Not Your Venus

This podcast is a co-production of ABC Australia and CBC Podcasts. Two shillings. Tonight, that is all you have to spend. You know, it's Saturday night, let's go out and do something. London is an incredibly big city. It would have been incredibly easy to get lost in it. You are in Piccadilly Circus. But in this particular moment in time, there's no LED screens, a lot of the night, no bright red brushes, no tube entrances, no buskers doing edge shearing covers. And yet, even here, in 1810, one thing is exactly the same. It would have been intensely busy. That's when those posters catch your eye. You would see a big poster of her. And those would have been plastered around her venue. So you turned down one of those lineways. To 225 Piccadilly Circus. That's when you see the building. People were interested. An Egyptian temple complete with statues of gods in the middle of a row of Victorian terraces. To enter is to enter another time at another place. And you would walk in and she would be on the stage. Then a cage is revealed. That's what eyewitnesses say. Inside is a near naked black woman. And you could look at her, you know, for two shillings. To a room full of English eyes, there's something about her body that instantly stands out. She's supposed to have a really big behind. You know, big hips and a big bum. She is a woman who has a big bum. A rather large bottom that was visibly obvious. Freak shows were the popular form of entertainment. There's a man on stage, people call her keeper. And he effectively orders her to walk about, to sing and dance. She was being oppressed. She did not want to be in this space. This is the moment when they hand you a stick. If people wanted to touch her, they had to pay more. You could look at her, you could touch her body. Poking and prodding her. She was treated like a circus animal. You just get a sense of a woman who doesn't want to be there. The dignity was taken away from her. Even if she had agreed to be there, that's not the same as actually finally being on stage. And she would have gone through that night, after night, after night. You don't treat another human being that way. In the days of the British Empire, objects were taken. Objects that tell us about the world we have today. And sometimes, they weren't just objects. They were people. I'm Mark Fanell. And this is Stuff the British stole. And never again shall it be that this beautiful love will again experience the oppression of one by another. For Natasha, all of these started with Nelson Mandela. So we're talking about the late 90s. I really wanted to be back in Africa. And I wanted to feel what a new South Africa post apartheid would be like. Dr. Natasha Gordon Chippenberry is a writer and professor. And she was originally born in New York. But as an African American woman, she felt this pool of this particular moment in time to South Africa. But when she actually got there in the 90s, she was struck by these growing calls for the return of a body. There was a lot of discussion from Nelson Mandela's government about bringing Sarah Bartman's remains home. And so that's how I became really interested in thinking about Sarah Bartman. Her story was really powerful for me. In some ways, it's telling that this story starts with a body. Because for most of Sarah Bartman's life, that is all people thought she was, a body. A body that would fundamentally change the way women from across the African continent were seen and treated. Sarah Bartman's experience really set in motion a particular way that black women's bodies have been seen and accessed and represented through how Kim Kardashian and Nicki Minaj and all these other contemporary women utilized their bodies that really started in a negative space with Sarah Bartman. I think a lot of people have all kinds of ideas around her, but people haven't spent the time to really think about, "Well, who is this woman?" Right? And I think that's really important. So who is Sarah Bartman? Okay, according to her people, the Koi-san. So when I say the Koi-san, they were, they're considered the first nation indigenous people of the Western Cape in South Africa. And when the Dutch essentially colonized the Cape, technically they did not enslave the Koi-san, but essentially they decimated them, right? I mean, they took over their land, the disease that they brought with them wiped these people out in many ways. And so Bartman was part of a group of people who were essentially forced into Cape Town, right? That was the colonial Dutch space in order to survive, to work. Here in the bustling world of Cape Town, this is where Sarah Bartman's life takes turn. See, at this point, it was slowly turning from being under Dutch control to British control. And Sarah, or Sardaki, as the Dutch would have called her, would have been about 20 years old. And so she ends up in the property working for a Dutch farmer. From what we can gather, she was working as a maid, but her body had already caught attention. She was short, not quite five feet, and she was very courageous. She had a, you know, big hips and a big bomb. And people had already started to capitalise on her body. She was being displayed in Cape Town at the local hospital, which is where Alexander Dunlop, the ship's surgeon, first encountered her. Alexander Dunlop was one of two men that changed Sarah Bartman's life forever. He was a doctor, he had this sort of side hustle, supplying wild animals to shows in Britain. He was the architects of this particular plan, but he could not do it without the other men that would reshape Sarah's life. And his name was Henrik Cesar. Henrik Cesar was actually free black, which in that era in South African