GWS - Feminist Knowledge

Colonialism, disjuncture and dysfunction: Sarah Bartmann's resistance
By Yvette Abrahams

Sarah Bartmann was a Khoekhoe woman, who was born in the southern Cape in 1788.[2] She was taken into exile in November, 1809, by an Englishman named Hendrik Cezar, who first tried to sell her as a freak exhibit and later, when he could not find a willing buyer, exhibited her himself. The exhibition eventually led to a court case in 1810, where ostensibly Cezar was on trial for enslaving Sarah Bartmann but where, ultimately, Sarah Bartmann's character and veracity came to be put on trial, and was condemned. Her exhibition in London during the latter half of 1810, and the trial, caused a media furore, and Mrs Bartmann can without hesitation be called the most famous Khoekhoe of her time. She was later exhibited in the British provinces and in 1814, transferred to a new master in Paris. She became a sensation in Paris, as she had in London, and amongst other things, inspired a new fashion and a play. She was also examined by three scientists in December, 1814. Mrs Bartmann died shortly thereafter, in the early hours of 1815, at the age of twenty eight.

The academic resurgence of studies about Sarah Bartmann can be dated back to Sander Gilman's famous paper.[3] The publication of Gilman's article marked the beginning of a number of studies in a multitude of disciplines dealing with issues around the social construction of knowledge, and the development of positivist scientific ideas of race and gender in particular. She is featured regularly in the media, both locally and internationally, and there have also been two documentaries, one including Sarah Bartmann's life as part of a broader analysis, and one devoted solely to her life. There have also been at least three poetry collections of which her history has formed a part, and two plays. In this sense, Sarah Bartmann can justly be named the most famous Khoekhoe of our time, as well.

This paper is an excerpt from a larger work, which has turned the lens back towards the intellectuals, and has worked with linking the race and gender of the people who wrote about Sarah Bartmann to their particular ideas on race and gender. The work uses the metaphor of "…cleaning my historiographical house…" to explain why it is necessary to subject the analyzers to such a searching examination. The metaphor pictures a house of history, fouled and littered with almost two centuries of the most obnoxious sexism, racism, and classism, in which it is impossible that an elderly African lady would feel comfortable. It was necessary to clean up, I argued, before we could properly welcome auntie Sarah Bartmann into the house of African history.

However, when the cleaning is complete, renovations must begin. In this paper I seek to construct an Africanist history of Sarah Bartmann. It is the first step towards the biography of her life which it is my ardent desire to write. Here, I seek to turn a circle - as the first person of Khokhoe descent to write a book length study of Sarah Bartmann, I feel it my duty to turn from externally generated historiographies to creating a story centering on a Khoekhoe woman, by a Khoekhoe woman, using historical and contemporary Khoekhoe ideas of history and art. In doing so, I turn my back on previous analytical treatments of her life, which, I argue, have denied her person historical autonomy in favour of perpetually reconstructing racist and sexist discourses.

Here, I use womanist theory as a useful approach. The aim of this paper is to contribute to African women's activism. It is situated in the present and arises uncompromisingly from my own experiential location. In it, I summarize the survival wisdom of my own life and community in constructing a theory which re-tells Sarah Bartmann's history in a way which self-consciously seeks to be liberatory. Finally, in the tradition of African story telling, each story must have a moral. This one does.

Well, the work is done. The house looks decent, the larder is stocked. We are almost ready to welcome a dignified aunt into this symbolic home. I should be rushing off to wash myself and put on clean clothes. Oh yes, and I must still pick some flowers for the bedside table. But first, I think, I shall relax on the couch with a cup of tea and some confidences.

Confiding is good for the soul. The historian must take care of her soul. The historian who wishes to write of strange and painful events must ensure a fit mind in a healthy body. The stresses and strains of this colonized history, of this history of the colonized, are such that it becomes of the utmost importance to ensure that no unhappiness is passed on. The pain is enough. It would be wrong if from the pain of the past I were to transmit the burden of my own pain to the future.

Testifying is a necessity for the womanist historian. Womanism removes the comfort and protection of being able to pretend that the historian is somehow apart from her history. Whereas objectivity requires distance, womanism expects involvement and requires activism. While there is much comfort in testifying, there is no protection in it from the unresolved contradictions of the colonized self. The womanist injunction upon its practitioners may be summed up as follows: theorist, know thyself! In this society, this is in itself a painful process. Denial, distance and objectivity are so much more safe and comfortable! As Fawzia Afgal-Khan writes:

This paper seeks to create a dialectic which may or may not culminate in a comfortable discursive space, but which certainly can acknowledge my deep embeddedness in history and its injustice to me. When no choice, no knowledge seems possible without pain and suffering, it is always an excellent time to take a smoke break and review your strategic situation with care.

Self-knowledge must be the foundation stone of womanism. If you do not know yourself you truly cannot know your world, how it came to be, or your place in it. I have just concluded an extended critique of people who insist on seeing the world through the opaque distortions of their own racist and sexist glasses, all the while pretending that they are clear. I should not criticize this mistake while perpetuating it. The danger inherent in an anti-struggle of this nature is that danger itself, risk, pain, anger, sorrow and loss become reified as ends in themselves, when they should be understood as means a towards an end, necessary but not good. The desire to glorify suffering should worry me.^[5] In seeking to understand myself, then, I am immediately forced to confront the fundamental knowledge that I am crazy.

My insanity stems from a long (five hundred and five years in the south-western Cape) history of madness. My mother once said to me: " a traumatic event is an act of violence done to you over which you have no control." I said: "It sounds to me as if you have pretty much defined colonialism." When violence is inflicted upon us, we hurt. In seeking a diagnosis for my madness, it is as well to begin at once by suggesting that I suffer from post (or is it neo?)-colonial stress disorder.^[6] Its symptoms are many: I doubt the legitimacy of my own emotions. I do not trust myself. I cannot love myself. I hold on to anger and pain in preference to working through it. Never believe an historian who says she is merely studying the past! We seek to make the future. In the project of making a better world, colonial stress disorders of any variety is dysfunctional.

Dysfunction may be defined as the lack of function, the inability to form part of an organic whole, to be unable to relate lovingly to the other parts and people of your world. Dysfunction is sometimes counter-functional: a pattern of behaviour which exacerbates rather than addresses the problem which caused it. Substance addiction is a good example of dysfunctional behaviour: being addicted to a substance means the substance becomes your problem. You can wake up in the morning and go to bed at night worrying about your substance abuse. This saves you from having to worry about the problem which caused your substance abuse in the first place. It also prevents you from ever having to grapple with that problem, in fact, your problem may never go away but you are affectively isolated from it by your preoccupation with your substance abuse. The pain of the problem is displaced by the self-hatred of the substance abuser. The fact that at the end of the process you now have two problems instead of one is makes it dysfunctional, but your mind needs to be sober enough to see this.

