See Maria DeLongoria’s unpublished doctorial thesis, “The Stranger
Fruit” The Lynching of Black women: The Cases of Rosa Jefferson and
Marie Scott.” University of Missouri, fall 2006. It provides an informed
discussion around the particularities that defined the lynching of black
women in the United States.
3. In many cases there is a fine line between “dancing” and prostitution in
the music video industry. Many hip-hop music producers actively seek
professional strippers and lap dancers at adult entertainment clubs to par-
ticipate in their videos (Hobson 2005, 103–105).
9780230117792_12_ch10.indd 179 6/20/2011 1:43:07 PM

4. Michelle Obama has been on the covers of Time, People, Vogue, The
New Yorker, Newsweek, Glamour, Prevention, Conde Nast Traveler,
Parade, Radar, O Magazine, Ebony, and Essence. Since its inception in
1974, Vogue (the “Bible” of Fashion) has allowed eighteen black women
on its monthly cover. In its tradition of photographing the First Lady
within the first few months in office, Michelle Obama was defiant in her
direct look at the viewer, baring her well-toned, much discussed arms,
rather than the demure First Lady covers that have been the signature of
Vogue for years.
5. See Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1985) for a fuller discussion on this dichotomy in American
female slaves.
9780230117792_12_ch10.indd 180 6/20/2011 1:43:07 PM

Notes on Contributors
Yvette Abrahams/Khib Omsis was born in Cape Town to struggle

parents of mixed slave and Khoekhoe descent and grew up in exile.
She is the first Black woman to take a PhD in the Department of
History at the University of Cape Town and her dissertation was
the first historiography of Sarah Baartman. Post-doctorally, she
headed the Herstory Project in the Institute of Historical Research
at the University of the Western Cape. Currently, Yvette is the
Commissioner at the Commission for Gender Equality, a watch-
dog body set up under the South African Constitution.
Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and scholar. She has
published three collections of poetry, The Dream in the Next
Day, The Museum of Ordinary Life and A Hundred Silences. She
received her PhD in English at the University of Cape Town, and
for 2010-2011 holds a research fellowship in the “Islam, African
Publics and Religious Values” Project at the University of Cape
Town. She writes on Islam, slavery, race and sexuality in South
Africa and teaches Women’s Studies and African and African
American Studies at Penn State University.
Natasha Gordon- Chipembere holds a PhD in English from the
University of South Africa. Her dissertation was entitled “From
Silence to Speech, From Object to Subject: The Body Politic
Investigated in the Trajectory between Sarah Baartman and
Contemporary Circumcised African Women’s Writing.” She has
a number of publications, including articles in scrutiny 2, Agenda
and Changing English. She was a Fulbright Specialist at Chancellor
College, University of Malawi, summer 2010. Her forthcom-
ing book project is an auto/biography with Malawian activist,
Catherine Chipembere. She is an Assistant Professor of English at
Medgar Evers College CUNY in Brooklyn, New York.
Z’étoile Imma is a pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson
Institute at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation examines
African masculinities and spatial politics in contemporary African
9780230117792_13_con.indd 181 6/20/2011 6:38:29 PM

182 Contributors
feminist fiction and film. She has published essays on gender, the
body, sexual violence and representation in African texts.
Desiree Lewis is an Associate Professor in the Women’s and Gender
Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in South
Africa. She has published on feminist theorizing, African women’s
writing, South African cultural politics and sexuality.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean who is currently a doc-
toral candidate at Stanford University working towards a PhD in
Modern Thought and Literature. Her dissertation examines the
impact that migration and travel have had in problematizing an
otherwise over-simplified political sense of national belonging in
Zimbabwe. Siphiwe has an MA in African Studies and an MFA
in Film from Ohio State University. While a graduate student, she
made a short film entitled “Graffiti” that won the Silver Dhow at
the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Siphiwe received her BFA
in Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College.
Ilaria Oddenino completed a Master’s degree in Postcolonial
Literature at the University of Turin in November 2006, with a
final thesis on Sarah Baartman and contemporary re-readings
of her story in fiction, poetry and drama. She is now a doctorial
candidate at the University of Turin and her research areas are
Postcolonial Literature and Modernism.
Karlien van der Schyff completed a Master’s degree in English at
the University of Stellenbosch in 2009. She is currently engaged in
doctoral studies at the University of Cape Town, focusing on rep-
resentations of Sarah Bartmann in post-apartheid South African
literature and feminist embodiment theory.
Sheila Smith McKoy is a critic and writer who is an associate pro-
fessor of English at North Carolina State University. Smith McKoy
directs the Africana Studies Program at NCSU and is the editor
of Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora. Her research
and creative work center on the connections among African and
African Diasporan literatures and cultures. The author of When
Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South
African Cultures (2001), her work has also appeared in Callaloo,
Mythium: The Journal of Contemporary Literature and Cultural
Voices, Obsidian: Literature of the African Diaspora, Research in
African Literatures and other journals.
9780230117792_13_con.indd 182 6/20/2011 6:38:30 PM

