The Exploitation of Saartjie Baartman Lives On

Black women today do not know the origins of their sexual objectification. Some will not question it but rather embrace it, reciting misogynistic lyrics in songs, constantly twerking, and referring to themselves as a “bad b*tch” If you mention Saartjie Baartman to them, they probably would not know who that is. They would not know that Saartjie was the first known African woman used for sexual objectification, exploitation, and justification for African female inferiority in the 19th century. Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan woman, faced many hardships in her upbringing due to the constant fighting amongst her people, the Xhosa people, and the Europeans in South Africa. The appeal of fame and fortune in Europe was irresistible; however, Saartjie did not receive such promises.

Saartjie Baartman was born during a war between the indigenous populations in South Africa, the Dutch, and the British. By 1806, the British had taken control of the Cape Colony, including Cape Town. In 1807, Saartjie Baartman’s father and new husband, Solkar, were murdered by European-lead commando units. Saartjie was then captured and forced on foot towards Cape Town with Pieter Caesars, a free Black hunter, and trader. She was eventually given to Pieter’s brother, Hendrik Caesars and Anna Catharina, a free Black married couple who hired her to become a domestic servant and wet nurse. Saartjie worked for Hendrik and Anna for food and shelter only. Her presence in their home was not recorded until a British law was passed that stated that all Khoisan domestic servants must be registered as indentured servants. Although she was given food and shelter for her services, she was not given a choice regarding leaving and returning to her home. At this point in her life, Saartjie was far away from her home with no family and no choice but to stay.

Hendrik Ceasar was employed by Alexander Dunlop, a British military doctor. When Dunlop was ordered to return to England, he came up with the idea to exhibit Saartjie as a “unique but typical” Hottentot woman with emphasis on her “unusual” African body features in England with the help of Hendrik Ceasar. Dunlop and Ceasar persuaded Saartjie to come to England in exchange for fame and fortune with the intention to return one day. In May of 1810, Saartjie arrived in London. Her first performance was set at a theater at 225 Piccadilly, where the audience would pay two shillings to see the Hottentot Venus. The stage’s background depicted the South African landscape with a grass hut that was to represent Saartjie’s African home. During her performances, she played her instrument from Cape Town, the rawkie, while she danced and sang African or Khoi songs.

Saartjie was objectified through the marketing tactics of her performances. For example, her given stage name was humiliating. Hottentot was a pejorative word used to describe Khoisan people in Britain. British people considered Hottentot people to be barbaric, animalistic, and alien, while Venus was considered a synonym for sex. The two names together created an unavoidable interest amongst the British people, especially on Piccadilly Street, the hub for popular entertainment and peculiar freak shows. Advertisements for her show emphasized her African culture, breasts, elongated labia, and most importantly, her rump. The presentation of her exhibit made her an object of fascination. She no longer was just a woman performing but a strange alien that must be seen to believe the distributed rumors were true.

Dunlop and Ceasar further exploited Saartijie through her costume. Her body features in her costume needed to give the illusion of nakedness. Her costume consisted of a skintight fleshing, a one-piece stocking, a leotard, her apron, and African jewelry made from beads and feathers. The jewelry was placed around her neck, wrists, and ankles to cover up places where the stocking would end. The purpose of the beaded and feathered apron was to act as a codpiece that hid the rumored Hottentot elongated labia. The purpose of her costume was to dramatize the African natural features of Saartjie’s body and elate curiosity in what was underneath.

As Saartjie became popular, the demand for shows increased. As a result, the shows put a hinder on her health, and she began to battle with the flu; however, that did not make Ceasar stop her from performing on stage and at private shows for the most privileged class in London. Saartjie began to demonstrate acts of displeasure during performances that caught the eye of antislavery activists. One, in particular, was named Zachary Macaulay, who wrote many pieces in newspapers about the distasteful performances of Saartjie due to her sickness. He and others were determined to expose Ceasar and Dunlop for the exploitation of Saartjie since the slave trade was abolished in the year 1807 in Britain.

