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Sarah Baartman - Reclaiming the past
Sheila Meintjes
For 180 years, the remains of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoi woman from the Eastern Cape of South Africa, were held in the Musée de l'Homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris, France. 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, what we today call 'scientific racism'.
Sarah Baartman was brought
to Europe from Cape Town as a young woman by her employers more than two
hundred years ago. Not a great deal is known about her, but she appears to
have been the equivalent of a slave. In Europe, she was displayed as an exotic
species of humanity in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, along with other exotic
animals and plants. She was shown off to anatomical scientists and artists
by Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, member of the French Académie des
Sciences.
When she died, her brains
and genitals were preserved, and a caste of her body was taken, to preserve
her physical appearance. These were displayed by the Museum of Natural History.
The cause of this scientific and artistic excitement? The fact that she had
an unusual anatomy and colour compared to Europeans. Such interest was of
course the consequence of eighteenth and nineteenth century European scientific
racism.
Today, we can only imagine
the humiliation and hurt the display would have afforded to the young woman.
Evidence suggests that she was miserable and unhappy, and died in poverty
in Paris. Upon her death, the renowned French anatomist and scientist, Georges
Cuvier, examined her body in detail.
In 2002, after extensive
negotiations between the South African and French Governments, it was at
last agreed that the remains of Saartjie Baartman should be returned to the
country of her birth for reburial. Perhaps surprisingly, given the passage
of time, the French Government refused to allow filming of the other remains
kept in the Museum. European states still find it almost impossible to apologise
for the exploitation of the colonial experience. Gender activist and academic
Gail Smith accompanied the South African delegation to France, to film the
return. This is how she described her experience:
"Seven years of research,
discussion and fascination with Baartman did not prepare me for the face-to-face
meeting with her. Or rather with the disembodied bits and pieces deemed crucial
for scientific research by the scientists auspiciously 'entrusted' with her
remains just hours after her death. And who wasted no time in getting to
the heart of the matter: making a cast of her body, dissecting it and preserving
her brain and genitals.
Baartman's skeleton reached
no higher than my solar plexus, which would've made her no taller than 1,3
meter. The upright caste looked ghoulish and has trapped her face in a perpetual
death mask, her arms sticking straight out at an awkward angle, and painted
an odd brown. The bottle containing her brain seemed unremarkable, as did
the bottle of grey matter that constitutes her genitals ...
My heart bled for the ostriches
and kangaroos leaping around in a drenching rain and freezing temperatures.
As I huddled further into my three layers of clothing I could only imagine
Baartman's misery in such hostile environs, with no warm clothes, surrounded
by men so obsessed with her vagina that they were constantly trying to persuade
her to drop the remaining garments she wore."
Smith's description of her
own reactions bear testimony to the powerful symbolism embedded in the return
of Baartman's remains. The legacy of the hurt and shame resonated with the
hurt and shame of colonial oppression everywhere, and with South Africa's
own colonial and more recent apartheid past, a past that also exploited black
women's sexuality in a brutal and shameful fashion. Smith's concluding remarks
say it all:
"I wept for Baartman, I wept for every black woman degraded and humiliated by men obsessed by the secrets they carry between their legs. And I wept for every brown South African reduced, degraded and humiliated by being called 'Hotnot' and 'AmaBoesman' (1). I also wept tears of joy and gratitude because I had been chosen as a witness to a brief and victorious moment in history.".
(1) The expressions' Hotnot'
and 'AmaBoesman' are racially derogatory terms referring to people of mixed
origin, such as the Khoi people in Southern Africa.
Dr. Sheila Meintjes
is a gender commissioner at the South African Commission on Gender Equality
and lectures in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.