Contributors 183
Hershini Bhana Young is an Associate Professor in the Department

of English at SUNY at Buffalo where she teaches classes on African
Diasporic literature and art, focusing on sexuality and perfor-
mance. Her book Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black
Diasporic Body (UPNE, 2006) maps the spectral traces of the past
that haunt the subject formation of dislocated black women. Her
articles include work on criminalization and race in Gayl Jones’
work, mixed race politics in novels by Danzy Senna and issues
of pornography and slavery. A South African, her current book
project returns home by focusing on issues of coercion and consent
that plague the lives of Southern African women in the late eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries.
9780230117792_13_con.indd 183 6/20/2011 6:38:30 PM

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Index
abolitionists’ trial against Cezar 21, agency 57, 109

22, 48, 49 beings rendered as objects 62
Aborigines’ Protection exploration of 115–16
Society 154–5 failed 61
Abrahams, Yvette 2, 8, 19, 21–2, limited 55
101, 102, 147 notions of 52
on freak shows 156 personhood and authority 13
KhoiSan traditional garden 13 reconceptualizing 53–4
on scientific racism 10 retheorizing 51
African American women 8 “revisionist” accounts 117
“cult of secrecy and of Aidoo, Ama ata 13, 137, 141–5
dissemblance” 67–8 Altick, Richard 19, 95
models and music video American circus 155
“dancers” 172 American Museum of Natural
self-injury and infanticide 68 History 149, 154
African and Diasporic women 5, 10 anatomists 10
media’s negative attachment to ancestors 36, 37
bodies 175–6 animal importation 20
oppressive stance 172 animalized Africans and
universal exhibition of 171 KhoiSan 138, 168
Western obsession with genitals Anthropological Laboratory,
of 8 Cambridge 154
see also black women’s bodies; anti-racist and anti-sextist
body projects 66
African Association campaign 50 apartheid 48, 67
law suit against exhibitors 50–1, racist policies 138
55 archives 19, 23
Macauley’s affidavit 50, 55–6, deconstructing 28
116 Dutch Cape Colony records 23–4
African Association for Promoting escaping the confines of 24–5
the Discovery of the Interior of limits of 26–7
Africa 9 oblique meanings 74–5
African male as “uncivilized and official 73
savage” 157 personal African 75
“African privacy” 73 Arnfred, Signe 137
“African Sexuality/Sexuality in arts and crafts 41
Africa: Tales and Silences” Association of University English
(Arnfred) 137 Teachers of South Africa
African womanhood 14, 168 conference 67
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196 Index
Australia 148 see also “Nomshado, Queensgate,

authenticity 34 Parktown, 2007”
autobiographical narratives 101 Beloved (Morrison) 68
autobiographies 76, 77 “Beyond Booty: Covering Sarah
Axis Gallery, New Jersey 176 Baartman and Other Tales”
(Marasela) 176–7
Baartman, Sarah 3, 6–11, 19, biographical narrative 102–3
29, 87 biography
(also known as “Saartjie/Sarah/ and individuals 115
Sara/Sartje”) intertextuality 112–13
burial 1, 11, 48, 65, 71, 147, 149 Western 113–14
death in Paris 65 Biography, journal article
healing and homecoming 147 (Durbach) 112
iconic status 148, 149–50, 161 biomythography 32, 33
legacy in twenty-first “Black Bodies, White Bodies:
century 172–8 Towards an Iconography
personhood and rituals of of Female Sexuality in Late
purification 92–3 Nineteenth-Century Art,
remains returned 47–8, 71 Medicine, and Literature”
South African icon 147 (Gilman) 20
symbolic icon 157 black consciousness writings 104
Baderoon, Gabeba 2, 33–4, 176 black female images 11
private and intimate spaces 13 black lesbian, gay and transgender
Baker, Josephine 90 communities 78–9
Barber, Karin 75 “self-archiving” 79
do-it-yourself archiving 76 black male magazines,
elite texts 76 semipornographic 172
hidden histories 75 “blackness”
tin-trunk texts 75–7 idea of 20
Barnard, Dr. 143 notions of 52–3
Barnum and Bailey sideshow Black Skin, White Masks
circus 152, 154, 158, 160 (Fanon) 17
Barnum, P.T. Black Venus 2010: and They Called
Folies Bergère 148 Her Hottentot (Willis) 2
“Little People” 148 black womanhood 1, 166
“lovable Earthmen” 150 “anomaly of their hypersexual”
sideshow circus 148, 150 genitals 5
Bartman, Sarah, see Baartman, body dissatisfaction and eating
Sarah disorders 175
Batswana people 139 derogatory images 6
beauty and femininity, Western derogatory view of their
discourses on 11 sexuality 66
Becker, Robin 79 empowerment 179
Being series (Muholi) 79–80 gender-fixed idea about role
existence and its complexities 79 of 177–8
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Index 197
hypersexualized 161, 162 British