Dysfunction is caused by dysjunctures. I use the plural advisedly: under colonialism, dysjunctures never come singly. In fact, colonialism may be defined alternatively as a series of dysjunctures, one after the other. Imagine a loss so complete that it can never be undone! Imagine waking up in the morning and confronting the fact that the day just passed was not a dream, that in the time between your previous awakening and the present one you sustained a loss so complete that your life will never be the same again. No word or action of yours can bring back what you have lost. This is dysjuncture.

Dysjunctures displace us from the known to the unknown, leaving all our emotional habits, cultures and morals unable to cope with this new and dangerous world. For survival we mimic the emotional habits of the colonizer: embracing danger, risk, pain, anger, and the glorification of sorrow and loss. Dysjunctures are violent in the extreme. Post-colonial stress disorder then has three causes; 1: the original violence of the dysjuncture; 2: the memory-triggered trauma of that violence; 3: Without healing tools, we develop dysfunctional responses to dysjunctures. Although they add to our problems, dysfunctional responses work. We did, we do, survive. It is not enough for a revolution. Colonialism happened. Dysjunctures remain. What was severed can never be healed the way should have grown. Still, through dysfunctional responses, we only make the pain worse for ourselves.

Individuals and peoples do more than copy dysfunction. They do, at some point begin to seek in their pre-dysjunctural culture and philosophy, tools for healing and moral regeneration: Africanism. Nobody knows how long it takes for this regeneration to be complete. Also, for this process to work we need some measure of the depth of dysjunctures we have experienced. I can testify: I have lost my land, my cattle, my culture and my language. I have lost my family, for the people whom we are today are not the people we would have been, had we been born of freedom.

To continue my catalogue of dysjunctures: I have lost the history which should have been mine. I have lost not only my past, but my future. For the Africa which we were can never be brought back again. For all that the new Afrika which we build shall be a wild and wondrous place, filled with pleasures of which I could write forever, we shall know that it can never be the Africa we were making.

I mourn the dead heroes of our struggle with sorrow and bitterness, for I have seen those who survived. To have watched the mighty ones return from battle, to have looked into their eyes grappling with the multiple contusions of the anti-violence just inflicted in our cause for freedom; all this is to have watched the daily struggle between good and evil, humanity and the glorification of violence, loss and the glorification of suffering; is to understand when I say that we need emotional healing more than we need anything else. Freedom is not going to come without it. We have barely begun to count the cost of our glorious resistance, for innocence, once lost, can never be regained.

Womanism as activism needs to make the connections between the political and the personal clear, lucid, and available as a programme for action. Mama observes of her experiences organizing Black women's movements in London:

This rings true in the context of my own experience of resistance. Revolution begins in the heart. The heart is a contradictory site, it is the hardest thing in the world to change and yet when it happens, when a child opens her eyes to the power of dreaming and dares to dream of freedom, it is the most unstoppable force in the world.

My organizational experience has not taught me how to accomplish this change reliably, nor to understand why the one heart changes and the other remains obdurate. So, although obviously the only way to accomplish change is by continuing to work, I cannot theorize about this. What I do know is that much can and must be done to change the discourses within which children's hearts, perforce, must grow. It is easier to decolonize the literature which forms the mind than to decolonize the minds of children. It is easier to re-circulate images of beautiful Blacks than to heal the damage caused by racism. Much can be done, and that much remains to do. About this I consider that I am qualified to theorize, and this theory, like all broad generalizations, is simple. It is possible to divest our historiography of racism and sexism, to provide the emotional tools needed for those, like historians, who must perforce continue to grapple with a racist legacy. It is possible to reconstruct a historiography which asks the questions to which African women need answers. And where the heart goes the body must follow. In the midst of my concerns about economic exploitation, the very existence of this text demonstrates that the material conditions have been sufficient for the task set before me.

So it can be done and it must be done. In order to do it, the theorist must be aware of the dangers of complicity. In attempting to remove the root causes of the illness, it is critical not to catch the disease. Self-healing and self-retrieval are needed to acquire the ability to know the difference, to understand that hatred, pain and anger cannot form part of the liberated self.[8] One cannot be part of the problem and part of the solution. The theorist who desires freedom must perform a revolution in the heart, must turn from pain and anger to love. Loving self, love my people, loving Spirit, regardless.^[9]

How is this change to be achieved? How does the crazy writer heal herself? There are few options. We cannot expect those who caused the problem in the first place to now come up with solutions. My experience is that we need to accept and no longer be ashamed of our madness. Those of us who have survived our losses are all crazy. We must be so because we live in a society which is defined by violence. Suffering is an endemic state of being. There is so much pain in this world that it will be pictured in our cultural expressions and people will watch it for `pleasure'. The process of watching the infliction of trauma is called "entertainment" in our society, whereas in others it would be called "sick". I can understand that any society needs to understand itself through art, yet the choice of terminology is revealing. It is an indication that we have become so desensitized to pain that we no longer know the difference between dealing with our trauma and enjoying it. We are a society of masochists.^[10]

If masochism, denial and separation anxiety were all our sufferings, this would probably be a short paper. They are only some of a multitude of dysfunctions which seem to me to be endemic to our society. The problem is that we are not just dealing with a trauma, singular, but a multitude of violences inflicted over time. It is not as if our most recent ancestors had much time to sit around and practise group therapy. We have lost their poetry, their art, and their music. They had little time to practise culture and left us, instead, a legacy of struggle. It is a glorious legacy. That it is not our rightful heritage does not diminish the love with which it was built. Love asks no return, yet it would not be misplaced to ask: where to from here?

The time and place in which I write is a good one for the asking of all of these questions. The struggle years of the 1980 were years of much good: we practiced an undying love for our people. In the midst of danger we knew life, laughter, silly jokes and fellowship through hard work. Still today, as I watch the children of entitlement grow, I catch my breath at the wonder of it. That a Black child should feel entitled to anything is a thing of beauty!

Resistance is what this chapter is going to speak about. It is good to situate this conversation amongst the rewards we enjoy, now, from our resistance then. We are not free, yet. My generation has seen the toppling of a mighty regime. Now, as we gaze bemusedly at what we have become amidst the ruins of the oppression we knew, it is not hard to see that that we are not yet free. Cheikh Anta Diop has observed of Sweden:

From where I sit, it looks as if the racial struggle is transforming itself into the class struggle. While the racial structure of ownership of the means of production has remained fundamentally unchanged, the period during which I have researched and writtten this thesis has been one where sections of our growing Black petty bourgeosie seem to have lost all grip of who they were and where they have come from. From here, the struggle cannot but continue. Frantz Fanon has written:

So it is with me. I cannot change the past, and the future is not here yet. For all I write so that the world may be a better place to live, I may never live to know it. For all I have striven to see clearly, I cannot rise above the shackles of my time.