In November of 1810, the Hottentot Venus Case was brought to court with Sir Simon Le Blanc, a representative of the African Institution, presiding as judge. Macaulay called a writ of habeas corpus for Dunlop and Ceasar on the accusation of smuggling and exploiting Saartjie Baartman for profit without her consent. As a reaction, Dunlop wrote up a contract, with the help of a notary, which stated Saartjie’s consent to the performances, her intention to return to South Africa, and her claim to a share of the profits. After this formality, Saartjie testified in favor of Dunlop and Ceasar, claiming they treated her well and that she did not want to return to Africa. The court had no choice but to dismiss the case. Although it seemed that Saartjie made a triumph when she finally received a legal claim to her profits, the victory was short-lived. Dunlop was the only grantor of the contract. When he died in July of 1812, all proceeds went to Hendrik Ceasar, who sold an ill Saartjie to Rèaux, a French showman, in 1815. Once again, this shows the further exploitation of Saartjie as she was never able to claim the profits of her shows in London under Alexander Dunlop and Hendrik Ceasar.

Her experience worsened under her new management. Rèaux knew he could capitalize on Saartjie Baartman’s body, especially since her sickness continued to plague her performances. While she continued public and private performances, Saartjie was also subdued to pose for artists and scientists like Georges Curvier, who was a naturalist exploring scientific racism, at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. This event was the first time Saartjie ever posed completely nude. Saartjie Baartman died at the age of 27 from overwork, alcoholism, and possibly bronchitis or the flu in the winter of 1815. In her death, Georges Curvier bought Saartjie’s body from Rèaux. He claimed the purchase was to further the scientific knowledge in humans. At the hands of Curvier, Saartjie’s brain, genitals, buttocks, and skeleton were cut out and preserved in jars. Wax copies of her body, brain, and genitals were made and displayed in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris for over 200 years. Curvier claimed her death was due to inflammatory disease, which left the cause ambiguous and vulnerable to interpretation. The one most often said was syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease, which implied that Saartjie was hypersexual; however, some scholars had been skeptical to believe since it was known of her constant battle with the flu and heavy alcoholic drinking. By the end of the 18th century Curvier concluded that,

“The Negro race is confined to the south of Mount Atlas; it is marked by a black complexion, crisped or woolly hair, compressed cranium, and a flat nose. The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe the hordes of which is consists have always remained in the most complete state of utter barbarism.” (pg. 40)

This false prejudice theory based on works about Saartjie and others confirmed the lack of humanity seen in African people in the European science discipline during this time.

The inhumane exploitation and objectification of Saartjie Baartman continued in her afterlife. No-one stopped to think that it was immoral to use an unconsented woman for scientific research. Those scientists simply saw her as an inferior object they could use to prove their hypotheses about scientific racism. Saartjie’s brain and genitals were often used in lectures to justify the supposed inferiority of African people. The exhibition of her skeleton and her full body cast in the national museum was equally disrespectful to her humanity. All the people who would see her body in the museum would only know her as an object and not a human being. Saartjie Baartman’s privacy, dignity, and humanity were completely stripped the moment her body became a science experiment and museum exhibit.

Saartjie Baartman finally returned home and received a national burial ceremony by the state of South Africa on August 2nd, 2002. Although Saartjie has been laid to rest, the exploitation of Black women around the world continues. Today, Black women are unaware of her story; failing Saartjie by constantly playing into the false narratives based on her objectification. Natasha Maria Gordon-Chipembere said, “Her buttocks, coupled with her perceived hypersexuality, created a western historical trajectory of socio-cultural images/imaginings of Africa, and the black female body as inherently inferior, and thus a site to be plundered.” (pg. 57). Such controlling images include Jezebel, a hypersexual Black woman, and Sapphire, the angry Black woman. These images depicted in television, music, and media influence the prejudgment of Black women. Examples include Pamela James in Martin (1992-1997), Rochelle in Everybody Hates Chris (2005-2009), Terri in Barbershop (2002), Cookie Lyon in Empire (2015- ), Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (1974), Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball (2001), Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones (1954), and Tangie Adrose in For Colored Girls (2010).