history was a designation of someone who had slave descent and had been freed at some point. There, either them or their parents had been freed at some point. And so the irony is that Henrik Cesar, who brought her to London with this Scottish ship surgeon, was in fact himself also a victim of racial prejudice and discrimination in Cape Town. And Dunlop, who was this Scottish surgeon, persuaded him that if they brought Sarah to England, they'd be able to make money by displaying her. All right, so can I just get you to start by introducing yourself and what you do? Sure, so I'm Professor Pamela Scully. And I am a professor at Emory University in Atlanta in the United States, but as you can hear from my accent, originally South African. In some ways, Pamela Scully and Natasha Gordon-Chippenberry have done a sort of kind of country swap. Natasha was in the US, drawn to South Africa. Pamela now works in the US, but South Africa, for her, is where it all started. You know, I grew up in a part of South Africa in the Vignettes. One of the areas where slavery was, you know, historically practiced. And so when it was just surrounded by history, it was so clear that the old names of the white farmers who've been there, you know, for centuries, were still there in control of the town. So history, I've always been interested, but it was very, it was personal. It was wrestling with being a white South African and coming to terms with responsibility for things that had gone before and things that were happening right then too. So Pamela, who are you hearing now? Just like Natasha from before, at this moment in time, it comes a little bit obsessed with this Sarah Bartman character. It was the '90s democracy that was coming to South Africa. And Pamela finds herself as this young historian, this grand sandstone building, and the heart of the city. This is the Cape Archives. And I just thought, well, I think I'm going to go to the card catalog and just see, is there anything about Sarah Bartman? And there was. That's how we started. Pamela and her research partner went digging to find out how a four-foot tall, Koi San made, could end up gracing the stages of London. And why did Sarah agree to this strange plan? Hatch by two men, she didn't really know. Her life was pretty horrible. Maybe London didn't seem the worst choice. The British arrived as sort of people who were talking about ending slavery and bringing a new dispensation to South Africa. So maybe in contrast to what she was experiencing, they seemed like things wouldn't be so bad. For two centuries, this moment has been debated. No, I don't believe that there was a negotiation and that Bartman signed anything or agreed to anything. She couldn't be formally enslaved because the Dutch had a policy of not enslaving people indigenous to an area. But she lived in all respects as someone who was engaged in urban slavery, which was that she had freedom of movement, but had to give her, if she had wages, they went to her master and she probably didn't have wages. But there is evidence that Elizonda Dunlop wanted to take her to England by himself and she refused to go and let Hendrix's arm went with her. So she did, it seemed, make some conditions. No, it's like tomorrow you're getting on the ship. We're packing you up with this and you're off. Whether she was ever in any position to say no is a question. It is complicated. Somehow a deal was struck between the Scottish Stockton Dunlop, the free black Caesar and 20 year old Sarah Bartman. They would set sail for England, she would be put on display, return to the Cape in five years' time. Once she's on that ship, she had no idea what's on the other side. In reality, she would never see this land again. I think it would have been exceptionally busy, because it was an extremely popular show. This is how we end up with your two-chilling night-outs. It was here that Sarah got her new name. Her stage name was the Hot and Top Venus. Come and see the Hot and Top Venus for a shilling. This is the voice of a woman who has dedicated years of her life to tracking down the stories of people who were brought from across the globe to be put on stages here in Britain. This is Dr. Sadea Koreshi. And according to her, among all of those attractions from around the world, Sarah Bartman was where she was kind of a star. The kind of phrase that's used in the advertising is possessing the kind of shape which has most admired amongst her countrymen. And she's also put in a costume that is really, really tight. She was dressed in sort of flesh-colored clothing and then with like some traditional beads around her waist and her neck. And is designed to look as if she's almost naked. And essentially she was asked to walk up and down the stage as people looked at her. There's a man on stage that sometimes people call her keeper. That keeper was Henrik Sazar. Henrik Sazar at first was the showman. Sazar was violent towards her. And he effectively orders her to walk about, push her and speak sharply to her. To sing and dance, you just get a sense of a woman who doesn't want to be there. The thing is, it wasn't just her body that pulled people here. The whole event was wrapped in this thin veneer of scientific discovery. An African savage, this woman, who was the link between the ape and the human and here with this discovery on the stage. But also, you almost certainly would have seen people poking and prodding her. And more than one night when it says that this is the thing that really kind of seems to upset her. If she didn't want to be touched, he would threaten to rip her. She essentially now is beholden to Henrik Sazar once they're in England because she has no ability to then survive