Customer Reviews

Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography

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I read this for a class. I enjoy almost all of the texts we've read for the class, but this book was definitely not one of those. I actually stopped reading it because I found it so obnoxious that the authors go on at length about things they can't and don't know for certain- what Sara thought, what she would have felt with regards to her surroundings, who possibly raped her, whether or not she secretly had children, etc.. I know that this approach to Sara Baartman's biography is part of the authors' claims about her, so it is not entirely extraneous. Nevertheless, knowing that did not stop me from becoming incredibly annoyed by the book. I also agree with the person who wrote the other 1 star review. Because most of their "history" of Sara Baartman is unverifiable (if not completely falsified), it's a little hard to take them seriously. If the authors had been limited to a tenth of the space they were given, I might be interested in reading what they have to say and felt less like I was wasting my time.

This is an extremely well-written and evocative book based on research in five countries conducted over a number of years by two eminent scholars of African history. It sheds light on not only on one woman's life, but on all sorts of fascinating intellectual questions, including how one should read biography, how to write biography, problems with access to archives, etc. In addition, it also encourages its readers to think very seriously about the big questions -'Enligtenment' questions, if you will - about identity, nations, science, the novel, display and story-telling at its finest. I recommend this book to all intelligent readers. It should reach a very wide audience. READ THIS BOOK FOR YOURSELF!

The story of Sara Baartman is at first seen as quite a cut-and-dry story, involving the exploitation and restraint over a southern African woman around the turn of the 19th century, showcased around Europe as a specimen of the "lower" forms of human kind at the tip of Africa, and touted as the possible link between humans and other animals by scientists. Her life has been used in many contexts since her death, and has most recently stood in the limelight, upon her return to South Africa from Parisian museums, as a glaring symbol of the colonial oppression associated with the late 18th and 19th centuries. What Crais and Scully vividly portray, however, is that Sara Baartman's history is anything but a cut-and-dry account. By extensively surveying primary and secondary sources from across the world, Crais and Scully not only explain the life of Sara Baartman, but also take the reader on a side-by-side voyage with Sara as she went from the rural areas of South Africa to the growing colonial outpost of Cape Town, and then all the way to the metropoles of London and Paris. The book drives home the point the interpretive values held within the field of history, as well as the frequent lack of self-power and choice given posthumously to historical figures. By empowering Sara Baartman, and returning her voice to her after centuries of only others speaking on her behalf, Crais and Scully guide the reader through a questioning of otherwise-assumed historical fact and exploration of the different themes underlying a very prominent character in world history.

This book serves as a wonderful insight into the topics of world history, scientific research, and gender studies. The writing style and storyline superbly captures the continued attention and fascination of the reader, and offers a welcomed change to a field typically inundated with dry, solely analytical role. Crais and Scully's book actively energises the life of Sara Baartman and her role in it, and takes the reader on a trip around a world of the not-so-distant past.

CRAIS, Clifton, and SCULLY, Pamela, 2009, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, Princeton Univ. Press, 232 pp.

This rich and informative book is at heart a biography about an elusive but significant figure in the history of race relations, gender studies, and colonialism. Understanding relevant details about the specific topic, Sara Baartman (died in 1815), required extensive research and a flair for writing illuminating biography. In tracing the life and times of a South African black woman who became an object of fascination, and circus-like display, in London and Paris, the authors supply an amazing amount of information and insight about the world of the late Enlightenment and early Industrial Revolution. Topics skillfully interwoven into the biographic account include, as but a few examples: the natural history of South Africa; anthropology and European visions of "savage" societies; the treatment of women as objects (whether in prurient or scientific contexts); attitudes of colonial regimes; political, economic, and social history; and the impact of Sara Baartman's life on modern legal issues. Even the power and pitfalls of Enlightenment science, centered on the person of Georges Cuvier, receive interesting analysis. In closing Sara's story, the authors provide valuable discussions of the politics of repatriation of cultural materials. They also discuss the contemporary situation, as Sara Baartman's remains did find their way from a Paris museum back to South Africa, with a bittersweet result. The many noteworthy details are well documented in an extensive section of Notes. Happily for the reader, the mass of information is leavened with superb language and excellent narrative flow.

So who was the person behind the Hottentot Venus, the bootylicious Khoisan woman who created a sensation in London and Paris in 1810-1815? You won't find out in "Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus," despite assiduous excavation in archives by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully.

Why should we care? As regards Sara Baartman, a washerwoman, no reason at all. She lived a hard life but not exceptionally so for a woman in a premodern world. No particular personal quality of hers threw her temporarily on a world stage. However, we learn something about ourselves by studying the ridiculous status that Baartman has been given by various ax-grinders today: "Mother Africa" to some, although she had no surviving children, and "almost a sacral object" in the words of Crais and Scully, whatever that means.