What I can do is try to put this awareness into practice. My experience of colonial stress disorder teaches me that it is no use being dysfunctional about struggle. Dysfunction requires not only the glorification of suffering but a peculiar sort of blindness known as denial, a refusal to see what is, because the pain of seeing is too much to bear. The shambles which is left of our struggle of the 1980s, of my strivings to build a better world, is a mess which it requires great strength of mind to see. But that is no matter. To refuse to see it is to accept that we shall live in oppression forever. Colonialism was forced upon us. Dysjunctures were done unto us which forever will separate us from who we once were. But dysfunction is something over which each one of us still has control. We have the power to solve one problem out of two.

Let me borrow a little story from another author, to show you what is meant by a dysfunctional struggle. Tsitsi Dangarembga allows mad Nyasha to speak this truth about colonialism:

Nyasha rejects colonialism in the only way she can, by retreating into the absolute lack of self-love symbolized by her anorexia. She rejects the colonial classification of a good African as one who grovels, and uses colonial ideas of the African who stands up as evil for a stone to throw at them. Her madness enables her to speak a truth which everybody around her is trying to deny: that colonial oppression loses us to each other as we grapple with a world where survival simultaneously in spirit and in body is sometimes impossible. The choices people are forced to make can be unacceptable to themselves and others, and in losing love for ourselves and respect for one another we have lost our foundation for family and community. Dangarembga places them all before us with pitying clarity: the father who does not want to listen, the mother who dares not understand, the sister/cousin who strives to remain oblivious to the warning voices around her, the brother lost to jungle fever, and a community struggling to come to terms with the violence, the dysjunctures and the traumas following on the First Chimurenga.

I have defined oppression as the place where there is no good choice to make, only a choice between greater and lesser evils. Nyasha chooses madness as the price of truth, and in doing so she has lost her loving self. The loss is not hers alone. Her family lost a daughter, a sister and a niece. Her community lost a potential mother, wife and aunt. Her nation lost a revolutionary-in-the-making. Madness is the last weapon of the weak. Like the slave women who threw themselves into the seas of the Cape, rather than bear a child into slavery, a retreat into madness is the ultimate protest. It throws the stone effectively, it inflicts a counter-pain if only by ensuring that this slave can no longer be economically exploited. It is also dysfunctional: it carries colonial dysjunctures into the furthest recesses of the human mind, the place which we have striven with our lives to defend against evil beyond our comprehension. Amina Mama has defined this space:

I would suggest that in all that we repress, there is not just the anxieties of life, but also the parts of ourselves which are life-generating. This is because colonialism is a social situation in which it is simply impossible to live a loving, giving, self-affirming mental life. So, African women repress life in order to protect it, to keep some part of themselves sacrosanct from the exigencies of surviving colonialism. I live sparingly. I love only just enough to get by. I wonder often: where does the love go? It may sound odd to hypothesize the possibility of choice in connection with the unconscious, but it is necessary. Revolution means creating choice in the face of necessity.

I would argue that it is when this protection gives way that African women are exposed to the full blast of the exploitative psychodynamics of colonialism. In Nyasha's madness we can measure the width and the breadth, the height and the depth of her oppression. If we are to measure the oppression of our own times, it must be by our ability to avoid losing more women to madness. If the last two generations of African revolutionaries are to have made a meaningful difference, we should be able to avoid using the ultimate weapon. Truth is cheap at any price, but surely it can come cheaper, now.

In choosing sanity as a strategic option, I do not underestimate the magnitude of the task. Of course, so long as the root cause of our dysfunction remains - colonialism - we may never be completely sane. But the only way to remove the source of our disorder is to strive for sanity. The lesson which I draw from the eighties, could I distil it in a sentence, is that we lose out by being dysfunctional about the struggle. In our resistance, if nowhere else, we must strive to be pure of heart. We must see clearly. We must act thoughtfully. The howling reverbarations of pain and the blurry eyes of denial are of no use when it comes to planning a strategy and executing it with caution, calm, and resolution. I do not mean to blame the victim here. The colonial habits and mode of struggle we adopted, merely to survive, served to confuse us so that even when we tried to resist (as any human alive must resist) the denial of freedom, our resistance would be feeble and weak. We would not see opportunites where there were opportunities, we would take chances where there was no hope, we would seek death - whether swiftly at the hands of the apartheid police and army or the slow suicide of substance abuse - because we hoped against hope it would lead to a better life. bell hooks has pointed out that the very intensity of our desire for freedom can work to our detriment:

I can date this moment in the South African struggle with some precision. It was in the mid-1980's that the laaities began to kap a pyp before going to throw stones at the casspirs.^[16] This was a time when the word 'cannonfodder' entered my vocabulary, when it ceased to matter who you were or what you believed in, so long as you could provide a warm body for the demonstrations, or a cold one for the statistics. And here we are. A better life for some. Crack for the others. But when I begin to hear from people I know suffered unbelievable trauma that 'it was better during apartheid', I know it is time to move on. The future is not here yet. When it comes, I would like it to be enriched by the lessons of the past. Though I may never overcome the dysfunctions of my times, the least I can do is to refrain from passing it on. The only way to do this is by striving to overcome.

In choosing sanity as a strategic option, I do so without a clue as to how hard it is going to be. Still, if my ancestors, back in 1906, had asked themselves whether what they were trying to do was at all possible, they would never have done it. So it is with me. The revolution I seek for the new millennium is a revolution of the heart. In order to turn the circle of the heart, we need a social psychology which is historical in its approach. We need to grapple with communal traumas, with social dysfunctions that arise out of collective experiences of dysjunctures which are still on-going. We need answers for everyone, one heart at a time. The task is naturally too big for one person, or one paper. The remainder of this one attempts to contribute to a psychology of history. This paper details three dysjunctures in my own life. It compares these events to three dysjunctures in Sarah Bartmann's life. It posits these experiences as paradigmatic psychological experiences for Black women in southern Africa. It finally examines how Sarah Bartmann turned her experiences into positive, life-affirming gestures. We learn from her a theory and a praxis of African revolution: a way to turn the circle of the heart.

I shall place my discussion in Namibian history, for it is there that the events are most recent and the dysjunctures most stark. Let me tell of the event which has caused the severest dysjuncture in my life. Let me reach into my personal history and confide: in 1905 the German colonial army, finding itself unable to beat down the African guerrillas no matter how much the number of troops increased, withdrew from the battlefields in the mountains. They stationed troops around every waterhole from the Karas to the Kalahari, and as the people came to drink they were shot, men, women and children. Step by step, people were forced into the thirstlands of the Omaheke. Eighty percent of the Herero and fifty percent of the Nama died in that war.^[17] It seems that nobody ever bothered to count the Damara.

