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Abdulaziz Dino Gidreta
famous among naturalists and ethnologists, who measured, observed, drew, wrote re-
searches about, modelled, made waxen moulds and plaster casts, and scrutinized every
detail, of her anatomy, dead and alive (Hall, 1997: 265 and Palmburg 2001: 57). Visitors
were not only attracted by her size but by her protruding buttocks, a feature of Hotten-
tot anatomy (Gilman, 1985; Hall, 1997 and Palmburg, 2001). Totally, Saartje offered the
British public three kinds of sideshow stimulations: part freak, part savage, part cooch
dancer (Palmburg, 2001: 56).
However, the degrading nature of her exhibition did not please everyone who witnessed it
(Palmburg, 2001: 56). The exhibition in 1810 caused a public scandal in London inflamed
by the issue of abolition of slavery, since she was exhibited to the public in a manner
offensive to decency (Gilman, 1985: 213). As the pick of misrepresentation in the history
of human representation, several scholars emerge highly critical of the portrayal of the
Saartje Baartman (Gilman, 1985, Palmburg, 2001: 56-58, Hall, 1997: 265). Hall attempts
to draw couple of discontents from The Hottentot Venus’ case of representation including
the marking of difference, reducing of her to an ordinary nature, a physical body and body
parts.
According to Hall, there is high level obsession with marking ‘difference’. Saartje Baart-
man’s difference was represented as a pathological form of ‘otherness’. As she did not fit
the ethnocentric norm applied to European women, and fall outside a Western classifica-
tory system of what ‘women’ are like (1997: 265).
She was also represented and observed through a series of polarized conceptions like
‘primitive’, not ‘civilized’, and compared with wild beasts not to the human culture.
She was also subjected to an extreme form of reductionism - a strategy often applied to
the representation of women’s bodies, of whatever ‘race’. She was literally turned into a
set of separate objects, into a thing - ‘a collection of sexual parts’. She underwent a kind
of symbolic dismantling or fragmentation.
This naturalization of difference was signified, above all, by her sexuality. She was re-
duced to her body and her body in turn was reduced to her sexual organs. They stood
as the essential signifiers of her place in the universal scheme of things (Hall, 1997: 266).
Generally, Hall notes that Saartje Baartman ‘did not exist as a person’. She had been
disassembled into her relevant parts. She was - turned into an object, ‘fetishized’. This
substitution of a part for the whole, of a thing - an object, an organ, a portion of the body
- for a subject, is the effect of a very important representational practice - fetishism (1997:
266).
Such an early dehumanization of the antecedents of the current Africa must be the base
for the ongoing mis-conceptualizations of Africans as highly different from others, at least