labels 4 colonies 73
ownership over 167 Empire in South Africa 89
in power 174 settlers 87
textual and visual brothels 91, 160
representations 107 see also Slave Lodge
black women’s bodies 58, 66, 95, brown women 18
104, 107 Brustein, Robert 132
buttocks and genitals 170 Buffie the Body (rap videos) 12
Cuvieresque philosophy 11 Buffon 123–4
historical myths of Bullock, William 48
hypersexualized 172 Burke, Peter 111
representation of genitalia 168 Burke, Timothy 54–5
resistance 58 Bylstrom, Kerry 75
sexuality 160
Western representations 11–12, Cacadu District Municipality 41
172 Cadmore, Margaret 140–1
see also body colonial ambivalence 140
Blanchard, P. 123 Caledon, Lord 49
bodily performance 19 Callahan, Laura 20, 22–3
body campaign for repatriation of
African female 137 Baartman 10, 47–8
childhood obesity 179 Cape Colony 21, 89
and commodity 61–2 Dutch and British government 49
as consolidation of identity 54 Khoisan-European relations 22
female as sexualized object 158 Cape of Good Hope, colonization
gendered representations 155, of 89
159 capitalism 28, 52
male as sexual superiority 158 caste systems, hierarchical 139
“opaqueness” of 23, 27 Center for Remembrance,
ownership of 166 Hankie 40
plaster cast of 65 see also Memorial Garden
primacy of 18–19 Cezar, Hendrick 1, 7, 9, 48, 155
race, nation, gender 55 Cezar, Peter 48
repository for erotic fantasies 121 Chase-Riboud, Barbara 8, 24
vocabulary of 54 “chorus of spectators” 106–7
“body” Chrisman, Laura 3
of evidence 18 Clico, “Wild Dancing
of literature 121 Bushman” 13
Bonaparte, Josephine 90 Clinton, Hillary 167
Bosjemans company 148 coercion and consent 56–7, 61
Botswana 139 Cohn, Dorrit 114
Brantley, Ben 132 “psycho-narration” 114
Breckenridge, Keith 76–7 Colligan, Collette
tin-trunk literacies 76–7 on genre of erotica in Britain 87
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198 Index
Collins, Patricia Hills 174 Darwinian system of

on “controlling images” 174 classification 137–8
colonial archive 4, 12 Dave Meekin’s Pygmies 148
colonial historiography 4 David’s Story (Wicomb) 67, 69, 70,
colonialism 67, 69 101
colonization 28, 49–50 Davies, Carole Boyce 3
of body 121 death 71–2
Caribbean and Africa by de Blainville, Henri 10, 65, 154
French 90–1 Department of Arts and Culture,
colonized identities 87 SA 40
colour-caste system 143 Department of Public Works,
“coloureds” 69, 89 SA 40–1
South African identity 92–3 De Veaux, Alexis 32
South African women 95 Diasporic Africanists 54
commodification 96 diasporic or exile studies 3
commodities 60–1 Diasporic sisterhood 8
compliant noncompliance 60, 61 dis-membered pornographic
connectedness 39 image 96
contractual black labour 51 dismemberment 94
Cook, Frank 152–4, 160 dis(remembering) of
Cook-Sullivan, Frances 154 Baartman 19–20, 28–9
Coombes, Annie 148 The dis(re)memberment of the
co-ownership of time 26 Venus Hottentot (Parks)
corporeal representations 12 129
court transcripts 24 Dlamini, Jacob 77
Crais, Clifton 19, 91, 102, 103, domination 55, 102
137, 155 Douglass, Frederick 87–8
Cross, Heather 174 Dubow, Saul 138, 144
cultural representations 101 Duckworth, W.H.L. 154
culture Dumas, Alexandre 91
food and cuisine 34 Dunlop, Alexander 7, 48, 106
impact of scientific thought 144 Durbach, Nadja 112
indigenous 36 Dutch 49, 89
Curtin, Philip D. colonies 73
“culture prejudice” to “color colonizing of the Cape 3
prejudice” 52 commandos 7
Cuvier, Georges 4, 6, 7, 22, 65, 88, settlers 87
104, 154 Dutch East India Company
autopsy 48–9 73–4
description of body 128–9
monograph on autopsy 10, 14 “Earthmen” (Barnum &
published scientific findings 24 Bailey) 150
racism and science 95–6 Egyptian ancient frescoes
science as imperial Elgin Marbles 85
mechanism 137 Ramses’s mummy 85
cyberspace 171, 174–5 Elmo 173
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Index 199
English For the Love of the Venus