Enlightenment Europeans were interested in the rest of the world, to a degree unknown among any people since the Classic period of Greece. Not so much in personalities but in categories. They had inherited Plinian stories about fabulous near-humans, and, remarkably compared to their ancestors, wanted to know which, if any, of these marvels were real.

We are, of course, invited to think this immoral, to wonder whether a different-looking woman from a distant land was exactly human like an Englishman. This posturing is silly. Baartman, a Gonaqua, very likely did not clearly distinguish her own species (to the extent she thought in such a category) from the antelopes. Cuvier (not the first comparative anatomist, although C&S say so, one of scores of simple factual errors in the book) wondered whether Baartman was closer to Europeans or to orangutans. This did not, as C&S think, make him a racist. The Malays also did not clearly demarcate a species line between themselves and the orangutans.

It would have been immoral to have decided the question without investigation, but Cuvier did not do that. His conclusions were erroneous, but correctible because based on investigation. So it goes.

Real investigation is foreign to people like Crais and Scully. Their own unexamined prejudices scream from every page. We are, for example, supposed to shudder whenever Baartman is described as a "colonial" woman. No thanks. I subscribe to a daily newspaper, and Baartman was lucky to have lived before the savagery of African post-colonialism.

Besides, although C&S constantly tell us they are trying to restore Baartman to her real context, apart from the somewhat comical Hottentot Venus job, they do no such thing. As a San (Bushman) person, Baartman stood an excellent chance of being a "colonial" woman even if the Dutch had never found South Africa. The scene-setting that makes up the first part of the book completely ignores the colonization of the San lands by the Bantus. Only once, in passing and near the end of the text, do C&S mention that Khoisan and Bantu had "interacted for centuries." So they had, but Bantu colonialism is not going to be admitted by a professor of women's and African studies, especially not one from historically-white Emory University.

If Baartman had left a personal history, it would have been interesting to have it. She didn't. She was illiterate, and the people around her who did leave records left little.

Thus C&S, with a book contract to fulfill but nothing to put in it, fill up their volume with a combination of naïve travelogue (of the school of "So as the blazing African sun sinks into the peaceful Indian Ocean, we bid a fond farewell to the happy people of Camdeboo . . .") and pretentious name-dropping (Baartman was baptized in Manchester Cathedral, but why are we informed that Oliver Cromwell rode his horse through it?). The writing never rises about the level of a high school term paper begun the night before it is due ("the great poet Lord Byron"), and the book sounds for all the world like Andy Griffith describing his introduction to "Hamlet."

But there's worse than bad writing. If the idea was to recover the real Sara Baartman, then there is only one key document, the interview Baartman gave to officers of the Court of King's Bench. The case itself was legally innovative, an application by a stranger (the abolitionist Zachary Macauley) for a writ of habeas corpus to determine whether the Hottentot Venus was a free woman. The court found she was.

As such, the record -- not verbatim -- deserved the minutest examination by writers purporting to be professional historians. Instead, they dismiss it with a glance, probably because Baartman did not tell the court the awful things C&S think she should have.

Elsewhere, they are not so skeptical. Where there is no evidence (which is almost everywhere), they feel free to imagine unrecorded rapes, secret pregnancies and weird conspiracies. This is the Fawn Brodie school of faux history: As long as the documents don't absolutely contradict it, the writer can make up any sort of shocking and sensational crap she wants.

"Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus" will do nothing to absolve women's and ethnic studies academic departments from their well-deserved reputation for producing tedious, tendentious, shallow and sloppy "research."

In the last pages, C&S fling even a pretense of scholarship overboard. Although the book up to this point has often been unintentionally funny -- the semi-literate authors have a habit of using a big word that sounds like the smaller word they really mean, like malinger for linger; and they make the stupidest mistakes, like starting the French Revolution in 1776 -- the last chapters are hilarious.

This might be called the channeling of Sara Baartman, as professional grievance mongers decided that Sara Baartman's bones, brain and pudenda (all preserved by Cuvier) needed to "come home" to South Africa. A national commission solemnly considered the question of what Sara would want, although she had been dead for 170 years. It was a rip-snorting circus of victim's theater, with a cast of con artists, sawdust messiahs, dingbats, corrupt pols, poets (in the conventional sense used of a writer who is incapable of composing a complete sentence), imaginary heirs, fake indigenes, boomers and tub thumpers. How Ward Churchill failed to be involved is a mystery.

The one thing binding this vile crew together, as C&S's narrative makes clear, is that they were all racists. Not that C&S can acknowledge this, since the players were mostly tinted. It turned into a gigantic, international hate fest, although the intended victims (white men) can shrug off the charges. The Vyshinsky of the piece was the deranged racist Thabo Mbeki.

Anyhow, in the end, Sara Baartman came home to a place she never was in life, and everybody else went home vindicated in her own fevered mind. Since then, the site has been vandalized and made the scene of a horrible, perhaps ritualistic child murder.

The French treated her bones with more respect.