Paris | Tuesday
ONE of the grimmest chapters of Europe’s colonial involvement in Africa will draw to a close if a proposed law, due to be debated by the French parliament, comes to fruition.
A bill scheduled to be put to the upper house on Tuesday will see the remains of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus”, returned to her homeland nearly 200 years after she was exhibited in Europe as a sexual freak.
Baartman, born on the Gamtoos River in what is now South Africa in 1789, was taken to London by a British ship’s doctor, William Dunlop, who persuaded her that she could make a fortune by displaying her body to curious Europeans.
After arriving in Britain in 1810, she was paraded as a savage around circus sideshows, museums, bars and universities, where she had to show off her protruding posterior, an anatomical feature of her native Khoisan people (formerly called the Hottentots), and her genitals, which had outsized vulva lips.
Baartman, died an impoverished prostitute in Paris in 1816.
She was not to know that she would become a source for grotesque stereotypes about race and African sexuality, much of which can be blamed on the top European scientific minds of the day.
After her death, French scientists made a mould of her body and preserved her skeleton, genitalia and brain, and these remained on display at the Museum of Mankind in Paris until 1974.
Baartman has become an icon for the descendants of South Africa’s Khoisan people, believed to be the original inhabitants of the southern tip of Africa.
In 1994, the South African government and representatives of the Griqua people, who belong to the Khoisan group, asked for her remains to be returned for burial.
However, the remains are French national patrimony, and as such they cannot leave France permanently unless allowed to under a specific law.
After the Senate, the bill goes to the lower house, the National Assembly, for a likely debate in mid-February.
The government has given the proposal its total backing.
The law “will restore full dignity to Saartjie Baartman, who was humiliated as a woman and exploited as an African,” Research Minister Roger-Gerard Schwartzenberg said.
He said he hoped her return would mark the emergence “from the night of slavery, colonialism and racism.” – AFP