When I think of the loss in my life I wonder that I still live. For the young men who should have been my great-grandfathers died in that year. And the young men whom my grandfathers could have been were lost with them, their full human potential denied to us by genocide. If I feel that loss, how so the sons who had to invent good Black male role-models as they went along? Our men with courage and compassion died in that year, and with them went self-respect. Which Black man, surviving, when all men around him were dead, stood much chance of surviving survivor's guilt? The Omaheke and the German soldiers between them provided the material conditions in which any man who thought of being a man at all wanted to die. No human being should have had to make such a choice.

Mama's critique of colonial psychology is powerful and hard-hitting. She argues that one of its chief discursive weapons was to define black people as inherently pathological.^[18] My analysis of colonial dysjunctures is not meant to feed into this discourse. However, I must ask how it would be possible for us not be traumatized? Post-colonial stress disorder is historically contingent and context-specific, and it also varies with the individual, but it has been a part of our Blackness for a great length of time. Now, of course the Germans were mad, too. According to Bley's calculations, the army spent six hundred million German marks - the most expensive war of its time in Africa - on the conquest of a largely semi-desert country of little value to anybody but its inhabitants.^[19] Over the years, the profits of the mining industry would exceed this sum, but in 1905 nobody knew whether the colony would ever be economically self-sufficient, much less make money. The motive for genocide was not even economically rational. It was the sheer and undiluted desire to rule at any cost, the inability to concede that the German army could be bested by Africans, which caused the war. As the commander of the army, Von Trotha proclaimed:

The question is not whether this was pathological. The questions we need to ask are: how do we distinguish between the pathology of the colonizer and the traumas of the colonized? How do we ensure that our dysfunctions do not allow us to adopt the colonizing pathology? How do we turn that circle before we become what we most despised?

A loss of such immensity made the act of grieving a practical impossibility. To have even begun to grieve would have been such a great sorrow-work we would still be crying, three generations later. Instead, we became angry. When I look around me and see the violence which has engulfed African families, I see not only the living men who look for manhood in all the wrong places, but also the missing great-grandfathers who did not live to be parents. Genocide means that not only your father, but your brothers, sons, uncles, sometimes also wives and daughters, are gone. The entire collectivity which makes you, you, is gone. What is left but the pain? When I look around me and see a collective, compulsive addiction to violence and lies, I see a post-traumatic stress disorder echoing down the generations. I do not mean to remove from each individual our moral obligation to distinguish between right and wrong, or our personal responsibility for our actions. The questions which interest me are these: how long does it take to find our minds after such an event? How do we theorize, and practise, the path to sanity? Maybe it is up to us, the great-grandchildren of genocide, to provide the answers.

There are times when survival itself becomes resistance. In the face of loss so complete, and so total, life itself becomes an act of resistance. The survival wisdom which I draw from this is that you survive to fight another day. Indeed, the very fact that I now have leisure to sit and think of this dysjuncture, and the wisdom which came of it, is testimony to the fact that we did survive and resist. If I can do nothing else to honour this struggle I can at least think, know and remember freedom. And if my mind has been so colonized that I cannot envision freedom, I can at least retain just enough sanity to know that it is not this madness. It is not this intellectual thirst which afflicts me in the symbolic Omaheke which is the historiography of Sarah Bartmann. My grip on sanity is the sure knowledge that I hunger and thirst for freedom.

If the sands of the Omaheke was the one root of our dysfunction, the kitchens of the German soldiers provided the site of another. For if I see the genocide of 1905 as a defining traumatic event, there followed a second series of events, contingent upon the first to be sure, but equally traumatizing in its effects. Winifred Hoernle observed it, and named the second site of dysjunctures as follows:

A bamboes was a wooden pot used by the Khoekhoe in which they stored herbs and medicine. This inversion of the word, from a place for buchu to the self-image of a German soldier seeking healing for his colonialist pathology, expresses the dysjuncture of our collective rape. The chronology of dysjunctures is clear: first the violence, then the sexual abuse. The question of individual consent is not even at issue. It was rendered irrelevant in the Omaheke.

In the kitchens of the Germans was severed the mind from the body, the soul from joy of life. Institutionalized rape on this scale was a dysjuncture so severe, and so systematic, that it comes to have enduring meaning only at the level of the individual. I must write about each and every woman's experience or write about none. 'Stilte is die beste antwoord' is a proverb of my people, and, I suspect, one which may have arisen from this kind of collective experience.^[22] The dysjunctures of the post-1905 period have left only the silence of the individual. And if I have in the previous chapter spoken out for the right of African women publicly to denounce this abuse, I wish here to emphasize respect for the right of those who have chosen to remain silent. It is their right to choose. Out of the silences I grow buchu for the body and the soul.

The survival wisdom of generations seems pitifully little when measured against the trauma, and can best be expressed as Judy Mowatt sings: "love is a miracle" and indeed it is.^[23] For those African women brought up children, raised families and taught morality. The undying love for my people I practised in the 1980s did not come from nowhere. This text, if you will, is evidence to this. Under colonialism, Black girl-children do not survive to adulthood, much less write theses, without a lot of love.

Survival is pointless without freedom. If we cannot be free, we can live and die trying. By the sand dunes of the Omaheke and in the forced labour camps which followed was born the collective wisdom that this struggle is all that gives meaning to a colonized life where a human could choose only exile, slavery or death. And in the kitchens of the Germans, African women clung to the knowledge that love is all that matters. I would not say that this love was born out of hatred, for indeed love is not dependent on evil for its existence. Love is autonomous, self-generated, and bitterly endangered under colonial conquest. Yet it has survived amongst us. As my people built the roads, the railroads and the public buildings which became the symbols of imperial Germany in Africa, they also began building the family, community and culture which produced us.

But I am not yet born. In my story of the dysjunctures which have been the deepest causes of my colonial pathology, I have not yet arrived. Well, I was born, and while still playing with the differences between my fingers and my toes, experienced yet another dysjuncture. In 1963, my parents were discovered to be plotting treasonable activities against the apartheid state, to wit: armed struggle, and I was taken into exile very young. After various vicissitudes, my family ended up in Sweden. My father battled for some years to have his qualifications recognized by the Swedish authorities, and was forced to repeat his internship wherever he could find a vacancy. As a consequence, I grew up in the remote towns of rural Sweden, and it was here that I learnt the hard way that race is real. It exists. I learnt of the pain of this reality by going to school in places where people had never seen a living Black person in their life. From the seemingly innocuous elderly women who rubbed my hair "to see if it really is as curly as it looks" to the school mates who called me 'nigger', I learnt that as far as white people were concerned race was a straightforward reality.

The scars on my body bear mute testimony to the reality of race, and racism. I would have had many more, were it not for the fortunate circumstance that my brother and I were in the same class, and so could watch each other's back at all times. I learnt young (long before I could spell the words) of the strength, the power and the sheer necessity of Black solidarity. I felt that I owed my physical survival to the vigilance of Black manhood. In the face of children's racism, where was my space to fight for the dignity, freedom and equality of Black womanhood?

