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

Much ink has been spilled over Sara Baartman, who in the early years of the nineteenth century was exhibited in the United Kingdom and Paris as “the Hottentot Venus.” Since her rediscovery in the 1980s, Baartman has served a variety of academics as a means to interrogate early nineteenth-century understandings of race and sexuality, as well as to critique the practices of science and imperialism. Most of this scholarly work, however, has relied on a rather limited, and almost exclusively European, archive, as it has been widely assumed that it is impossible to uncover other source material that sheds light on Baartman herself. Although there are notable exceptions to this rule, much of this scholarship has therefore treated Baartman as the paradigm of “Western” or “scientific” understandings of “African” sexuality. In the process, scholars have inadvertently reproduced precisely the kind of essentialism that they intend to critique.

Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully have investigated Baartman from a different angle by pursuing a biographical approach. The result, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, is a remarkable achievement. However, to identify it as such would be to miss their larger point: that a historical and biographical understanding of Sara Baartman (and by implication other individuals who are not white, male, or middle class) is indeed possible if one does the necessary research rather than assuming that it cannot be undertaken. Crais and Scully have been dedicated researchers, pursuing traces of Baartman around South Africa, across the ocean, through European cities, and back again to what is now her final resting place in Hankey, South Africa. Their archival work, genealogical research, and oral histories have produced a new archive for “the Hottentot Venus,” and have explicitly challenged scholars to rethink what can and cannot be known about particular kinds of historical actors.

Some of what they have found merely embellishes the story already in place. But other details about her life have forced the narrative of Sara Baartman to shift in dramatic ways. The most important of these new discoveries is that Baartman was likely ten years older than scholars have assumed when she first began to exhibit herself in Europe. This is critical because it repositions her as a woman in her thirties with much more life experience, who was thus in a better position to make rational economic and personal choices. Crais and Scully also document that Hendrik Cesars, who accompanied Baartman to London and initially served as her showman, was not in fact a Boer farmer, as scholars have presumed, but rather a “free black.” This racial identity was clearly lost on nineteenth-century English audiences, who positioned him as the perfect realization of their own racialized readings of the Afrikaner population. But as this book argues, there was a much more complex relationship between Baartman, a Khoekhoe woman, and Cesars, her free black employer, who was himself similarly limited by his racial and thus legal status in the Cape colony.

Crais and Scully also disclose that Baartman actually owned the copyright for much of the publicity materials that accompanied her European exhibitions. This suggests that Baartman herself had a much greater stake, professional and economic, in her performance. Although, as they note, there might be reasons for her to appear as the copyright holder that have nothing to do with her willingness to be on display, at the very least this fact forces us to rethink the idea that an African woman could only ever have been a victim in this context. Although this is an uncomfortable position for many scholars to occupy, it is critical that we allow the possibility of Baartman’s agency even while acknowledging the constraints within which she could make choices about her life.

The book ends dramatically and poignantly with debates over the repatriation of Baartman’s remains. Crais and Scully skillfully argue that even once the French had agreed to...