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

"This is such an important book. Its subtitle ‘ A Ghost Story and a Biography ’ really expresses the challenge that these authors set themselves. It’s an epic micro-history, if you can have such a thing. It tells the story of one woman, Sara Baartman, but also tells a much bigger tale about the black African diaspora and about changes in European ideas of race, all through the narrative of this one woman and her body. Sara Baartman was born in what is now South Africa in the 1770s, we think. She was brought to Europe, went through Holland to England and finally to Paris, where she died in 1815. Along that journey through Europe, she’s displayed as a physical specimen and as a bodily curiosity. She had very large buttocks and, contemporaries said, distinctive genitalia. There was an interest with her body generally, as a black woman, and she is displayed virtually naked in public. But the interest is in particular parts of her body. And that interest is both scientific, asking questions about what her body tell us about race, but also clearly prurient. One of the shocking things about her story is that when she dies in Paris in 1815, she’s dissected by a leading anatomist because her body was thought to hold secrets about what distinguishes black people from white people and, in particular, the Hottentot peoples from everybody else. The story is quite familiar to 18th-century and early 19th-century historians, and it’s a shocking one. But one of the things that I value about the book is how they move past the really disturbing details and try and tell a much broader history, not just about Baartman, but also about other people like her. For example, when they talk about her years in England, they try to reconstruct the black British community in London. When she arrives in the early 19th century, there are already between 5,000 and 10,000 black people in London. The book is important not only because this is a really extraordinary case, but also because it’s trying to explore histories that are still largely hidden—for example, the story of the black British community in the 18th century. It’s all of that. It’s partly that differences become a point of interest because of the increasing frequency of cultural encounters. If you travel and meet people who display what you see as differences, you’re likely to become interested in thinking about the origins of those differences and the causes of those differences. But cultural encounters were not new in the late 18th century, so that’s not a sufficient explanation at all. This is about the way in which we understand the material world; it’s a much longer story of changing forms of knowledge, in particular changing scientific knowledge, and within that, in relation to the history of the body, changing medical knowledge. It’s a very broad generalization, but in this period, investigators in all sciences are becoming more and more interested in details of the material world. “Differences become a point of interest because of the increasing frequency of cultural encounters” Whereas once, all material in whatever form it took may have been thought to express in quite direct ways God’s will, now, different kinds of materials are subject to natural laws, and scientists are interested in determining the differences between these different components of the natural material world. That informs the way that scientists see everything. And medicine is becoming a science, which it hasn’t always been, so it’s subject to that empirical interest in the material world. You see this in so many ways, but it’s very clear and direct in the way that it feeds into understandings of race, gender and (to some extent) rank. Researchers are trying to pin down these identities and categories in something that’s not immaterial but absolutely grounded in the natural, physical world and therefore having a kind of permanence in its materiality. I think it depends on who you read. There are two important caveats. One is that there’s a difference between theory and practice. In medicine, for example, you will find scientific and medical theories about the body which argue that the black African body is completely different to the white European body, right down to its bones. But in terms of medical practice , there are many practitioners—in Jamaica, for example—who have both black and white patients and they treat them in exactly the same way, or treat them in ways that are particular to the individual, regardless of his or her race or sex. They’re not treating them with reference to these bigger categories, but dealing with the person standing in front of them, that person’s particular disposition and demeanour. So, there’s a difference between theory and practice, even within medicine. Then there’s the second caveat—and this is the one on which I think historians need to work more. Medicine does not determine the way that everybody thinks about the body; it’s just one set of ideas and practices around the body. In fact, in the work I’m doing at the moment, reading lots of 18th-century letters, the body is understood not through medicine, but through their family knowledge of the body and their personal experiences of it. They’re not drawing on doctors’ ideas to understand what’s going on in their bodies. There are real limits to the extent to which these ideas affect the way people really thought and acted and behaved with one another. It was about her mistreatment. Zachary Macaulay was involved in bringing the case. So, the bigger context of the case is the abolition of slavery . It’s very much about the mistreatment of this black person. But trying to reconstruct Sara and her personal experiences and her own perspective, when we have so few documents about her in the historical records, is very difficult. The document in which she appears to condone her treatment has to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. Whatever choice she had in the situation, if she had any, was severely circumscribed by her dependence on her owners/masters. I wouldn’t set too much store by her apparent agreement with that declaration. Yes. There’d been growing pressure on the museum to do that. Both, I think. The history of the body as an object is really illuminating—looking at whose bodies are allowed to be objectified in this way. You said it’s a very sad story, and it is a very tragic story, but I don’t think we honour her by focusing just on the tragedy. That’s why I think this book is so important: other people have discussed this case, but this is the only book that really tries to get past the tragedy and to try to understand where she came from, get to some of her experiences, and tell the whole of her story in as much detail as is possible. Exactly. This was one of those books that I had in my mind as a model for the one I’ve just written about Mary Toft. You can’t really write a biography of this woman because there just aren’t the documents in the historical record to allow it. It’s a ghost story as well as a biography. It’s a fantastic attempt at both."