I cannot overestimate the impact it must have had on my personality formation to be one of the only five Black people in these towns, and the other four my family. We moved eventually to the capital, but it must be remembered that in the 1970s Stockholm was still a small town. This was before the big wave of Black immigration, which hit Sweden in the late 1980s, and I can remember that even in the capital, Black people would be so few and far between that we would greet each other in the street, even if we were total strangers. The gesture of recognition was an instinctive tribute to the reality of race. To me, this was a crucial moment in my perceptions of race. I discovered race not just as an element which separated me from the white people around me, but as a quality which united me with untold millions in the world. The struggle out there to force whites to respect my colour was certainly instrumental in reinforcing my perceptions of race as a critical constitutent of reality. Equally, I can remember relating to Blackness as joy and pride. Most of all I used to treasure the thrill and excitement of my mother's stories about 'home'. Africa - a place where the streets would be filled with Black people. A place where everybody around me would look like me, talk like me, and walk like me. A place where my skin, my hair, my culture would be the norm, not the exception. I learnt to love the name of Africa. Had it not been for the promise of return, I think, I never would have survived those teenage years.

Still, I cannot overestimate the effect exile must have had on my personality formation. It is very frightening for a child to be unable to go 'home'. The political exile is out of control of her own life. My ability to go home was dependent upon the struggle of millions of Black men and women in Africa. There was pitifully little we could do, and that little we of course did. We learnt to roll off pamphlets and collate newsletters as part of our 'normal' childhood activities.

My mother took what I still believe was the only rational decision under the circumstances. She did not want us to remain in a state of permanent limbo, so she brought us up to live as if we would remain in Sweden forever. I remember 1976 as a formative moment in my life. Reading the newspapers, discussing over the kitchen table, we were all keen to boycott too. The idea of not going to school as a method of struggle had a wondrous attraction for us, and certainly seemed much easier than collating newsletters or picketing the South African embassy. We pestered my parents mercilessly, until they said, 'listen, you children. What difference are you going to make, the two of you boycotting on your own? You have an opportunity which many African children don't have. The children in South Africa are going without schooling for your freedom. Do you go to school for theirs! Get your education, learn as much as you can, and use it in the cause for freedom!'

The survival wisdom I draw from this is that exile limits your possibilities of resistance. Indeed, this wisdom can be generalized: the dividing line between resistance and collaboration must depend on your circumstances. It is only by measuring the width, the depth, and the height of your dysjunctures that you can decide what is resistance and what is not.

These three dysjunctures have been the formative events which have shaped my experiences of subjectivity. They are the roots of my colonial stress disorder. Thanks to the collective survival wisdom of my people, I have survived, I have come back, and it is now time to turn the circle and perform a revolution. The revolution I desire to perform in my heart, is to turn from those multiple traumas to love.

It is indeed true that the subtext of the historiography I have been discussing is the insult; 'you are all c---s'. It is exactly as I feared it was in the dim dark days when I was struggling with paranoid schizophrenia. Looking back, I do not even think I was that insane. Dysfunctional, yes, but not so blind that I could not see the truth. It was fear of my dysfunction, more than the madness itself, which caused me to doubt the reality of my emotions. And by way of fighting for freedom, let me love my subject, as indeed it would be impossible not to, after spending years in a study of her life. It is a worthy pursuit to see the good in auntie Sarah Bartmann, and bring it to light so that others may see it too.

The history I have just told about myself is a specific history - it took place in a specific time and place and happened to specific people. Yet colonialism is also a system. It retains structural similarities no matter where and when it exists. Indeed, when comparing the dysjunctures in my own personal history to those in auntie Sarah's, the similarities are striking.

The frontier of the eastern Cape was one place where genocide was being committed from the 1770's to the end of the century. It differed from that which took place further north a century and a half later, in that it was committed in bits and pieces. Material constraints readily explain this. The non-British European settlers in the eastern Cape of the late eighteenth century did not possess the material resources of the German army in the early twentieth. Yet the settlers continued to pursue this war, for if material constraints forced them to move slowly, the capturing of slaves formed a powerful material inducement to continue to raid Khoekhoe villages. Sarah Bartmann's birth and childhood was located in a time and place characterized by violence both on the colonial frontier, and behind the frontier where bonded Khoekhoe labour was the foundation of the settler economy.^[24] It is a genocide which is horrifyingly easy to track. During this period, reports from local military leaders in the eastern Cape abound, detailing the number of Khoekhoe killed and taken slaves.^[25] The people, culture and economy which would have given rise to a free Sarah Bartman was devastated by the onslaught of the settlers against indigenous people. As Susan Newton-King cautiously observes:

Between 1770 and 1800, everything that auntie Sarah's family knew and understood in the world would probably have changed forever. I cannot speak to the specificity of auntie Sarah's experience - I have spoken of my own - but I can observe with certainty that she was heir to this trauma. No doubt there were many differences between my specific historical experience and that of auntie Sarah, the chief being that she was two generations closer to it than I am. But the dysjuncture felt as the same.

Nonetheless, she survived long enough to give testimony about her experiences. Auntie Sarah's account of her early life, as translated by a court interpreter, is as follows:

Three deaths in one paragraph - that is the effect of genocide on the individual life. The death of a loved one by violence is a traumatic event from which may take years, even decades, to fully recover. The death of auntie Sarah's father by cattle raiders must have been very difficult for her. We do not know how old she would have been at the time, but the sequence of the narrative seems to suggest a causal connection. In other words, that her father's death was followed by her mother's death, by which time auntie Sarah, who was twenty two at the time she told this story, must have been two years old.^[28] The loss of a mother at such an early age must have been deeply traumatic. We do not know who then functioned as a surrogate mother, although the same account tells of brothers and sisters, who must presumably have been older than she. It is reasonable to assume that auntie Sarah would have been the youngest of her family. In an age when not only the settler's guns, but the settler's diseases, were busy committing genocide against the Khoekhoe, it must have taken special care to bring a girl-child to adulthood.

The death of a child is arguably the single most traumatic incident which can happen to anybody. How the child died is not told, but this death cannot have been more than two or three years before auntie Sarah's embarkation to Britain. How long does it take to overcome the death of child? The answer must depend on the individual. What we do know is that in 1810, the wife of an actor observed her grieve her lost child in the midst of a performance. This was not evident to the eyewitness, who wrote:

In 1810 then, auntie Sarah was still grieving for her lost child. She expressed this grief in the only way she could, in the nexus of human relations available to her, during a performance for people who may have seemed sympathetic, compared to her other viewers. The geographical separation from the child's grave, and from the family with whom she shared this deeply-felt grief, must have made it much more difficult to heal.