erotic culture 87 (Parks) 125–33
judiciary system 9 Foucault, M. 54
Enlightenment biopower 54
emphasis on free will 113 genealogy 54
European scholars and France 10
scientists 144–5 see also Paris
philosophy 115 freak shows 155
Envisioning the Worst: European travelling shows 148
Representations of show and sideshow 155–6
“Hottentots” in Early-Modern “Free Blacks” 105
England (Merians) 5 “free labour” argument 51
erotic desire, hidden 170
“ersatz pornography” 124 Gamtoos River 39, 87, 96
“ethic of care” 22, 23, 24, 28 gardens 38–9
“ethics of exploitation” 25, 27 Green Garden agenda 167
ethnological oddity 90 and poetry 38
eugenics, discourse of 156 sweet thorn tree (Acacia
Eurocentric historical narratives 5 karoo) 44–6
European male translators 9 White House Garden 178–9
European texts 4 see also Memorial Garden
European women Geertz, Clifford 111
“à la mode” dresses 127–8 anthropological value of “thick
“cul de Paris” bustles 128 description” 111–12
exclusion, policies of 73 gender
exhibitions 148–9 disparity in exhibitions 13
of “Bushman” at holiday fair, and exhibition spaces 166
Germany 148 gender-based violence 41
and commodification 20–1 genocide 168
exile Gilman, Sander 19, 20, 49, 91, 95,
African, and exploitation 147 101, 102, 127
experience 31–2 on sexual otherness 156
exploitation 150, 155 Gomez, Jewelle 32
Gonaqua 109
Fanon, Frantz 17 Gonaqualands 110–11
female images, black 11 “Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara
femininity, Western discourses Walker, Black Women Writers,
on 11 and African American
feminists Postmemory” (Keizer) 68
accounts by 117 Gqola, Pumla Dineo 3, 66, 70, 107
Western 176 “theoretical industry” around
Ferrus, Diana 1, 17, 22, 35–6 Baartman 70
“First Lady Got Back” gravesite of Baartman
(Kaplan) 173–4 as tourist attraction 94, 96
flagellation and sexual pleasure 87 vandalization 94
food and cuisine, see under culture Griqua people 168
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200 Index
Guha, Ranajit 28 advertisements for show 23–4

“dominance without European collective
hegemony” 28 imagination 121
example of scopophilic
Harris, John 154–5 instinct 124
Hartman, Saidiya 57 as hyper-corporeal “other” 101
Haupt, Clive 142–4 as individual and human
see also heart transplant being 115
Head, Bessie 13, 137, 138–41 London and Paris 65
heart transplant 142–5 show manager, see Cezar,
apartheid legislation 143–4 Hendrick
foreign headlines 143 as symbol and icon 115
Time magazine article 143 as symbolic Other 161
Hepston, Morris “Paddy” 151–2, Hottentot Venus (Holmes) 102
154, 157 “The Hottentot Venus or the
(also known as Captain Epstein) Hatred of the French Woman”
Herbert, Dorothy 159 (show) 10
Hine, Darlene Clark 67–8 human complexity and ambiguity 102
hip-hop music videos, American 11, hypervisible figure 66
172
“As Nasty as They Wanna Be” 172 “I’ve Come to Take You Home”
“Baby got Back” 172 (Ferrus) xi–ii, 1, 22–3, 35
pornographic exhibition of Imma, Z’étoile 2, 13
bodies 172 imperialism
historical biography 108–9 legacy of 48
historical writing 113 white masculanist 28
history 18, 37, 87 imperial native policy 49–50, 52
The History of Mary Prince 88 imperial racism 148
HIV/AIDS indigenous knowledge systems 41
anxieties about race, sex and 93 indigenous people of Southern
and sex with virgins 93 Africa 168
Hobson, Janell 7, 27, 170 individual(s) 102
on Cuvier’s porno-erotic acts and will 116
agenda 175–6 and collective divide 76
on female subjectivity 174 humanist thinkers 113
Holmes, Rachel 102 “self” of 113
revisionist claim 117 subjectivity 73
hooks, bell 91 “In Search of Our Mother’s
Hottentot Apron 6, 8, 90 Garden” (Walker) 178–9
“Hottentot Code” 49, 50 institutions 102
“Hottentots” 20 insurrection in settler society 74
description of skin colour 53 Isaacson, Maureen 112
female and prostitute link 91 Islam 74
study of 88
“Hottentot Venus” 1, 6, 10, 19, 47, Jackson, Michael 173
48, 147, 169 Jamaica 150–1
9780230117792_15_ind.indd 200 6/21/2011 5:24:10 PM