Although these roles have declined in the movie industry, it has stayed consistently popular in the music industry; after all, sex sells. A report, Sex and Love Mentions on the Billboard Hot 100 Charts since 1960, explores that idea, which can be found on Billboard’s official website, an American entertainment media brand whose charts are a global reflection of music trends. The report states that “one of the most striking trends is that while love has waxed and waned, sex has skyrocketed, with mentions becoming several times more common in the 2010s than in the 1960s.” In other words, sex talk has become increasingly more open and accepted in the 20th and 21st centuries. This cultural emergence of free sexual expression has had consequences for Black women in the music industry as they are constant targets of the same sexual objectification that Saartjie Baartman faced. Black female artists like Tina Turner, Janet Jackson, and Diana Ross have experienced this phenomenon first hand, but they decided to take ownership of their sexuality in their music, allowing their predecessors like Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj to be the stars that they are. Carol E. Henderson argues that, “…these misperceptions of the black feminine body also find fertile ground in the ill-advised gesticulations of current day figures like Nicki Minaj and Lil’ Kim, who engage in so-called feminist antics that have them using their bodies as sexual ploys in the music industry…These gestures fail to consider, however, the always-already-known racial narrative of sexual impropriety that ancestral mothers like Baartman lived under during the nineteenth century.” (pg. 952). Although Black women have reclaimed their sexuality, it is still wrongfully profited and more sexualized than others.

Another example is the rap culture in America that has also exploited Black women in its lyrics and has increasingly becoming normalized. For example, one song by a popular hip-hop group, Three 6 Mafia, recorded a song in 2011 called “Slob on My Knob.” The lyrics state lines like, “Slob on my knob like corn on the cob,” “Don’t have to ask, don’t have to beg,” and “Let’s call the boys, let’s run a train.” These types of lyrics are explicit and unbelievably common in many popular hip hop artists’ songs like Nelly’s Tip Drill (2000), Dr. Dre’s “B*tches ain’t Sh*t” (1992), Snoop Dogg’s “Ain’t No Fun” and Lil Wayne’s No Love (2013). If these songs are played at a party, all women and men will get excited and scream these lyrics. The image of Black women chanting these types of lyrics reinforces the controlling image of Jezebel that rose from the exploitation of Saartjie Baartman. These actions are also a consequence for why there is a higher tolerance amongst Black women who refer to themselves and their friends as “hoes and b*tches.”

Saartjie Baartman was a woman searching for an escape from her homeland’s horrors; however, the horror continued in her utilization as an exhibit in life and death. Saartjie Baartman’s humanity stripped away as she performed on stages. She was stolen during the full dismemberment and exhibition of her dead human body and organs. Only imagination can be used to think of what Saartjie would say to all Black women unconsciously and eagerly diminishing themselves while also supporting stereotypes that originated from her experience. In order to bring justice to the brutal exploitation of Saartjie Baartman, Black women must be taught her story and think critically about how the actions they do reinforce negative stereotypes about themselves are paralleled to what Saartjie Baartman experienced. Black women should own their sexuality for themselves and not to satisfy white people's erotic desires or to be accepted by Eurocentric standards.

Sources:

- Holmes, Rachel. African Queen: The real life of the Hottentot Venus. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.

- Henderson, Carol E. “AKA: Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, and Black Women’s Identity.” Women’s Studies, vol. 43, no. 7, Oct. 2014, pp. 946-959. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/00497878.2014.938191.

- Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha Maria. ‘Even with the Best Intentions’: The Misreading of Sarah Baartman’s Life by African American Writers. N.p.: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Agenda Feminist Media, 20 Apr. 17. PDF.

- Parkinson, Justin. “The significance of Sarah Baartman.” BBC News. BBC, 07 Jan. 2016. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

- Cuvier, Georges. The Animal Kingdom, arranged in conformity with its organization. Translated from the French, and abridged for the use of schools, &c. By H. M’Murtrie. London: Orr & Smith, 1834. Google Books. Google. Web. 20 Apr. 17.

- Pilgrim, David. “Jezebel Stereotype.” JCM: Jezebel Stereotype. Ferris State Univeristy, July 2002. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

- Pilgrim, David. “The Sapphire Caricature.” JCM: The Sapphire Caricature. Ferris State Univeristy, Aug. 2008. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

- Superdrug. "Sex and Love on the Charts." Superdrug Online Doctor. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

- Leander. "Sara "Saartje" Baartman." South African History Online. South African History Online, 16 Aug. 2013. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

- Slob On My Knob (feat. “Mista Dj Paul, Juicy “Low Down” J & Gangsta Boo) by Triple Six Mafia. Google Play Music. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.

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