With regard to the second collective dysjuncture of Sarah Bartman's people, it is clear that institutionalized sexual violence against Black women was so much part of the culture of the colonial Cape, that it could be considered normative. As Mentzel remarked of Cape Town in 1785:

The idea of sexual violence as almost a rite of passage for young settler men says something about the extent to which institutionalized rape was embedded in settler culture. By the nineteenth century, this perception was so pervasive that a court reversed a death sentence for rape passed on a white man, upon evidence being brought that the victim was in fact Khoekhoe.^[31] I cannot speak to the experience of auntie Sarah and her family in this regard, but I can say with certainty that if this was the norm in white culture, there must have been a culture of resistance within Khoekhoe culture. And auntie Sarah would have had need of it, to confront the abuse she would experience in exile.

In her study of female slave resistance, Barbara Bush argues that, though resistance was a constant, its form varied depending on the circumstances of the slave. She demolishes the myth that domestic servants, so often assumed to be more amenable to slavery, did not resist their conditions of labour:

The subtlety and deviousness of domestic slave resistance is readily understood in the context of their circumstances. They were more likely to be women, and therefore more vulnerable to all forms of abuse. Their proximity to the slave master and family meant that they were under more constant surveillance, and generally had less freedom of movement than field workers. They were also more likely to be isolated from other slaves by the nature of their work. Their weapons were the weapons of the weak, a resistance often so devious that even the nature of their actions as resistance could remain hidden. Their very survival depended on their acceptance by the slave master as passive, and survival was the prerequisite to living to resist another day. The contours of domestic slave resistance was determined by the objective conditions under which these women lived. It had to be subversive, challenging domination but, in the event of failure to achieve change, easily disguised as 'laziness', 'stupidity' or an excess of docility. Domestic slave resistance, therefore, can be seen as a very female form of resistance.

In order to understand auntie Sarah's resistance, we need to understand the choices open to her in exile. She could have chosen to be sweetly submissive, or passionately sensual. She could have chosen to play off her beautiful Blackness, for the material advantage she could gain. She chose none of these things. Instead, all accounts indicate that she was a stubborn and recalcitrant slave.

Auntie Sarah was a dancer. She was almost two centuries closer than we are to the Khoekhoe tradition of dance as vision, as ritual, and as art of the most enduring kind. Unfortunately, the writings and illustrations of her we have available were overdetermined by perceptions of her race and gender. Nowhere have I found a reference to her art from an aesthetic point of view. Yet, as an artist she must have been a story-teller. Her art was to communicate. What stories did she tell?

The story she told was one of resistance. Like domestic slaves were wont to do, she slacked when she could, and protested when she could. As one spectator wrote of a performance:

As with her grief over her lost child, auntie Sarah chose a public performance for her testimony. The drama she enacted was one of slavery: the woman resisting, forcing the violence which underpinned her labour to become explicit. The effort made her tired, however. She showed her anger openly. The spectator continued:

Auntie Sarah had made her point. If there were people walking around London fully convinced that she was a slave, it was because she told them so. She spoke as eloquently as she could, using every art known to her. The tactic of constantly provoking Cezar in public, of forcing him to show his violence and making her coercion explicit, was extremely effective.

At times, she made even her silence speak for her. In a deposition before the court, Thomas Babington and Peter van Wageninge said that the latter put many questions to her after a performance, he being Dutch speaking, but she would not answer. Instead:

Auntie Sarah was anything but a willing worker. It is, of course, possible that there were performances of hers where she worked willingly, of which evidence has not been preserved. Certainly the descriptions we do have make it very clear that she was pursuing an effective strategy of showing what kind of man her master was. We can see that she was a woman with self-love and considerable mental resources. Without the support of fellow slaves, in the absence of any possibility of collective resistance, she nevertheless made sure that she got her recalcitrant message across.

The very props used to stage her appearances spoke eloquently of slavery. Mr Mc'Cartney spoke of an early performance where he had found her enclosed in a cage, on a platform raised about three feet above the floor. He

Cezar, no doubt, was trying to play on British sentiments about the African as beast, as uncontrollable, through the contrivance of the cage. But auntie Sarah challenged his control, because she took the props and subverted them into a narrative about being forced against her will to perform.

Here, I must make the point that I would not like my story to be confused with 'performance' theory. In my vernacular, 'to perform', means to front, to play a part not in accordance with the feelings of the heart. In speaking of auntie Sarah the artist, and the story she has told for us, I am by no means suggesting that the feelings - the sighs, the tears, the anger - were not real. Auntie Sarah acted as she felt, and felt her story as she told it. Her life and art were one. This was the culture she in which was born, and held on to, in the midst of multiple dysjunctures. What she disguised was the spirit of this culture as resistance.

And when we consider the colonial settler culture in which she had lived and worked, we can appreciate fully the magnitude of her strategy. For if violence against Black women was instutionalized in colonial culture, it was also rendered socially invisible. Apart from the odd comment such as Mentzel's, colonial sources have little to say on everyday violence against Black women. It was a taken-for-granted part of colonial life. So if the drama that auntie Sarah played out with Cezar forced him to lift a stick, to utter threats, or to close her cage door, it made a very strong statement about violence against Black women which British observers could not ignore. It formed an answer to the silence back home in the colonial Cape.

This was a point not missed by contemporary observers. As one 'Humanitas' wrote:

Auntie Sarah was making at least one Englishman think, not only about her state of slavery in the metropolis, but about the state of Khoekhoe slavery in the colony. In truth, the longer she was allowed to perform, the more severe the danger she posed to the orderly conduct of British administration in the Cape. Her message was powerful.

If her exile weakened auntie Sarah, by separating her from the collective of blood and culture which formed the source of her strength, she nevertheless chose the strategy of resistance open to her. In London, she found a stage and an audience. She used this, to the best of her ability, to speak about the social relations she knew. Her art, and her resistance, was to make the violence embedded in these social relations visible. It was a strange dance she danced with Cezar and the stick. It was one which sought to change the circumstances of her life and times.

If we understand her life as art, and her art as a strategy of resistance, the question of her intelligence leaps to the fore. From where did she obtain the knowledge on which to base her strategy? Did they gossip about the abolition of the slave trade in the servant's quarters of number 225, Piccadilly? Would she have understood them, if they did? Was she aware of the court case? Did her heart leap when the notaries came to speak to her, and did it fall when the question whether:

came not? There are so many things we do not know about auntie Sarah's social relations in London. It is possible that her only source of information was Cezar, and if so, her methods of intelligence-gathering must have been devious indeed.