Index 201
Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Kristeva, Julia 127

Festival 149 essay on abjection 127
Jardin du Roi, Paris 10
Johnson, Walter 59–60 Lalu, Premish 70
language 13, 34
Kaplan, Erin Aubrey 173–4 of fashion and entertainment 178
Keizer, Arlene 68 of race and racial
KhoeKhoe people 35 development 138
Khoe pharmacology 39 of racism and sexism 14
KhoeSangoed (Helichrysum and representations 166
petiolare) 38 “La Venus Hottentote” 91
KhoeSan people 35, 90 La Venus Hottentote, ou haine aux
(also known as “San,” “Nama,” françaises, vaudeville 121–7
“Griqua,” Khoesan”) le Fleur, Cecil 6–7
Baster communities 90 Leggett, Ted 93
continuity and change 43 Leibovitz, Annie 175
life and spirituality 43 lesbian and gay life in South
mission station 41 Africa 77–8
mixed racial heritage 90 narratives of violence 78
!nau 37, 39, 40 Lessing, Gotthold 168
!nau rituals 43–4 le Valliant, François 90
“performers” 150 Lewis, Desiree 2, 13
positioning of genitalia 147 on “documentary dialect” 78
tradition 43 Lindfors, Bernth 95
women 86, 89–90 “ethnological show business”
see also Memorial Garden 148
Khoikhoi people Linnaeus, Carolus 88
ethnicity 21 genus categorization 88
literature on 53 racial hierarchies 88
Khoi people 168 Lorde, Audre 24, 27–8, 31
“Khoisan-ness” 3 love letters 76–7
KhoiSan people 3, 5–6, 137–8,
139, 145, 168 Macauley, Zachary 154
(also known as “Bushmen,” see also under African
“Hottentots”) Association campaign
dehumanization by European magazines
imperialists 139–40 African American male’s 11
meditative construction 5 women’s 177
sexual slavery and victimization Magubane, Zine 7–8, 19, 20, 66,
of women 89 69
subject to British colonial diasporic methodology 53
rule 89 on misanalysis 161
see also plants race, class, gender study 53
Kirchner, J. 154 Malawi college students 11
knowing, way of 27–8 Malherbe 158–9
Kouga Municipality 41 Mandela, Nelson 10, 92
9780230117792_15_ind.indd 201 6/21/2011 5:24:10 PM

202 Index
A Mantis Carol (Van der Sarah Baartman Legacy

Post) 150–4 Project 40–4
life story of Hans water as symbol 42–3
Taaibosch 150–4 Merians, Linda E. 5
map 33 metaphorical kitchen 32
liberatory history as 32 “Michelle and the Media”
of Otherness 121 (Williams) 174
Marasela, Senzeni 176–7 mineworkers’ compound
Marche D’Esclave, engraving 57 communities 77
in Le Commerce de l’Amerique Moffett, Helen 94
par Marseille 57, 62 Mohanty, Chandra 52
Maru (Head) 13, 138–41, 145 morality
Marxist accounts 117 and humanity 169
masculinist and white racist and self-representation 169
desires 107 Morgan, Jennifer 168
masculinity and animalistic Morrison, Toni 68
tendencies 175 Morton, S.G. 168
Maseko, Zola 101, 102 “Mother Africa nationalist icon”
“The Master’s Tools Will Never status 1
Dismantle the Master’s House” motherhood, radical black agenda
(Lorde) 24 of 178–9
Maxwell, John 53 Muholi, Zanele 70, 77–83, 176
Mbeki, Thabo 1, 69, 92–3 complexity of African lives 83
funeral oration for Musée de l’Homme, Paris 4, 10, 49,
Baartman 94–5 70–1, 91, 138
Mbembe, Achille 25–7 skeleton, brain, genitals
McClintock, Anne 126 exhibited 65
McKoy, Sheila Smith 2, 13, 89 Musée d’Histoire Naturelle,
“The Meanings of Sara Baartman” Paris 10
colloquium 77, 79 Museum of Natural History,
media 174 Paris 154
analysis 170 music industry 172
and black femininity 166 Muslim slaves 74
and blog space 173 myth-making 108, 110
coverage of burial 149 My Tongue Softens on the Other
language of deviance and Name (Baderoon) 33–4
hypersexuality 173
see also Obama, Michelle Namibia 90
medical and anthropological narrative, emplotment in 109
discourses 7 The Narrative of Frederick
Meintjies, Sheila 170 Douglass (Douglass) 88
Memorial Garden national healing and
dignity of womanhood 44 homecoming 162
notion of circularity 42–3 national identity 69
phases of the Moon 42, 43 nationalist accounts 117
9780230117792_15_ind.indd 202 6/21/2011 5:24:11 PM

