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Mbeki on Europe's barbarians
09/08/2002 17:32 - (SA)
Jan Hennop
Hankey - President Thabo Mbeki slammed 19th century
Europeans as "barbarians" on Friday at the long-delayed funeral of Sarah Bartmann, who was called a Hottentot Venus and paraded
naked as a sexual freak in Britain and France in the 1800s.
"Sarah Bartmann should never have been stripped of her native
Khoisan and African identity and paraded in Europe as a savage
monstrosity", Mbeki told about 7 000 mourners at a school in the remote Gamtoos valley in southeastern South Africa.
"It was not the lonely African woman in Europe, alienated from
her identity and her motherland who was the barbarian, but those
who treated her with barbaric brutality", Mbeki said.
He added that by the time Baartman died, as a consumptive
prostitute in France in 1816, she had "been enlightened about the
ways and barbarism" of Europeans.
She was born in the valley on August 9, 1789 - exactly 213
years ago - but was living in Cape Town in 1810 when a British
ship's doctor offered to take her to London, promising that she
could earn a fortune by allowing foreigners to look at her body.
Paraded as a savage
In Britain, she was paraded as a savage around circus sideshows, museums, bars and universities. There, she was forced to show off her protruding posterior, an anatomical feature of her native Khoisan people (formerly called the Hottentots), and her outsized genitalia.
Her notoriety made Bartmann the source of grotesque stereotypes about race and African sexuality, many of which were perpetuated by the leading European scientific minds of the day.
Mbeki quoted Baron Georges Couvier, a French scientist who
dissected Baartman's body after her death, as saying: "Her moves
had something that reminded one of the monkey and her external
genitalia recalled those of the orang-utang".
Bartmann's remains - her skeleton and bottles with her brain
and genitialia in preserving fluid - were on display in the Museum of Mankind in Paris until 1974.
They were flown back to South Africa in March after seven years of negotiations with the French government.
Changing times
"On behalf of the government, the parliament and the people of
South Africa, I am privileged to convey our heartfelt and profound thanks to the government, the parliament and the people of France for agreeing to return our Sarah to us and for living up to the noble objectives of the French revolution of liberty, equality and fraternity," Mbeki said.
"The changing times tell us that she did not suffer and die in
vain. Our presence at her gravesite demands that we act to ensure
that what happened should never be repeated", Mbeki said.
The ceremony started with the burning of buchu, a traditional herb of the Khoisan, the original inhabitants of the southern tip of Africa, to purify her spirit.
"We are burning this traditional herb as part of our culture. We have to unite with the earth and the spirits of Sarah Bartmann," said Piet Booysen, a Khoisan traditional leader.
Her remains were due to be buried on a thorny hill overlooking
the small town of Hankey.
A monument will also be erected in her honour in Cape Town.
- Sapa-AFP
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