What we do know for certain is that her search for freedom did not cease after the dissappointment of the court case. It is in the context of her resistance that we must see her baptism in Manchester on the seventh of December, 1811.^[39] It may have been auntie Sarah's way of demonstrating that she was capable of election. As Elizabeth Elbourne remarks:

Baptism in a Christian church, then, was an act with profound political significance. It was a claim to racial equality on the part of the Khoekhoe. As Reverend Witbooi explains, baptism also could provide a spiritual answer for dispossessed Khoekhoe, seeking a firm basis of faith in a changed world. The idea of a rite of passage through water was by no means foreign to Khoekhoe culture, but on the contrary a familiar way of coping with changes in their state of being:

Baptism by a Christian was then understood by some Khoekhoe, conceiving of their new society in traditional terms, as a way of moving into the future with rites appropriate to the past. The passage through water offered healing for the soul, and spirit to deal with the challenges of an unknown world. Auntie Sarah's baptism, seen through the lens of her culture of birth, can be read as seeking peace with the past, and independence in the present.

Indeed, this would not have been the first time a Khoekhoe woman in London had used the church as a platform for resistance. Mary van Rooy, who visited London in 1803 together with two Khoekhoe men, preached as follows:

That Mary van Rooy did not use the opportunity to thank the isteners for their missionary efforts in Africa, but instead besought them to take care of their own souls, was certainly subversive. What I understand to be her text, that only by grace through faith are we saved, must have been calculated to disturb the tranquillity of a missionary society dedicated to doing good works in heathen lands. As Elbourne remarks:

The missionary churches in South Africa set out to enslave the minds of the Khoekhoe. And like all slaves, the Khoekhoe set out to subvert the dominant narrative. I wonder if auntie Sarah knew, or had heard of Mary van Rooy who, like herself, came from the eastern Cape?

It is sad to record that the baptism did not succeed as intended for auntie Sarah. I must hope that she found peace of the soul, because it certainly did nothing to remove her from Cezar's power. Indeed, the next few years must have been hard for auntie Sarah, as she went from provincial parlour to provincial parlour, the spectators never ending. At last the seemingly insatiable British curiousity about her ceased to make Cezar money, and she was able to get away from him. In September, 1814, she was taken to France. In France, however, her chances of resistance were smaller. She now had to learn a new language and a new culture. In all his miserableness, Cezar was her last surviving link with home, now severed. Auntie Sarah experienced a new dysjuncture added over one old, and scarcely healed. The land to which she was going was engulfed in the Napoleonic post-Revolution backlash which included, amongst other things, a complete reversal of ideas on the universal rights of humans to freedom and equality. The political climate she was to find around slavery was far more conservative than in Britain. Auntie Sarah was sold to her new master Reaux for an undisclosed sum, and the French did not scruple to call him her 'keeper'. The fact that he was a showman of wild animals merely added to the irony.^[44]

It was in Paris that auntie Sarah was to meet, and overcome, her greatest challenge, for it was there that three French scientists made an arrangement with Reaux to examine her body in the spring of 1815. They had also arranged for an illustrator to be there. Did auntie Sarah know that this was to be more than a casual performance? How soon did she feel threatened, as their demands became clear to her? What we do know is that her actions demonstrated the strongest possible objections to being undressed and examined. Londa Schiebinger gives a description from one of the men who was present:

What should we read from auntie Sarah's actions? An expectation of respect. Auntie Sarah stated, with the greatest possible clarity, that she did not wish her bodily parts to be the subject of public scrutiny, not for money, neither for enjoyment, nor for the 'logic' of science. If she had ceased to try for freedom, she had not ceased the struggle to set limits to her conditions of servitude. We can appreciate the immensity of her demand, both then and now, for not one of the men who have observed her seems to have heard her message. Her struggle was one hundred and eighty-five years before its time.

Auntie Sarah said what she had to say. It is for us to listen. Each artist requires an audience, and each work of art is a conversation. Auntie Sarah was successful in getting her message out, even through the pen of one of her antagonists. Yet I shall not call her resistance successful until she has been listened to.

It must have required enormous spiritual resources to keep up the fight during the three days for which the examination lasted. How did she eat, or sleep, during the days she fought off these men, each larger and more well-fed than she? It was well that auntie Sarah had taken the time to walk the passage under water, to finally make peace with herself and accept that the life she had had at home was gone forever. It was well that she had taken the time, alone under the water with her Spirit, to dedicate herself fully to the new life she had to lead. De Blainville surely underplays the violence which took place. What brought on her 'great sorrow'? I suspect that there is more to be told than meets the eye, for if de Blainville chose to underplay the incident, Cuvier chose to obscure it entirely: "In the spring of 1815, having been driven to the Jardin du Roi, she agreed to undress and be painted naked."^[46] Yet de Blainville's description does not sound like agreement. It sounds more like Khoekhoe resistance.

If auntie Sarah could resist, there are none of us so alone, so isolated, or so traumatized that we cannot resist. Her story teaches us to keep trying, even when we fail at first, at second and even at third try. That she succeeded in getting her message across, through time and space and by the hands of strangers, was surely a great achievement. The artist who is silenced cannot live. By living, auntie Sarah created the story of which I have to write, and given the constraints under which she had to practise her art, the negation and silencing of her self-hood which she overcame, her speech deserves due honour, love and respect.

The survival wisdom I draw from her story is that for resistance to be successful - for resistance to become revolution - it has to be collective. Auntie Sarah was determined to assert her sense of self. She could not be stopped. Probably she spoke much more than is recorded here, and as research continues into her life and times we shall no doubt be able to piece together much more of her message. But her speaking was only half of her art. It is for us who have ears with which to hear to fulfil her story, to find our voices and speak of her out loud. Only when auntie Sarah's message has been heard over mountain, land and sea, only when no one can ignore what I understand to be her cry: "RESPECT ME, BLACK WOMAN!", will her story be complete.

So I have told my story - for now. The tea is long since drunk, the ashtray overflowing. I must make haste to empty it, for we do not know if auntie Sarah likes the smell of smoke. I see that, in the manner of my people, I have whiled away the time of waiting by talking about the dear approaching, her likes and dislikes, her achievements and her sorrows, and all that she has meant to me. But the time for waiting draws to its close. I see in my mind's eye that she approaches down the mountain path. It is good, for the house is clean, and we are ready.

For what it is worth, my theory about what those observers saw in auntie Sarah's gait was her pride. Like the ostrich it came behind her as she walked, her pride, indomitable. And the white men looked and they looked, but their eyes could not recognize pride in a Black woman, so all they decided to see was a body. Still, for three days in the garden of kings the white men tasted of her spirit: indomitable.

Though I am young and she is old, I have taken the liberty of naming auntie Sarah. Until we find the name her mother gave her, I shall call her 'coming home' - Aroas!

^[1]. Mama, Amina, Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity , Routledge, London, 1995, pp. 14.

[2] . The term 'Khoekhoe' is used to denote the indigenous people of southern Africa, those whom a colonial historiography has designated 'bushmen' or 'hottentots'.