Index 203
National Khoisan Consultative media images and blog spaces 13,

Council 6–7 170, 171–4
“National Mother” 161 metaphorical lynching of 170–2
of “new” South Africa 162 women’s magazines 171–2,
National Women’s Day 11, 48, 69, 173–5, 177–8
92–3 obedience as strategy of
nation building resistance 58
discourse on 149 occupation, political and
and national healing 147 territorial 121
Native Nostalgia (Dlamini) 77 Oddenino, Ilaria 2, 13
naturalists 10 oppression 58, 94–5
European discourses 169, 171 Other 58, 162
Ndlovu, Siphiwe 2 and “knowable and visible” 121
“an ethic of care” 4, 12–13 and objects 137
“Negritude 2.0: Modern Day “savage” 123
Hottietots” (Reynolds) 11–12 sexualized female 124, 147
The Neverending Story, 1820–2002 Othering 5–6, 23, 24
(Ferrus) 17 genealogy of 20
New Yorker magazine 171–2 narrative 26–7
Ngubane, Dr. Ben 147 racial 92
Niewijk, Alexandria 143 racist, patriarchal 172
noble savage, idealized image Otherness 7, 157, 169
of 123 map of 121
“Nomshado, Queensgate, racial and sexual 155, 156
Parktown, 2007” Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections of
(Muholi) 79–83 a Blackeyedsquint (Aidoo) 13,
photograph 80 138, 141–5
North American slavery and sexual Oyewumi, Oyeronke 52
assault 67
Nuttall, Sarah 75 Paris 4, 10, 49, 65, 70–1, 90
brothels (“maisons de
Obama, Barack 166, 167 tolerance”) 91
Obama, Michelle 5 Palais Royal exhibitions 91
and black personhood 168–9 Parker, John 60
culture discourse 165–7 Parks, Suzan-Lori 8, 13, 102,
defiance 179 103–8, 121–2, 124–33
disruption of Parsons, Neil 148, 149, 150
dehumanization 167 pathology of hypersexual
fashion prowess 173, 177 disorder 93
Green Garden agenda 167 patriarchal assumptions 161
iconic status and pop culture patriarchal perceptions of the
fame 173 corporeal 159, 160
“Let’s Move” program patriarchal stereotypes 161
for fighting Childhood patriarchy 28
Obesity 167, 179 Peterson, Bheki 73
9780230117792_15_ind.indd 203 6/21/2011 5:24:11 PM

204 Index
Piccadilly Circus exhibition 1, 4, 89 “psycho-narration” 114

Pieterse, Jan 168 public private sphere 75
plants 34–8
Buchu 35–6 Quena people 168
compost 37–8 Qureshi, Sadiah 19, 20–1, 169–70
herbs 39
of home 35 race 20, 88
poem (Abrahams) 36–7 de-centring 21
see also gardens and gender systems 52
“plundered art and antiquities”, power and consent 143
value of 85 pseudoscientific obsession
and Hottentot Venus 85 with 156
poetry 38 and sex, notions of 67
political power 52 and sexuality 19
politics 19, 20 white supremacist discourses
contemporary identity 23 137
race and gender 25 race-based pseudo-science 91–2
pornographic-erotic desire 176 racial and social paradigms 96
pornography 88, 131 racial difference 21
dis-integration of as legacy of 94 codified 7
and erotic desire 13 devalued racial type 169
Internet 93 European categories 10
race-based 92 measurement of value of life
post-apartheid South Africa 92 142
Baartman as “National racial heterogeneity 74
Mother” 147 racial prejudice, scientific
“post-Black”/nonracial codification of 52–3
sensibility 167 racial superiority 88
power 88 Rainbow Vice: The Drugs and Sex
access to 69 Industries in the New South
workings of 58–9 Africa (Leggett) 93
Prince, Mary (Antiguan female “Rape and the inner lives of Black
slave) 88 women in the Middle West:
“privacies” 74 Preliminary Thoughts on the
privacy Culture of Dissemblance”
definition of 66 (Hine) 67
rethinking the private 72–3, 75 rape of women 94
use of term 72 Reaux, S. 9–10, 48
“privatizing” 75 Refiguring the Archive
prostitution, enforced 73–4 (Peterson) 73
pseudoscientists 21, 22 relationships 102, 110
psychic survival of black women 68 Remembering the Nation,
psychological impact of slavery Dismembering Women? Stories
on descendants 67 of the South African Transition
systemic violence 67 (Samuelson) 69
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Index 205
repatriation scientific experimentation 139–40

