[Mhiz Rebecca]

The Europeans even disrespected her humanity to the
extent of displaying her brain, skeleton and sexual
organs in a Paris museum until 1974.
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.