The Return of Sara Baartman

Abstract

Return of Sara Baartman. Film by Zola Maseko. New York: First Run Icarus Films, 2003. 53 min., color. $248 purchase, $75.00 rental. Zola Maseko's film focuses on people who engineered return of Sara Baartman's physical remains from Paris to South Africa for burial. In life Baartman was the hottentot Venus in London and Paris in 1800s and 1810s, a famous exhibit. She died young, in France, and French pickled her vagina, and stored her bones in a box. These remains are golden briefcase in this film-the focus of everyone's attention-even though no one can figure out exactly what remains signify. South Africans like to resolve such matters in meetings, and movie is largely a recording of such committee work and of what people were thinking and feeling during hand-over. Maseko's first film, The Life and Times of Sara is excerpted in this one; there are brief monologues, and then scenes of Baartman's burial in Hankey, a nondescript town in Eastern Cape, where President Mbeki gave a suitable speech. movie lasts 53 minutes and is uninspired and often dull: don't expect it to win any Indie cinema award. voice-over begins on a wrong note, by mispronouncing with a non-explosive palatal fricative, g, as goegoe, instead of in usual way, perhaps in order to make a (spurious) claim to specialist knowledge. Khoikhoi were slaughtered in colonial hunting raids and decimated by smallpox, their lands stolen, a fair summation: but it is not clear that Baartman identified herself as a Khoikhoi, or a Christian, or some other ethnic or political name, or, more likely, as a daughter. By time she was born, in 1789, Boers had been acquiring loan farms on far side of Gamtoos River for twenty years. Like so many, she was a resident worker· on such a farm. She happened to have a large and protuberant posterior, for a Khoikhoi or a European, and she caught eye of a lewd impresario. Persuaded to go to Europe (how?), she was displayed in flesh on stage and paid a very small wage. There were always whispered rumors about the hottentot's body, her mythical anatomy and genitalia. Maseko's film, and narration (written and spoken by one Gail Smith), do not explain reference any further. It is to elongated labia minora within folds of a Khoikhoi woman's vagina. A debate still simmers among anthropologists and historians about whether there was such a physical difference, whether it was common, induced by customary practices (pulling), perhaps in some form of masturbation, whether it exists today, etc. Burying Baartman won't stop such talk about different bodies and sexual fetishism. Nineteenth-century audiences had not been shamed into silence and elaborated various discourses around Baartman before and after her death. George Cuvier measured her for anthropometric science, and compared her anatomy to that of apes and dogs. (Discordant music makes it hard to concentrate on what Cuvier was saying. music in this film is awful.) Cuvier made a cast of her after she died, and this model was exhibited at Musee de l'Homme, a veritable part of French history and culture for over 150 years, until 1974. Baartman, narrator Gail Smith tells, us became a symbol of black women's sexuality, which is what Sander oilman has argued.1 This was not case in 1810, when she was considered more of an oddity, but it is certainly true today. No doubt many of people in Maseko's film view Baartman as a symbol of black women's sexuality. Several of her modern partisans, having gained possession of her body in material form, want to use it to proclaim black women's repossession of their own bodies in a transformed South Africa today. Sadly, incidence of rape among black people in South Africa has remained high or even increased in townships since demise of apartheid. For others, Baartman's bones must be buried for spiritual reasons, to repair a trespass on Coloured women's modesty, to assert a form of ownership of her memory, to replace racial typology and exploitation with domestic containment and repose. …