[3] . Gilman, Sander "White Bodies, Black Bodies: Towards an Iconography of female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine and Literature." Critical Inquiry 12:1, 1985, (204-89)

^[4]. Afzal-Khan, Fawzia "Bridging the Gap Between So-Called Postcolonial and Minority Women of Colour: A Comparative Methodology for Third World Feminist Literary Criticism" Womanist Theory and Research Vol. 2, No. 1, 1996-97 (35-47), pp. 39.

^[5]. With thanks to Lynne Rhode, who made me see this!

^[6]. I must acknowledge my indebtedness to Joy Croft Leary of the Department of Psychology, UCLA at Berkeley, whose talk on post-tramatic slavery disorder set my mind thinking along the lines which follow; in a speech read at the Black History Week Conference, Queens University at Kingston, February, 1994.

^[7]. Mama, Beyond the Masks , pp. 5-6.

[8] . The terms are Kulawole's, cf. Kulawole, Mary E Modupe, Womanism and African Consciousness Africa World Press Inc., Asmara, Eritrea, pps 19 and 35.

^[9]. With grateful thanks to Alice Walker, cf. In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Harcourt Press, San Diego, 1983, pp.xii.

^[10]. With many thanks to Jo-Anne Prins, who with such beautiful economy defined masochism for me.

^[11]. Diop, Cheikh Anta Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology Lawrence hill Books, Chicago, 1991, pp. 122.

^[12]. Fanon, Frantz Black Skin, White Masks pp. 15.

^[13]. Dangarembga, Tsitsi Nervous Conditions Women's Press Ltd, London, 1988, pp. 200-201.

^[14]. Mama Beyond the Masks pp. 134.

^[15]". hooks, bell Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black South End Press, Boston, pp. 12.

^[16]. 'Laaities' : kids. 'Kap a pyp': the lighting of a bottleneck containing a mixture of dagga and mandrax (a prescription tranquilizer) Casspir: police tank.

^[17] Bley, H South West Africa Under German Rule: 1894-1914, Heinemann, London, 1968, pp. 151.

^[18]. Mama Beyond the Mask , pps. 20-39.

^[19]. Bley, South West Africa Under German Rule , pp. 152.

^[20]. Von Trotha's proclamation of the 22/4/1905, cited in Heywood, A and E Maasdorp The Hendrik Witbooi Papers National Archives of Namibia, Windhoek, 1995, pp. 220.

^[21]. Diary entry 30/10/1912 in Carstens, P; G Klinghardt and M West (eds) Trails in the Thirstland: The Anthropological Field Diaries of Winifred Hoernle , Centre For African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1987, pp. 41.

^[22]. Silence is the best answer

^[23]. Jusy Mowatt "Look at Love" Sistren: the Heart of Reggae Jayrem Music, 1995.

^[24]. Cf. Eg. Penn, Nigel "Labour, Land and Livestock in the Western cape During the Eighteenth Century" in James, Wilmot and Mary Simons (eds.)Class, caste and colour: A Social and Economic History of the South African Western Cape Transaction Publishers, new haven, 1992, pp. 13.

^[25]. Cf. Eg. Moodie, Donald The Record: Or a Series of Official Papers Relative to the Condition and Treatment of the Native Tribes of South Africa A.A. Balkema, Cape Town, 1960 (1839-1841) vol 3.

[26] . Newton-King, Susan The Enemy Within: The Struggle for Ascendancy on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760-1799 Ph. D. Thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1992, pp. 113.

^[27]. Interview with notary, 1810, cited in Lindfors, Bernt "Courting the Hottentot Venus" Africa, Rome, 40, 1985 (133-148) pp. 142. Lindfors' translation gives 'Bosmen' as the people who killed Sarah Bartman's father, while the same word is translated in the Morning Post "Law Intelligence", 29/11/1810 as 'Jagay', i.e. 'jager' (hunter). It was a well-known habit of the settlers to blame everything, from murder to stocktheft, on the Khoekhoe guerillas who referred to themselves as Soanqua. I have accordingly translated the word as 'hunter', since this is the literal truth. Whoever shot the father was a hunter of cattle, and obviously of men.

[28] . Please note Fausto-Sterling's caution that the inscription on the museum case which holds her body states that she was thirty-eight at the time of death. Contompary sources, however, state that she was twentyeight; cf. Fausto-Sterling, Anne "Gender, Race and Nation" in Terry, J and J. Urla Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1996, pp. 28.

^[29]. 'Baba' is Afrikaans for baby. "Diary of Mrs Charles Mathews, cited in Altick, Richard The Shows of London Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1978, pp. 269.

[30] . Mentzel, Otto A Complete and Authentic Geographical and Topographical Description of the Famous and (All Things Considered) Remarkable African Cape of Good Hope Van Riebeeck Societty, Cape Town, 1925, II, pp 109-110.

[31] . Cf. Scully, Pamela, Liberating the Family? Gender, Labour and Sexuality in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853, Ph. D Thesis, University of Michigan, 1993, pp. 388.

^[32]. Bush, Barbara "Defiance or Submission? The Role of Slave Women in Slave Resistance in the British Caribbean" in Hine, Darlene Clark; King, Wilma; and Reed Linda (eds.) `We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible': A Reader In Black Women's History Carlson Publishing, New York, 1995, pp. 151.

[33] . 'A Constant Reader' cited in Lindfors 'Courting', pp. 136.

[35] . T.G. Babington, P van Wageninge, Affidavit filed on the 26/11/1810, cited in Lindforc "Courting", pp. 140.

[36] . Deposition of the Secretary of the African Association, 24/11/1810, cited in Altick The Shows, pp. 270.

[37] . "Humanitas" in The Examiner, 28/10/1810.

[38] . Justice Lord Ellenborough, cited in Morning Post "Law Intelligence", 28/11/1810.

[39] . It is interesting to note that the signature on the baptismal certificate: "A. Dunlop" is the same as the name of the ship's surgeon who accompanied Sarah and Cezar from the Cape, Alexander Dunlop. This may be a complete coincidence, if not, it suggests that these two men were the only people to have ongoing contact with auntie Sarah through the years she spent in Britain.

[40] Elbourne, Elizabeth "Terrible Ambiguities: Khoisan Visits to London in the Early Nineteenth Century" University of Dalhousie History Department Seminar, March, 1996, pp. 16.

[41] . Witbooi, Benjamin The Decline of the Khoikhoi in South Africa- from Freedom to Bondage: The Price of Embracing Mission Acculturated Christianity MA Thesis, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, 1983 , pp. 107.

[42] . Cited in Elbourne "Terrible Ambiguities", pp. 10.

[44] . Kirby, Percival "The Hottentot Venus" Africana Notes and News, 6:3, June, 1949.

[45] . Schiebinger, Londa Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science Beacon Press, Boston, pp. 170.

[46] . Cuvier, Georges "Extrait D'Observations faites sur le cadavre d'une femme connue a' Paris et Londres sous le Nom de Venus Hottentotte: Memoires Du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, 3, 1817 (259-274), pp. 264.