This leads on to the introduction of the second tale of sexuality as related to Africa: the story of Sarah Bartmannd —the Khoikhoi woman who was taken to Europe from Cape Town in 1810 and exhibited as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. The factual course of events behind the mythical story, is a sad tale of a young woman who in 1810—a few years after the definitive British occupation of the Cape colony in 1806—was persuaded by an English army surgeon to accompany him to London. Here she was put on display in the Egyptian Hall in Picadilly Circus, where she appeared on a raised platform and was ordered to walk, sit or stand by a ‘keeper’ who threatened her when she disobeyed him (South African History Project 2002). Judging from an abundance of contemporary prints[49] [50] she caused a sensation, but also consternation in abolitionist circles, resulting in a court case and efforts to set her free.[51] With no result, however, as she was later taken to France, where she not only became a popular attraction, but also an object for keen scientific attention, studied and investigated by a team of scientists headed by Georges Cuvier. She died in 1815 not yet 30 years old. Cuvier made sure to obtain her body for dissection, cutting out among other things her genitalia and conserving them for posterity in a glass jar. Cuvier also published a report on his findings in Memoires du musk d’histoire naturelle in 1817.[52] Allegedly Sarah Bartmann’s genitalia in the glass jar, as well as her skeleton and a plaster cast of her body were on display in the Musee d’Homme in Paris until 1974, when they were removed to the store rooms of the museum.
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Sarah Bartmann’s story was re-launched in the 1980s—by Sander Gilman (1985a, b, 1989) and others—now in the context of critical studies of racism, sex-
‘African Sexuality’/Sexuality in Africa: Tales and Silences
uality and the history of science. Since then Sarah Bartmann has become an icon of colonial, racist oppression. A movement in South Africa has claimed back her remains for proper burial in the land of her home, and on August 9, 2002, on the South African National Women’s Day, Sarah Bartmann was buried on the banks of the Gamtoos River, in the place where she was born (South African History Project 2002).
Right from the start the Sarah Bartmann story has a double aspect: one is a story about what actually happened, and the other is the myth of African sexuality into which the Sarah Bartmann case was fed, and on which her popularity was based. Interestingly, as highlighted by Strother, she was launched by a double set of posters, one showing her as an ethnological type,[53] “a most correct and perfect specimen” (a contemporary newspaper quoted in Strother 1999:25) of the race of people inhabiting the new British colony in South Africa, and the other intended to advise the spectators regarding how to interpret what they saw (Strother 1999:27). In the first poster Bartman was shown dressed in a form-fitting dress, supposed to match her skin tone (Strother 1999:27) adorned with exotica in terms of beadwork and animal hides. The second poster refers more directly to already existing ideas of the wild and barbaric Hottentot race, with large buttocks and smoking a pipe. In this poster Sarah Bartmann is almost nude, but as also pointed out by Yvette Abrahams (1998:224) it is unlikely that she was ever exhibited naked: “The illustrations represent not Sarah Bartmann, the living woman, but the minds of those who made and viewed them” (Abrahams 1998:224).
There is some disagreement regarding the ways in which Sarah Bartmann fed into existing notions of black sexuality. Sander Gilman reads her directly as an icon of black sexuality, whereas according to Strother the issues are more complex. Obviously the exibition of Sarah Bartmann was sexualized, but in Strother’s interpretation neither her large buttocks (steatopygia in Latin), nor her elongated vaginal lips, the so-called ‘Hottentot apron’ (tablier in French) were perceived as sexually attractive or erotically arousing at the time, quite the opposite. Strother’s reading of the contemporary prints—as well as a 1814 Parisian vaudeville play: ‘The Hottentot Venus’ where the ‘Venus’ is disclosed as a monster—is that “however highly sexed, the Hottentot woman can never become an erotic threat” (Strother 1999:30). The fascination is mixed with abhorrence.
The element of abhorrence is underplayed in Sander Gilman’s analysis. Most probably, as also hinted by Strother, Gilman’s reading of the event draws on ideas which developed more fully in the course of the 19th century (Strother 1999:38). Gilman bases his reading of the Sarah Bartmann story on a contemporary essay in the widely cited Dictionary of the Medical Sciences from 1819, where the author summarizes his views on the sexual nature of the black female in terms of acceptable medical discourse: their “voluptuousness” is “developed to a degree of las — civity unknown in our climate, for their sexual organs are much more developed