in this new country, right? She's, he's providing food, he's providing shelter. She has to perform in order to then earn the wages that he gets off of her performances at Piccadilly. She's being oppressed. It's supposed to be like a weird question, but when you imagine that ruin with her in it, how do you feel? Well, no one's ever asked me that question before. I think she would feel incredible despair and loneliness. You know, thinking about how far she was from home, I think she would have been really shocked at the lack of humanity. The faces, looking out at that stage, the violence, she doesn't have freedom over her body. It is, it's very, very difficult to read those things, you know? They're really, really upsetting because, like I say, even if she had agreed to be there, that's not the same as being, as actually finally being on stage and going through that and she would have gone through that night off to night. On that stage, at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, a gaudy theatre covered in hieroglyphics, Sarah would have no way of knowing that her performance would help fuel a wave of human exhibitions. She's basically the earliest example of this in the 19th century and she becomes one of the most famous celebrities in the 19th century, but throughout the period, we have groups of Africans, Aboriginal Australians, Arabs, Indigenous Americans, by the later 19th century, you've got entire native villages being built if you think of a else caught. You know, the part of London that's famous for backpacker hostels and let's be honest, drunk in Australians. That was actually created to house these kinds of spectacles and in the later 19th century, it actually housed an entire African village. And if you see postcards from the period, you wouldn't necessarily know that they weren't, that this was somewhere in Britain. Before long, Sarah Bartman's mere existence started to cause a stir. The women were so intrigued by Bartman that you begin to get a new fashion style. It's called the bustle. So it's a different, I don't know if you know that dress style where there's padding on the behind. And so that whole fashion state becomes out of Bartman's presence because women were really anxious that their men were going to then be sort of lowered into wanting this sort of exotic paper, sexual, African woman. I find myself looking for pictures of Sarah Bartman's face. And there's a million posters printed of her body but close-ups of her actual face. When you find them, they show these with drawn eyes that are just so much older than they should be. She's 20 years old. What is this life like for her to be at the centre of all of this? There's this exceptionally long-standing interest in black women's bodies in their sexuality that exist. And in 1810, a newspaper article is about to bring all of that interest to a head. So this is from the 12th of October, 1810. That's in the morning chronicle. It says, "It is an offensed public decency with that most horrid of all situations, slavery." This was written about Sarah Bartman, by a man named Zachary McCorley. He hears about the display of Sarah Bartman in Piccadilly and goes to see what he thinks and is disturbed by what he saw. He becomes very, very upset. Decides that what he thinks he's seeing is, in fact, an evidence of slavery. So Zachary McCorley is one of the loudest voices in the UK to abolish slavery. He interprets her exhibition as evidence that she's enslaved. And so he goes to the Attorney General, writes the Attorney General, says, "You have to initiate an investigation into whether this woman is enslaved or free." Imagine he sees it as a quite an important test case, because this is only three years after the abolition of the British slave trade. Yes, by this point, the trading of slaves in the British Empire had been made illegal. It's been three years since slavery has been abolished, and so really the idea of British sensibilities and sort of, you know, the ending of slavery on our land is very much part of the narrative. Mind you, back in the colonies, it was still raging. No one got the message, right? They didn't send the telegram. They were enjoying their cotton and their sugar. So there's this moment where, although there are an immense number of people that are enslaved in British colonies, the British are still saying, well, we don't trade in them anymore. But that leaves Sarah Barton on British stages in a very precarious, almost dangerous position. She's a slave. The shows need to stop. You're offending us. Slavery's over. Get rid of it. So she becomes like this lightning rod for the abolitionist mission? Yes. I mean, it's really about this is offending the sensibilities of civilized British people, and so she must be removed. Through the entire documented court case, her name was never mentioned once. Only her owners. So how did they refer to her then? Caesar's property. Ultimately, it seems an interview was arranged with Barton. It was done in Dutch, translated into English for the court records. Crucially, Alexander Dunlop, the Scottish surgeon, the architect of this whole money-making venture, was in the room while she was interviewed. And so they say, "Well, did you come of your own free will?" And of course Sarah Barton says, "Yes, I did. I'm happy here. I'm a bit cold, but I have everything I want. All's good." And then outcomes, assigned piece of paper. And that is the point where her manager says there was a contract, produces the contract. And at that stage, Macauley doesn't have a chance. That's the end and so the court cases dismissed. There's long been questions about this contract. Many people asking, "Was it hastily signed up during the court