Musee de l homme sarah baartman

Video Transcript

It all started after the end of a bad day. They knew South Africa wants her back. It was the beginning of the 19th century. She was a young woman coming from far away. She's been both a servant and a great attraction. She's been a Venus and an exotic freak. A cartoon and a song, a vaudeville and a book. She's been a woman, and she's been an ape.

How could the same person play so many different parts? She was like at beast drawn, measured, and chalked, then preciously preserved in a French museum.

Even if death, she was given no rest. Now she's in Paris at the Musee de l'Homme, in case Number 33 they keep her skeleton. Why is she considered a symbol? Her name is Sarah Baartman and this is her story.

[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

Sarah Baartman was born in South Africa in this vast tranquil landscape that is the Eastern Cape. She belonged to the Khoikhoi, a nomadic people who had roamed freely across this land for centuries. From north to south, east to west, they wandered in search of greener grazing pastures for their livestock. They lived in caves on which they recorded their lives and history.

But in 1790, the tranquility of this place had long since been shattered by the brutal arrival of the Europeans. And at the time of Sarah's birth, her people, the Khoikhoi were engage in the guerrilla war against the encroaching Dutch. This meant that the men lived in mountains, ever watchful of the feared commando raids.

This also meant that only the women, children, and the old were left in the villages to fend for themselves. Sarah was born and grew up in a war zone.

We know of the near extermination of the San, or Bushmen, by commandos from Cape Town, because, as they said, the Bushmen were stealing our cattle. And so thousands and thousands of San, or Bushmen were shot over weekend commandos, like people going hunting.

There was the feeling that you could do with what you liked with these people, because they weren't quite human. They were subhuman. They were near human, but they weren't us.

This is an actual witnesses account of a [INAUDIBLE] commando raid on a Khoikhoi village.

"They surrounded the place during the night, spotting the Bushmen's fires. At day break the firing commenced and lasted until the sun was a little way up. The commando posse loaded and fired, and reloaded many times before they had finished.

A great many people, women and children, were fired upon that day. The men were absent. Only a few little children escaped, and they were distributed among the people of the commando. The women threw up their arms for mercy, but no mercy was shown. Great sins was perpetrated that day."

This is probably how the young Sarah came to Cape Town.

[SPEAKING FRENCH]

She would have been [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] contracted out to a farmer somewhere in the vicinity of Cape Town. Or she would have worked for the Cape [INAUDIBLE] at various public works, building roads, building buildings, doing the [? coal, ?] washing, that type of thing. So that is well how she could have ended up on Cezar's farm.

This clumsy, amateur sketch is all that remains of the house where Sarah worked as a servant until 1810. The farm belonged to Peter Cezar, a Dutch farmer. In the spring off the same year, Peter Cezar received two visitors, his brother Hendrik accompanied by a British surgeon named Alexander Dunlop.

The two men knew too well that for the past two centuries Europeans has been fascinated by the Khoikhoi, especially the women. This would explain their immediate interest in the 20-year-old Sarah. .

The Khoikhoi, or Hottentot peoples of Southern Africa were particularly interesting to Europeans, because they had an almost morbid fascination in the genital and special features of the Khoikhoi people, especially the females. And there had long been rumors in Europe that there was some very special, and interesting, and unusual features about Khoikhoi ladies' genital anatomy.

And although it is, today, repugnant to us to think about such masses. These early naturalists wanted to find out for themselves, were they, as rumor had held? Where they something very different and very special?

Behind it there was a mindset. And the mindset was, are these people really human? There was even a feeling that they didn't belong to our human species, which all the rest of the world belonged to, but they were something apart.

Hendrik Cezar and Alexander Dunlop both knew that if they could convince Sarah Baartman to accompany them to Europe, they would make a fortune.

If she was a slave in Cape Town she had very little choice about her life. Once she was a slave she had very little choice about where to live, how to live, what to do. It is quite perfectly possible that, if it true as Hendrik Cezar says, that he came across her on the farm of his brother, that his brother simply gave him to her, as one person would give a slave to another and say, take her. You find her bum interesting, take her and do with her as you will.

[SPEAKING FRENCH]

On the 20th of March, 1810, Sarah Baartman, Hendrik Cezar, and Alexander Dunlop boarded a ship bound for England. The journey lasted three months. What went on in that young woman's head as the ship set sail, we will never know. What is certain is that she would never again see her motherland.

Sarah Baartman arrived in London in June, 1810. England had abolished the slave trade just four years earlier. As a young, black women, what were her prospects?

When Saartjie turned up in this country, their black population was still mostly living in London and the seaports in various states. On one hand, you can say that the majority of the black people here were of the status which is known as slave/servants, that midpoint of servitude. And that's just a fact.

On the other hand, you can look at the writings of a noted socialite, like Mrs. Hester Piozzi, who noted, eight years before Saartjie turned up in London, that there were black lady in all their finery, in the pit at the opera, attending the opera house. At the same time, she also noted black children playing in the square with their nurses.

So although there was a concessionary number of black people who managed to move through society with relative ease, the majority of the community were in some sort of servitude, or some sort of beggary.

Uppermost in Hendrik Cezar and Alexander Dunlop's mind's was to profit from there rare specimen. They approached to William Bullock, the keeper of the Art and Natural History Museum. They offered to sell Sarah Baartman and a giraffe skin.

Bullock bought the giraffe skin but refused to buy Sarah. Apparently, Dunlop panicked and asked Cezar to buy him out of their deal. Cezar, believing he was on to a huge money spinner, began to put his plan into action.