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

Some ten years ago, the South African scholar Yvette Abrahams, speaking particularly on behalf of colonized women of color regarding the burgeoning cultural manifestations concerned with the story of their Saartjie Baartman, remarked that each new respondent tackling it proceeded as though they had no predecessors. One after the other regarded this fruitful and inspiring topic, she noted, as if they were the first to uncover it, so that the immense amount of documentary material come to light over the last half-century under the heading of "Hottentot Venus" apparently always needs to be rediscovered afresh.

Since Abrahams's caution, the field has expanded unchecked, with Barbara Chase-Riboud's The Hottentot Venus (2003), Rachel Holmes's The Httentot Venus: The Life and Times of Saartjie Baartman (marketed in the US blunderingly ineptly as African Queen (2007), and now the title under review here. This is to list solely new book-length works in English, while a recent Google search has turned up over 22,000 further references to spin-off articles, creative works of many kinds, and exhibition pieces provoked by this hottest of topics. In short, the gruesome story of the large-sterned indigene from the Cape of Good Hope who stripped down to take London and Paris by storm with her act appears to be of unending interest, even assuming its own momentum and—Abrahams's point—can be woefully repetitive and often is poor in basic investigation.

So it is par for the course to approach with a ho-hum of doubt Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully's claim that their version of the Baartman saga is no fantasy-ridden thumbsuck, but more authentic, truer than any versions heretofore, at last "authoritative and meticulously researched" (to quote Zoë Wicomb from the blurb), etc. Should not a work jointly written by two reputable academics (Crais is a history professor at Emory and noted for his slavery studies; Scully teaches women's and African studies at the same institution), published by the distinguished Princeton University Press, display such qualities in the first place, anyway? After five years in the making, spanning data-assembly on no less than three continents on those fine NEH grants, and so forth, with forty-six impressive pages of small-print notes and a vast bibliography, should not the result amount to the hoped-for clean sweep revelation that one is geared to expect?

For starters let it be said that the co-authors here have delivered a lively and engaging enough work, rattling through the main points of their kidnapped Khoisan performance artist's extraordinary life and career, with all the known names and verifiable but scant dates checked out in the usual order. They do introduce two novel speculations, as well: that Sara Baartman's date of birth should perhaps be pushed back a decade into the 1770s (without much evidence, however—but at least that would give her time to have three instead of two illegitimate offspring die before she develops some business sass on her own behalf); and that her place of birth probably ought to be pushed a few valleys further into the bushy, windy Cape, presumably so that her origins may be thought of as even more primitive.

But otherwise the necessary corrective to previous versions is nowhere in sight, while the rest is purely the dreaded routine repetition with the tradition of not bothering to cite borebears in the field being maintained. To this procedure there is one exception: Percival Kirby who kicked off this treasure hunt for sexy exotica sixty years ago does get due mention. But Bernth Lindfors, on the other hand, the founder editor of this journal, goes shamefully uncredited, even though in the 1980s he was the one who single-handedly elaborated Kirby's biographical data into the pioneering showbiz and other studies of the callipygous romper that so exhilarate...