Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 14:52:39 -0500
Subject: FW: NYTimes.com Article: France Returning Remains of African
From: cs <christina.sharpe-AT-tufts.edu>





France Returning Remains of African

January 30, 2002 

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


 

Filed at 1:20 p.m. ET

PARIS (AP) -- It has been a long wait -- nearly 200 years
-- but Saartjie Baartman, once paraded about like a circus
freak and then gawked at in a French museum, is finally
returning home. 

The skeleton and bottled organs of the young woman of South
Africa's indigenous Khoikhoi people, who died in Paris in
1816, were displayed for years at France's Musee de
l'Homme, then shoved onto a back shelf and forgotten.

Now, France is moving to send the remains home to restore
Baartman's honor, and its own, after years of requests by
South Africa. 

The Senate voted unanimously on Tuesday to accede to South
African requests to bring Saartjie Baartman home. Backed by
the government, the bill is expected to be passed soon in
the lower house. 

A victim, in life as in death, of what one minister called
``colonialism, sexism and racism,'' Baartman was known
pejoratively as the ``Hottentot Venus,'' a reference to her
well-endowed sexual organs and to the term once used in
South Africa to refer to indigenous people.

Born in 1789, Baartman, a slave, was taken to London in
1810 by a British Marine surgeon and exhibited ``in
humiliating and scandalous conditions,'' according to
Research Minister Roger-Gerard Schwartzenberg. It got worse
in Paris, where she was an attraction between 1814 and
1815, at one point displayed by an animal trainer.

She also was exhibited before ``sages and painters,''
Schwartzenberg told the Senate in a brief account of
Baartman's life. One of them, Georges Cuvier, described as
a founder of comparative anatomy in France, noted movements
``that had something brusque and capricious about them that
recalled those of monkeys.''

It was Cuvier who made a plaster cast of Baartman's body,
dissected her and conserved her organs, including sexual
organs, in bottles of formaldehyde.

``They wanted to pass her off as a monster, but where was
the monstrosity?'' the bill's author, Senator Nicolas
About, said during the Senate hearing.

Baartman's remains were displayed at the Musee de l'Homme
until 1976. They might have been forgotten had it not been
for South Africa. Since the end of apartheid, South Africa
has expressed a fierce desire to get its native daughter
back. 

President Nelson Mandela brought up the subject in 1994
during an official visit by French President Francois
Mitterrand. The request was renewed two years later, and
again in 2000.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-France-Going-Home.html?ex=1
013416591&ei=1&en=406935177a9e4bad



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