On 29 October 1810, Saartjie “Sara” Baartman, a nineteen year old
Khoisan woman signed a contract to be taken from Cape Town to London to
be exhibited for entertainment purposes. Though she was illiterate,
history allegedly claims she signed the contract with an English ship
surgeon named William Dunlop who was a friend to Pieter Willem Cezar and
Hendrik Cezar. Pieter Willem Cezar had bought Sara Baartman as a slave
at sixteen and she worked for Pieter’s brother, Hendrik. It was here
that she was named Saartjie, the Dutch form of Sara.
The history of colonialism was so unfair to her that she was
stripped of her identity and her bodily integrity. Her story is the full
representation of the evils of a hybrid of colonialism, slavery, racism
and sexism. The Europeans even disrespected her humanity to the extent
of displaying her brain, skeleton and sexual organs in a Paris museum
until 1974. She only got a dignified burial almost two centuries after
her death, in 2002.
The woman who lost everything…even her name
Sara Baartman was born to a Gonaquasub group of the KhoiKhoi in
1789 at the Gamtoos River which is found in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.
Her first major loss was that of her mother who died when Sara was just
two and her father, a cattle driver died when she reached adolescence.
She got married to a Khoikhoi drummer and had a child together. The
child died soon after.
Death
With the coming of colonialism, came conflicts between the natives
and the settlers. Her husband was murdered by the Dutch colonists, her
first loss to a system that would take her life from her. After working
for the Dutch in Cape Town, she allegedly signed the contract which
would take her to London to perform. What made her special? BBC says she
had what was called “steatopygia”, resulting in extremely protuberant
buttocks due to a build-up of fat.
What she had, most women can only dream of but at this point, the
Europeans were eager to gobble up anything that asserted their
superiority and somehow, Baartman was used in that narrative. They used
her as a confirmation of the dark skinned people’s inferiority; their
insatiable appetite for sex as shown by the size of their buttocks and
their genitalia. Promoters even described her genitals as resembling the
skin that hangs from a turkey’s throat.
Baartman was first displayed in Piccadilly where descriptions of her treatment reported how she 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”. The Guardian rightly says, “The crowd viewed her as
little different from an animal.” Like an animal, she was sold four
years later to Paris where she was under the control of a wild animal
exhibitor in a travelling circus. That she was now a part of his “show
animals” leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It is in Paris that Napoleon’s
surgeon, George Cuvier saw her and developed a “scientific interest”.
His idea of science was proving the superiority of the white people. In fact, he described Sara’s movements as having “something brusque and capricious about them that recalled those of a monkey”.
Men like Cuvier propounded the idea of a Homo Sapiens Monstrous; more
ape than human, devoid of the intelligence and emotional capabilities
the whites were endowed with.
The Edinburgh Review in 1863 is famed for writing, “There is no
vast difference between the intelligence of a Bosjesman and that of an
oran-utan, and that the difference is far greater between Descartes or
Homer and the Hottentot than between the stupid Hottentot and the ape.” Such depiction of Africans (particularly the Khoisan) as the most developed ape but least developed human was common.
When Baartman died of what is presumed to be pneumonia, syphilis
and alcoholism, George Cuvier made a plaster cast of her body before
dissecting it. Her preserved brain and genitals were placed in jars and
displayed at the Museum of Man in Paris. They were only removed in 1974
and she got a proper burial 187 years after her death. Her story is so
emotional that when the world heard of Beyonce’s plan to write and star
in a movie based on Baartman’s life, there was a massive backlash.
Jean Burgess, a chief from the Khoikhoi group Baartman hailed from is on record for saying Beyonce lacked “the basic human dignity to be worthy of writing Sara’s story, let alone playing the part”.
Similarly, a Kim Kardashian photo-shoot which mimicked contemporary
drawings of Baartman was widely criticised. The looks of black women
are a thing of politics with body-shaming and commodification forming
the lens through which they are viewed.
Baartman probably suffered the worst forms of subjugation and
dehumanisation at the hands of Europeans. This culture of using looks to
perpetuate black women oppression should come to an end. Baartman’s
story should not be re-enacted in modern society two centuries after her
unfortunate death.
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