Essay by the author of Hottentot Venus

Inventing Hottentot Venus
by Barbara Chase-Riboud

"I am sure God doesn't call me Hottentot any more than He calls them White."
-Sarah Baartman, from Hottentot Venus

The Hottentot Venus whose real name was Sarah Baartman, was returned to her native South Africa only last year from her 200 year incarceration first, in the Museum of Natural History of the zoological gardens of Paris and than the Museum of Mankind, Paris, France. Her skeleton, brain and other body parts had been part of the National Collections of France since 1816.

My novel HOTTENTOT VENUS is a re-creation of Baartman's short brutal and tumultuous life in the same blend of history and fiction I used for my SALLY HEMINGS, A NOVEL-- and for the same reasons--to walk her through the front door of history. This South African herdswoman was exhibited as a side show freak in the early 1800's both in London and Paris. Taken from Capetown by an English doctor, she was examined by the great scientific minds of the day, becoming a kind of Rosetta Stone of race as science literally invented racism before her very eyes. One could say that in that short life, Baartman actually became the mother of scientific racism.

It is a horrifying and sobering journey fraught with great scientific names like Darwin, Pope, George Cuvier, Napoleon, Voltaire, Lord Grandville, as we all know because so much of what was invented about race still survives as cant in the 21st century, not only in texts, but in our subconscious, our conscious and our hearts.

In writing HOTTENTOT VENUS, I wanted to write a narrative about South Africa that didn't begin in the middle; that is when white traders show up or from the point of view of white South Africans, even well meaning and "liberal" ones. I was interested in one seminal idea: the invention of race largely based on the Hottentot legend upon which the now extinct apartheid was based. Most South African writers begin with the overwhelming existence of apartheid as their premise as if it were God-given rather than man-made and political--as if apartheid had somehow fallen like a curse from heaven upon South Africans and against which good South Africans were fighting as exiles and revolutionaries. In fact, it was the invention of race by 19th century scientists upon which colonialism and slavery were based that produced apartheid not the opposite. Apartheid was not a curse, but a method, not a natural disaster but a theory - a theory born in the musings and dogmas and mis-information of The Great Chain of Being, the still influential, seminal idea of race and racial superiority.

We all now know that there is no such thing as "race". It is an 18th and 19th century invention based upon Europe's need to subdue recently conquered colonials and slaves. And since it was 19th century science and anthropology and natural history that invented race, 21st century science and biology must dis-invent it. Yet this concept sticks like mud. Gordimer, Brink, Coetzee, even Patton all write of apartheid in their fiction from the point of view of this "middle passage" concept. White power is already established. There is no place and no room for parity or equality. Apartheid is set in stone--to be demolished and revolted against to be sure, but never excavated psychologically at it's origins or even questioned as to it's fundamental foundation: scientific racism which is accepted as well, scientific. It is a point of view that is already tainted not only by a sense of privilege, well-being and superiority, but a sense of apartness to the origins of the theory of racial inferiority.

J.M. Coetzee writes in DUSKLANDS of his imagined and partly real ancestor, Jacobus Coetzee who left an 18th century narrative in Afrikaans in which he goes around shooting Hottentot children in the back, yet is rescued by them and prevented from dying from a festering boil on his posterior by them. Coetzee's true narrative is rightly chilling and horrendous but never from the point of view of the victim--the "Other", of course, (he being only fodder for the narrative) because it is he, Coetzee's ancestor, the perpetrator who is, after all, doing the writing because he believes his comportment is chronologically, scientifically and morally indispensable to History. As if there could not have been a South Africa without it. As if, it were not much, much more important what apartheid did to the white man than what it did to the colored man.

Gordimer has written that the writer may count on...a personification of fears, for example, recognizable and surviving from a common past of the subconscious when we were all in the cave together, and there were no races, no classes, and our hairiness hid the difference in color. But who dares write like that? She wrote recently in a self interview that she regretted not having learned an African language. But she was free as a White to learn anything she felt like learning. It was the black South African writer that was oblidged to learn English, Dutch or Africaan in order to write, as Sarah Baartman points out in her heroine's note at the beginning of HOTTENTOT VENUS. Gordimer also points out that it is an anachronism to think that African writers like Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus and Can Themba cannot and have no desire to create a "pure culture" in linguistic terms - but that is impossible - so why learn an African language at all, when a European one will do? And having said that, wouldn't that be true for a whole European culture, as well? Which means that this is a trap black South African writers are caught in as well: beginning their story, so to speak, in the middle - in the midst of apartheid and in a European language.

And so here stands Sarah Baartman the "missing link", naked or in her circus costume, her real name, her African name lost to us as is most of what she embodied or stood for. Yet this tiny, fat assed woman's influence as myth, symbol, science, icon of The Great Chain of Being, the Bell Curve and all the rest is insidious and awe-inspiring. She is everywhere - in every textbook that deals with science, literature, or history: the invisible one - there by absence or negation. There by her definition of not being there. Yet she is there, a dark despised shadow behind our concept of Beauty, of Womanhood, of Sex, of Color. Her negation is omnipresent in our publicity and advertisements, our bathroom scales and our obsession with race, our daydreams and our nightmares.

Gordimer insists that the reality of African history has long begun to be recorded and established from where it was cut off as anthropology and prehistory and substituted by the history of foreign conquest and settlers. (1) Oh really? I have yet to see it. And in what language? South African writers have written beautifully and brilliantly of the horror and tragedy of apartheid from the point of view of guilt and rage, but rarely from the point of view of all of us together in the cave. And this, of course includes myself. But it is still, really, their story, the Hottentot's story to tell and Sarah Baartman is literally, the mother of that story. At her real funeral which occurred on August 8, 2002 near Capetown, masses of South Africans chanted "Mama Sarah! Mama Sarah!"

And when the French Senate voted to send the remains of Sarah Baartman home to South Africa from her museum prison as requested by the prison-liberated president of the Republic of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, I knew I had to write this novel in her voice--from the inside out. I don't pretend to speak for the powerless because in doing so one always seems to end up gazing at one's own navel instead of into the eyes of the people you are talking about. But perhaps in the end, the Venus is right when she asserts (in fiction) that despite everything, her universality trumps any language.

I am speaking now in Khoe, my maternal language, a language white men have never mastered, a language complex and subtle enough to express anything I have to say in English or Dutch, any line of poetry, any rhyme or proverb or quotation from the New Testament. So you will not hear from me any pidgin Dutch or coy Negro dialect. What is English is rendered in English and what is Dutch, in Dutch, and what is Khoe is rendered in Khoe. (4)

Perhaps if Sarah Baartman had never exisited, she would have had to have been invented as the Hottentot Venus anyway. She is our touchstone of the "Other" who saw it all happen, in her own flesh and sinews: the birth of Race, over 200 years, to herself, to her family, to her descendents, to her nation, to the Blacks of an entire continent. And perhaps this is Baartman's message to us all; her humanity trumps all, even History.
-Barbara Chase-Riboud

Sources
1. Living in Hope and History, Nadine Gordimer, Bloomsbury, 2000
2. Dusklands, J.M. Coetzee, Vintage, 1998
3. The Great Chain of Being, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Harvard, 1936, 2000
4. Hottentot Venus, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Doubleday, 2003


Barbara Chase-Riboud is the best-selling, prizewinning author of, amongst others, Sally Hemings, Amistad: Echo of Lions, Valide, A Novel of the Harem, The President's Daughter and Hottentot Venus to be published by Doubleday books, Nov. 4th, 2003.


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