case to legitimise the deal?" We don't know precisely when she signs a contract, whether she was coerced, whether she felt freely able to speak. She had to have a translator, you know, because she couldn't speak English. So we also don't know the quality of the translation and so there's so much that's difficult to know about that. So I think that's very, very difficult, probably impossible question to answer. Whether or not Sarah Barton, a woman who, to the best of our knowledge, could neither read nor write in English, knowingly signed a contract, remains highly debatable. What is obvious here is this. There was a profound power imbalance here. A lot of people like to talk about this contract was just so interesting. If there was a contract, then it would have been something that we probably would have found in the archives and the cape. It doesn't exist. You don't negotiate with your property. It's like talk. Why would you negotiate with your cow or your horse or your dog? It's your property. And that's essentially how she was perceived. She was perceived as someone who could be created with enough mystique and curiosity in England as an anomaly that they would make money and they were right. They took the right bat. Around 1814, Sarah Barton began to be exhibited in Paris. But behind closed doors, things were much worse. She's actually sold to an animal trainer that just tells you she sold to an animal trainer. We think she probably was prostituted. I see her final years as really horrible. Then one freezing December day in 1815. She dies penniless. We think she probably died of pneumonia. Sarah Barton was around 26 years old. But there was one final man who would violate Sarah in a way that is still shocking. The most important comparative anatomist of the day, French scientist of the period, one of them is called Georges Cuvier. Georges Cuvier is a towering figure in science. It was an ally of Napoleon Bonaparte. And within hours of Sarah Barton's death, he was granted permission to dissect Sarah. Cuvier organized for her body to be brought to the Jordan Plan to be having an autopsy. But it was not an autopsy to find out what she died. It was an autopsy to look at her body, to look at her bones, to look at her genitalia. Cuvier was trying to understand something with Sarah's body. An idea that had massively taken hold at the time, that each ethnicity of humanity was actually a different species that you could rank in intelligence. So there's this idea of the races of man. So you'd have white men, Indian, Asian, African, and then the coy and the sand. We're often seen as that kind of indeterminate group of people where science was not sure, were they, in fact, part of the animal kingdom, or were they the kind of the lower runs of humanity? He was trying to prove the literal scientific supremacy of white men with her brains and her genitals. Of course, the only thing lower than a black man was a black woman. Women are really seen as not equal to men to have even closer a relationship with animals. Black women are, you know, treated in really, really profoundly inhumane ways because of their existence. They're literally, you know, the way they look. When he reported back on the dissection, he said her small ears were similar to those of an orangutan and also compared her vivacity when she was alive to the quickness of a monkey. Cuvier doesn't just dissect her. He actually preserves some of her remains, you know, her brain, her genitalia. He also preserves her skeleton. He also makes a full body cast of her and that cast and that skeleton and those remains are put on display. So she quite literally becomes a museum object in that stage. And even then, the cast based away from people as though the only thing that made her interesting was her rear end. Just a body. Throughout all of her life, throughout so much of the documentation, Sarah is given no voice. The truth of what she went through has largely been silenced. The irony is if we are to give a voice to Sarah until the truth about what she actually experienced. The first step is actually her body. You know, the skeleton is a funny thing. People tend to think of bones as hard tissue to get left after death, but bones are a living tissue. So in life, the bones record everything that happens to that person during their life. Of all the people you've heard from, Alan Morris has come closer to Sarah Bartman than anyone. He's a forensics expert originally from Canada, but he's been living in South Africa for decades. I'm a retired professor of human biology at the University of Cape Town, but my interests have always been around skeletons of all things. So I've spent some time, quite a lot of time, actually, trying to find all the coissant people who ended up in skeleton collections. Including Sarah Bartman's. Virtually everyone who has looked at the skeleton that I know of and coming right up until the 1960s and 1970s was primarily looking at her as an example of her race. What I did, which was a little bit different, was changing from looking at a specimen to looking at a person. And I think that's the fundamental difference. What can her bones tell us about her life? What was the first things you noticed? Yes, there's quite a lot. For starters, written into her bones, you can see that at some point as a kid, she got very sick. The skeleton is a recording. You see it as a line. In Bartman's skeleton, perhaps her early teens, maybe 12, 13, 14, there's two arrest lines, which suggested she had been quite sick at that stage. But by and large, her childhood before Cape Town was healthy. And Sarah Bartman had really very, very nice teeth. There was no side of tooth decay, no side of excessive