media coverage 93 scientific racism 13, 48–9, 137–8,
and return to home 92–3 144–5
resistance 60–1 European discourse 147, 166
acts of 61 scientists, English and French 14
culture of 68 Scully, Pamela 19, 91, 102, 103,
performative modes of 58–9 137, 155
recollection of 69 self
Reynolds, Mark 11–12 conception of 69, 109
righting/writing the wrongs 23, of individual 113
25–6 making of the 76
Roach, Joseph 56 self-representation 117, 169
Roberts, Christiaan Willem 151, Semenya, Caster 167
155 sex, race and anatomy 86
Royal Geographical Society 50, 53 sexual and racial alterity 19, 25–6
rural South African women, eating sexual artifact 86
disorders 11 sexual desire and eroticized
violence 87–8
Said, Edward 5–6 sexual economy 94
Saint-Hillaire, Ètienne 154 sexual enslavement 96
Salon magazine 173 sexual exploitation, strategies
Samuelson, Meg 69, 70, 107–8 against 68–9
“spectacle of nation sexual fetishes 90, 91
building” 147 sexuality 7, 21
San people 168 African 123
Sara Baartman and the Hottentot of black women 169
Venus: A Ghost Story masculanist, colonial
and a Biography (Crais & discourse 10
Scully) 102, 108–17 race and labour discourses 53
“Sarah Baartman Redress Series” see also race
(Marasela) 177 sexual lewdness 49
Sarah Baartman Remembrance sexual oppression and gender
Center 13, 94 inequality 86
scholarship sexual vice in South Africa 93
failure of 21, 26 sex workers 93
regarding Baartman 22 shame
Schrire, Carmel 102 ambiguities of survival 69
science 18, 137 slavery and colonization 72
dehumanizing African suppressed 68
people 145 “Shame and the Case of the
and pornography 96 Coloured” (Wicomb) 67, 69
racial/cultural classifications 52 Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean 24,
racialized 89 124
and racism 95 Shell, Robert 102
scientific apartheid 145 Slave Lodge 73–4
9780230117792_15_ind.indd 205 6/21/2011 5:24:11 PM

206 Index
slavery 3–4, 28, 67, 69 “Clico, the Wild Dancing

England and British empire 9, 48 Bushman” 152
and free labour 49 dance performance 157
and oppression 13 “dancing Bushman” 151, 155
slaves infantilization 153
auctions 52, 57 plaster cast of 149
buyers 57–8 Taylor, Charles 72–3
as human commodities 60 television, Ugandan and South
legal codes and surveillance 74 African 11
male and female 73–4 “Top Ten Plundered Artifacts”
resistance 54 (New York Times) 85
for sale 47, 54, 60 Touw’s River (River of Women) 39
subjectivities 74 traditional healers 41
trade 20, 52 Tratradouws Pass (Women’s
traders of 60 Door) 39
social relations 20 Treatis Memorie du Musée
social structure 102 d’Histoire Naturelle
Sources of the Self (Taylor) 72–3 (Cuvier) 137
South African War 151 truth, uncertainties about 117–18
Statutes of India 74
stereotypes 133, 156 Ubangi women in sideshow 158–9,
St. Hillarie, Geoffrey 10 160
storytelling 101, 107, 109 unknowability about Baartman’s
mode 110 life 66, 70
partisan 108 “un-mirroring” 174
perspectives on reality 118 urban African youth 11
subjectification 104 !Urisan (white people) 38
subjectivity 113
subjugation 59, 104 Van der Post, Laurens 150–4,
Submerged Gallery, USA 176 160–1
substance abuse 41 Van der Schyff, Karlien 2, 13,
Sunday Independent review 166
(Isaacson) 112 Van Jong, Hendrik 110
supremacy, global white 144 Venus (Parks) 13, 102–8, 121–2,
surrogation, violent network 124–33
of 56–7 “The Venus Hottentot,” history
surveillance of 87
and domination 75 “Venus Hottentots”
history of 75 womanhood 92, 96
techniques 74 see also “Hottentot Venus”
Venus in the Dark: Blackness and
Taibosh, Franz 151–4 Beauty in Popular Culture
(also known as Hans Taaibosch/ (Hobson) 7
Taibos) “victim” and “agent” dualism 105
advertisement for show 157–8 victimization 61, 101–2, 115
9780230117792_15_ind.indd 206 6/21/2011 5:24:11 PM

