Anew TV documentary seeks out the person behind the `freak’ Sara Baartman, writes Alex Dodd
`Can you imagine? You’ve become a rented spectacle. You’re owned by a guy who sells you to an animal trainer who then hires you out to scientists. And you return home to stay with his animals. There’s probably a trained bear there, a giraffe that does tricks. You are part of the stable. Someone has a dinner party and they want you. They give him 20 bucks to bring you over.”
It sounds like something out of a twisted fantasy novel: Star Wars meets Aldous Huxley. But in fact these are the words of young South African film-maker Zola Maseko. He is speaking about the subject of his powerful film, The Life and Times of Sara Baartman, to be screened in this country on Tuesday October 20.
Maseko’s is the first full-length documentary on the life of a young Southern African woman who was taken to Europe and exhibited as a freak in London in the early 19th century. After five years of sordid exhibition in the capitals of Europe, Baartman died at the age of 25 in Paris, where her body was donated to scientific research.
She became the icon of racial inferiority and black female sexuality for the next 100 years. After her death, her body was dissected and preserved in formalin. Her brains and genitals are still stored somewhere in a back room of the Muse de l’Homme in Paris.
Baartman’s life and death have become the subject of intense debate and discussion among historians and academics in the United States and Europe, yet very little is known about her here, in the country of her birth. The return of her remains is still at the centre of negotiations between the South African and French governments.
Maseko first came across the tale of Sara (“Saartjie”) Baartman while studying in England. “There was a Channel 4 documentary season on TV called Black and White in Colour. One of the films was a documentary about how black people have been perceived in Western popular culture. The film talked about how in popular imagination black women are still perceived to have this jungle sexuality. They traced it through Grace Jones and her whole wild image; and to Josephine Baker in the Thirties … And then traced it back to Sara Baartman.
“That was the first time I’d ever heard that it was Sara Baartman’s appearance in Europe that started these kinds of perceptions and I thought: who is this Sara Baartman? It was just a 10 second clip, but I was hooked.”
So began years of passionate research and dogged commitment to a project that metamorphosed over the years from a feature to a documentary film commissioned by SABC2 and France3 and produced by Mail & Guardian TV and Dominant 7 in Paris.
Within minutes of meeting Maseko, I am engaged in a gripping discussion about the degree of will Sara had in her destiny. “Was Sara seen as unusual or freakish among her own people before she left South Africa? Was she actually deformed or did she just have a regular South African big bum? Did she have any choice in leaving her homeland? Was she a slave? Did her social standing change when she moved from the freak shows of England to the dinner party circuit in France? How did her court case threaten to bring down the British government of the time? What was her daily life like? Did she walk the streets freely at any stage?”
Maseko is so deeply immersed in his subject, he speaks about the furore going on in Victorian England as though it were happening today – as though horses and carriages were passing by the coffee shop in which we’re sitting instead of Unos and Beemers. Had he not been a film-maker, I’d hazard the guess that he would have made a brilliant history teacher.
Maseko grew up in Swaziland. “My parents had to leave South Africa for political reasons in 1962. I grew up in this ANC family in Swaziland for 16 years and then in Tanzania. I went to Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College and then did three years in MK before going to England to the Beaconfield National Film and Television School where I did a postgraduate course in documentary directing. I returned home in 1994 and have been back since then trying to establish myself as a film-maker.”
In this endeavour he has shone. Although, to Maseko’s immense frustration, his work has only had two small screenings in South Africa. His short film The Foreigner – a heartbreaking indictment of xenophobia in South Africa -has won numerous film awards around the world. The parallels between the Sara Baartman story and The Foreigner are hard to miss. Both grapple intensely with the isolation and pain of exile – with being understood on the basis of skewed and demented public preconceptions about the humanity of an individual life.
I am interested in whether Maseko’s engagement with this theme, perhaps an echo of his own history, is a conscious one. Maseko believes that his fascination with themes of displacement and otherness is subconscious, but goes on to speak of other projects of his that have also been about remarkable lives emerging from the African diaspora. One of his student films grappled with a Nigerian immigrant’s sense of displacement living in London and he has written a three-part television series with Malcolm Purkey, called Homecoming, about three former MK guys returning to the new South Africa.
Contrary to an article in the newly launched Y magazine, which suggests that the Baartman documentary comes across as being made by someone who is not South African, I would argue that it’s a deeply and intrinsically South African film, from the story angle which explains colonisation from the perspective of the colonised to the magnificent indigenous soundtrack.
Part of power of the documentary is that, as a viewer, you cease to think of history as words on a page or abstract theories. Despite the myriad discourses her tale has triggered, one cannot for a second escape the reality that Sara Baartman was a real human being with feelings. Considering that this is a historical documentary – that visual material from the time is scarce – this is a remarkable achievement. Maseko and his team, notably Giulio Biccari, whose serene and aware camera work has a life of its own, have combined filmic elements in a way that militates against dryness and homogeneity. The scene that recreates Baartman’s odyssey from Cape Town to London is quite unforgettable.
This reluctance to draw conclusions was conscious on Maseko’s part. Faced with the immense body of research and conflicting views that surround Baartman’s history, he confesses to feeling overwhelmed before setting out to actually make the film. Then he remembered what had attracted him to the story to start with. It was Baartman’s life. “I’m not a debater,” says Maseko. “I’m a film-maker and I wanted to tell the amazing story of this one woman’s life. That’s the energy that guided me in the making of this film.”
And the energy has clearly guided him well. See for yourself. That’s if you’re awake on Tuesday night at 10.30pm when the SABC have decided to screen it.
SABC2’s head of scheduling, Solly Mabelane, says it was the filmmakers’ keenness to get the documentary screened as soon as possible that has resulted in its current time slot. Schedules are planned six months in advance. “Probably the most feasible option would be to rescreen the film in February after the 9pm news or before the 7pm news,” says Mabelane.
It’s a great pity that The Life and Times of Sara Baartman couldn’t be screened on Women’s Day. Or Heritage Day. Or International Human Rights Day – each of which would be apt. Nice way to encourage local talent.
Celebrate our own? Seems more like drowning our own in a giant mug of Horlicks, if you ask me.