Whose Trauma? Discursive Practices in Saartjie Baartman’s Literary Afterlives

Abstract

DOI: 10.13137/2283-6438/11868 “Sarah Bartmann [...] has, at last, returned to her people”. These words were uttered on 9 August 2002 by Thabo Mbeki,1 then President of South Africa, on the occasion of Saartjie Baartman’s ‘funeral’, which took place in the Eastern Cape Province. She was buried on the outskirts of the town of Hankey, possibly not far from the place where she was born in the 1770s or 1780s2. The remains of the body of the South African woman of Khoisan descent reached their land of origin after several years of negotiation between South Africa and France, begun by President Nelson Mandela in 1995 and concluded by his successor Mbeki in 2002. Until as late as 1974 a full cast of her body and skeleton were on exhibition at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, together with her bottled organs (brain and genitalia). Her body parts were then removed from display and held in storage, until they were repatriated to South Africa and solemnly buried. Saartjie Baartman3 was brought from Cape Town to London in 1810 to be exhibited at 225 Piccadilly as a freak and scientific curiosity for the price of two shillings. The shape of her body (short in stature with protruding buttocks) – unusual for European audiences but rather common among some populations of southern Africa – was exploited to titillate the morbid curiosity of the public4. After earning success in London and touring the provinces, the “Hottentot Venus” was put on display in the shows of Paris in 1814; in a few months she came to the attention of Georges Cuvier, the great anatomist and chief surgeon to Napoleon Bonaparte. Cuvier obtained Whose Trauma? Discursive Practices in Saartjie Baartman’s Literary Afterlives