Index 207
violence White, Hayden 102–3, 109, 113

accusation of women’s white men 18
complicity 67 Wicomb, Zoe 67, 69, 101, 103
and dehumanizing impact of “Shame” essay 69
racism 139 willfulness and domination 56
emotional, physical, epistemic 18 Williams, Zoe 174
gender-based 41 Willis, Debra 2
homosocial 57–8 will-lessness 53
sexual, during slavery 67–8 of Baartman and diasporic
visual art 66 slaves 53
Visual Sexuality 77 Wiss, Rosemary 169
Vogue magazine 175 Witbooi, Benjamin 42
Voyage de F. Le Valliant dans Wood, John 88
L’Interieur de L’Afrique 90 Worden, Nigel 74
“wretched” Africans 169
Walker, Alice 178–9 writing 66
Walker, Kara 68 see also storytelling
“cut-out” silhouettes 68–9
Warner, Sara 106 Young, Hershini Bhana 2
Western racist/sexist scientific acts of agency and slaves 13
memory 171 Young, Jean 104, 118, 131–2
What is Slavery to Me? (Gqola) 70
“(Not) representing Sara Zami (Lorde) 31
Bartman” 70 as “biomythography” 32
When Whites Riot (McKoy) 89 zoologists 10
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The Legacy of Sarah Baartman - Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

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Representation and Black Womanhood

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd i 6/21/2011 8:14:14 PM

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd iii 6/21/2011 8:14:14 PM

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd iv 6/21/2011 8:14:15 PM

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd v 6/21/2011 8:14:15 PM

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd vi 6/21/2011 8:14:15 PM

Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman,

Part One The Archive: Disrupting

Part Two Troubling the “Truth”:

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd vii 6/21/2011 8:14:15 PM

Seven “I Wanna Love Something Wild”: A Reading

Notes on Contributors 181

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd viii 6/21/2011 8:14:15 PM

This is a work of collaborative, global sisterhood—all premised

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd ix 6/21/2011 8:14:15 PM

wonderful, efficient folks at Palgrave, namely Chris Chappell and

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd x 6/21/2011 8:14:15 PM

“I’ve come to take you home”

I have come to take you home, home!

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd xi 6/21/2011 8:14:15 PM

I have come to take you home

9780230117792_01_prexii.indd xii 6/21/2011 8:14:15 PM

9780230117792_02_int.indd 1 6/20/2011 1:31:04 PM

who build academic and writing careers on producing “authorita-

9780230117792_02_int.indd 2 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

attempts to present a strong voice from the South (with echoes of

9780230117792_02_int.indd 3 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

9780230117792_02_int.indd 4 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

9780230117792_02_int.indd 5 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

into play here as the Khoisan people were villanized/Othered in a

was used as a yardstick by which to judge the stages of Western evo-

First, reinforced throughout this collection is that the persona of the

9780230117792_02_int.indd 6 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

from the Quena people. Baartman was forced, as a noncitizen, to

Baartman was one of thousands of people exhibited and trans-

9780230117792_02_int.indd 7 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

century . . . however; none of these . . . have been made to stand as

Hobson concurs with Magubane when she notes that Baartman

9780230117792_02_int.indd 8 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

Many scholars3 suggest that Baartman’s story became famous,

9780230117792_02_int.indd 9 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

caricatures and a one-act vaudeville show, entitled “The Hottentot

Upon Sara Baartman’s body a superstructure of scientific racism was

9780230117792_02_int.indd 10 6/20/2011 1:31:05 PM

in April 2002. The state buried her remains on National Women’s

The Modern Day “Hottietot”:

9780230117792_02_int.indd 11 6/20/2011 1:31:06 PM

Buffie the Body, made famous by her appearance in a number of

The contradictions of Sarah Baartman’s legacy are tremendous.

9780230117792_02_int.indd 12 6/20/2011 1:31:06 PM

(2011, 32) around Sarah Baartman’s personhood. Yvette Abrahams

9780230117792_02_int.indd 13 6/20/2011 1:31:06 PM

insistence on seeing Sarah’s humanity as private and sacred and on

9780230117792_02_int.indd 14 6/20/2011 1:31:06 PM

The Archive: Disrupting

9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 15 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM

“Body” of Evidence: Saartjie

I live to tell the story

Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to oth-

9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 17 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM

and thin woman with nothing ample or generous about her. My

9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 18 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM

takes center stage yet again? Is it possible to recuperate Saartjie

9780230117792_03_ch01.indd 19 6/20/2011 1:31:46 PM