Saartije Baartman’s caricature
‘These women were not supposed to be there. Yet they were’’
When I first came to know the story of Sarah Baartman, I was astonished by the atrocities perpetrated in plain sight in Post-Revolution France. However, when I learned that the offence somehow continued until 2002, I was in complete disbelief. To explain for those who have never heard the story of Saaertije ‘Sarah’ Baartman: she was a Khoikhoi woman who was brought to South Africa and next to London in 1810 as a slave and exhibited because of the unusual features of her body. Saartije was extremely small in height and suffered from steatopygia. She was paraded in chains, almost naked, to satisfy people’s morbid curiosity: she portrayed the objectification and sexualization of the ‘Hottentot Venus.’ Hottentot was the term used for Khoi people, Venus the goddess of love and fertility.
Soon after, a British abolitionist society, the African Association, fought for her release, cementing their battle right after the approval in 1807 of the Slave Trade Act. But Saartije herself, after being questioned, denied that she was being kept against her will. Her ‘performances’ resumed in France, where she was ultimately enslaved and brought to many scientists’ attention to please exoticist and racist scientific beliefs.
After she died in 1840, her body was mutilated and her remains - especially her intimate body parts - exhibited at the Musèe dell’Hommes until 1974, when they were finally removed from display. After several requests, France permitted her remains to be brought back to South Africa only in 2002.
Saartije Baartman
Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France narrates the life of Saartije Baartman and two other black women - Charlotte Catherine Benezet Ourika and Jeanne Duval. The author Robin Mitchell contextualize these stories in a France looking for a strong identity and suffering a feeling of national revanchism after the ‘shameful’ loss of Haiti soon after the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804.
These women all reflect a different role and status in French society, and originate from diverse locations.
Ourika was born in Senegal and sold to an aristocratic French family, she gained emancipation only four years prior to her death. Her figure was brutally consumed by French society, inspiring poems as well as clothing pieces, gripping her blackness and sexuality at the centre of her being. Duval was a Haitian dancer and actress, long time lover of Charles Baudelaire, and diminished by French culture in order to brush off the memory of her ‘race’. The demonization of these figures served the purpose of rehabilitating France’s identity, unloading the country’s fears and tensions on black women: this is the reason, Mitchell argues, that it is impossible to separate French identity from black people, from the moment the first has employed the second while constructing its sense of self.
Mitchell’s delicacy in tackling these women stories hides a personal attachment to their voices, granting them justice after centuries of silence and omissions: ‘‘the people who had power saw these women merely as objects, and that is how they survive today. There are no extant documents that allow them to speak, to tell their own stories’’. A compelling, accessible reading that will induce us to reflect on how black representation in Modern Europe has been twisted, distorted and abused - from science, to museum venues, to everyday history - to benefit white people's self-portrayal.
Venus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth Century France, Robin Mitchell, 2020
Written by Sofia Sireno