wear. What it suggested she had as a child, she had a generally healthy diet. But the bones will also tell us things that the documents won't say. There are some darker issues that came up when I looked at her skeleton. Damaged to the bones that had happened in life, so they weren't related to events of death. There was something that happened at least four or five years before her death. There's something called a perifracture. When somebody tries to hit you, your natural response is to raise your arm to block it. And the bone that gets broken when that happens is always the ulna usually towards the top. It's called a perifracture. Just hold your arm above your head to protect yourself, right? Your wrist, your forearm. Yeah, right there. That's where the impact would be. It's because you're protecting yourself. She flags on her right arm, classic position for a perifracture. When we look at the data today, modern data on injury sustained by women who have sustained domestic abuse, those are the sites that flag. It's where women get hit. But there's something important in the timeline that Alan found. You say it likely happened in the last four or five years of his life. Why do you think it happened in that window? Well, what happens when bone breaks, when it starts to heal, there's a swelling around the brake site. And the body lays down what's called a callus. If you could imagine it's the body putting a cast on a brake. Gradually, that callus should disappear. The longer the time post injury, the less visible that callus will be. In that window, four to five years before death, in that time period, it still should be fairly obvious. She shows those signs. She dies in 1815. Four to five years earlier is when that key trauma that you identified happened. Four to five years before her death was 1810. That was the year that she had the court case where a suddenly produced this document saying she'd been willingly displayed. Is it feasible that trauma she sustained was happening around the same time as that court case was happening? What did surprise me? I didn't know about that. But everything we do know about her life, that she was born into a very violent period. She's born into violence, so it doesn't surprise me. I wouldn't stand in a court of law and say this had to have been in 1810 when this injury happened. Who did it? Of course, it's no way to know. But the saddest part is that it could be related to that. She could have been coerced into testimony using violence. It's certainly possible. But it doesn't necessarily have to go that far. She probably suffered that kind of abuse simply by being a woman at that time in England. It took years of campaigning. But in 2002, Sarah's remains were returned to her people. Today I'm in Janusburg. I'm at home in Janusburg. It's a suburb called Haddon in the south of Janusburg in South Africa. It's the heart of winter, where they start to minus degrees. In Glen reckons, it only starts warming when the sun hits the windows of his house. My name is Glen Taibosch. I'm a paramount chief by Bloodline. Separated by centuries, Sarah and Glen are, in a sense, kin. I'm also the chairperson of the Houten-Coy and St. Council. Mark, I don't know if you should actually feel privileged. Because the Coy and the St. people, our DNA, we'd like to believe that we were the first human beings on Earth. How do you feel about what happened to Sarah in England and France? That is, it's inhumane. It hurts. She was first and foremost a coicene lady. You know, today in this modern day life, where we find ourselves living as Coy and St. people. The majority of us are displaced. We were moved and we were pushed. And I see the level of destruction that happened to our people. On this land, the past looms very large. We would just like to honor and try and make up for what the Ecolonialists did by taking a dignity, destroying a life like that. Just to apologize that she was treated like that, ever by other human beings. In death, Sarah Batman has come to mean something much more here. She definitely means a lot to us. We call her our Houten-Coy Queen. She is a symbol. She suffered the thing that women should not suffer. And we have to recognize that women still face these things. Even today, right? The idea and the permission that black women's bodies were accessible, meaning you could touch them. There was no one to protect those bodies. That idea, black girls' bodies, are hyper-sexualized, right? Very early, even for girl children, whether we're looking at domestic violence situations, whether we're looking at police situations. We can go on and on and on and on about how black women's bodies have not been cared for. And so that is why we need to look at someone like Sarah Batman. I think it's really important to understand what happened in the past and how did it get to the space where people can so readily feel. Like they can touch me, or they can say things about my body, or fat shame me, or why does it seem like there's a permissiveness? Well, that permissiveness comes from someplace, right? It comes from a place. It just didn't happen yesterday. It has historical groundings that were incredibly violent. Staff of the British Doll is produced by Zoe Ferguson, with help from Leia Simone Bowen at CBC Podcasts. Mixing by Hamish Kamaliri, the executive producer is Amruth Asli, the head of society and culture for ABCRN is Julie Browning. Special thanks to Dan Hudson and Dishen Moodley. This is a production of ABCRN in partnership with CBC Podcasts. It was created, written, and edited by me, I'm Mark Van Elk, and he's a hint for the last episode of this season. If you want to find it, look to Wonderland, and a girl named Alice.