“African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus” by Rachel Holmes
c.2007, Random House $23.95 / $29.95 Canada 161 pages, includes notes & index
When people meet you for the first time, what’s the one thing they notice first?
Do they see sparkly eyes, an unusual hair-do, or a flawlessly lipsticked pucker? Do they note a crooked smile, a distinctive nose, or a scar on your cheek that you got in a sixth-grade fight?
It seems as if we all have something that makes us who we are. Maybe it’s something passed down through generations that we never asked to have.
Now imagine being made to perform because of some physical attribute that makes you pretty common in your family, but that others see as an anomaly. In “African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus” by Rachel Holmes , you’ll read the sad life of one such person and the decades-later end of her story.
Saartjie (pronounced Sart-key) Baartman was born on the frontier of South Africa in 1789. Although she had little memory of her mother who died before Saartjie was barely a year old, she was close to her father who was, according to Holmes, a “late-eighteenth-century South African frontier cowboy”.
Although the area was populated by Khoisan and Xhosa people and Europeans, there were problems of a violent sort. Gunfire and fear were common to the area, and in 1807, Saartjie’s father was murdered. As a newly orphaned female who could neither read nor write, Saartjie was placed into the custody of a free black hunter and trader from Cape Town.
When the Hottentot Proclamation was issued in South Africa in 1809, Saartjie officially became indentured as a “Hottentot” servant. Shortly after that, she became the responsibility of a soldier-turned-surgeon-turned-showman who hatched a plan that would make Saartjie the talk of English society.
Clad in skin-toned, skin-tight cloth, furs, and feathers, Saartjie was put on stage as the Hottentot Venus. Slack-jawed audiences were entertained by her singing and dancing, but her physical attributes were what sparked British imaginations: Saartjie was blessed by a prodigiously-sized posterior.
When she railed against demands of performances, Saartjie became the center of a hotly-contested court case that shook England. Was Saartjie a slave? Or was she someone who had been terribly taken advantage-of? The outcome – and the rest of Saartjie’s life – makes a story you shouldn’t miss.
Too bad author Rachel Holmes makes it so dry, though. I understand that, because Saartjie could neither read nor write, little of her personal thoughts were recorded. Still, I wanted more about the woman behind the court case and less about the men who argued on her behalf. I wanted to walk with her down the streets of London. I didn’t care who visited her, I wanted to be there with her when gentlemen came calling on this fascinating woman who is revered in South Africa, but is little more than a footnote in history to many of us here.
Pick up a copy of “African Queen” and don’t hide it. This week marks the beginning of Black History Month and if you think you know it all, this book will prove that you don’t.
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Anne Haenni and Rick Pezzner
Owner, Diversity News |
