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Race and Erasure: Sara Baartman and Hendrik Cesars in Cape Town and London
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2012
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References
1 This article is drawn from a larger work, Crais, Clifton and Scully, Pamela, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ, 2008)Google Scholar.
2 On the African Institution, see Michael J. Turner, “The Limits of Abolition: Government, Saints and the 'African Question,’ c. 1780–1820,” English Historical Review 112, no. 446 (April 1997): 319–57. Cesars's name is spelled in a variety of ways throughout the sources. We have taken the spelling from his will. See “Will of Cesars and Staal,” 29 March 1810, filed 16 May 1811, Cape Archives (CA), MOOC 7/1/61.
3 Records regarding the Hottentot Venus, 21–28 November 1810, The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), King's Bench (KB) 1/36/4.
4 For examples of British popular interest, see Mrs. Mathews, Charles, Memoirs of Charles Mathews, vol. 4 (London, 1839), 136–39Google Scholar; Chambers, Robert, ed., The Book of Days: a miscellany of popular antiquities, in connection with the calendar, including anecdote, biography, & history, curiosities of literature and oddities of human life and character, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1863–64), 2:621Google Scholar; Lysons, Daniel, Collectanea; or a Collection of Advertisements and Paragraphs from the Newspapers, Relating to Various Subjects, vol. 2, unpublished scrapbook, British Library, London, c.103.k.Google Scholar See also the Bodleian Ballads Catalogue online, Harding B 25 (863) for a ballad, “The Hottentot Venus.”
5 On Italy, see Sòrgoni, Barbara, “‘Defending the Race’: The Italian Reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 411–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Kirby, Percival R., “The Hottentot Venus,” Africana Notes and News 6, no. 3 (1949): 55–61Google Scholar, “La Venus Hottentote en Angleterre,” Aesculape 33, no. 1 (1952): 14–21, “More about the Hottentot Venus,” Africana Notes and News 10, no. 4 (1953): 124–33, “The ‘Hottentot Venus’ of the Musee de L’Homme, Paris,” South African Journal of Science 50, no. 12 (1954): 319–22, “A Further Note on the 'Hottentot Venus,'” Africana Notes and News 11, no. 5 (1955): 165–66.
7 Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.
8 Altick, Richard, The Shows of London: A Panoramic History of Exhibitions, 1600–1862 (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar; Fausto-Sterling, Anne, “Gender, Race and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of Hottentot Women in Europe, 1815–1817,” in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, ed. Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), 66–95Google Scholar; Sharply-Whiting, T. Denean, “The Dawning of Racial-Sexual Science: A One Woman Showing, A One Man Telling,” in Ethnography in French Literature, ed. Norman, Buford (Atlanta, 1996), 115–28Google Scholar; Strother, Z. S., “Display of the Body Hottentot,” in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Lindfors, Bernth (Bloomington, IN, 1999), 1–61Google Scholar; Magubane, Zine, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminist Post-structuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the Hottentot Venus,” Gender and Society 15, no. 6 (December 2001): 816–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Recently, Sadiah Qureshi has argued that Sara Baartman's display was part of a much wider history of freak shows and the display of indigenous people. See Qureshi, Sadiah, “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus,'” History of Science 42, no. 2 (June 2004): 233–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Abrahams, Yvette, “Disempowered to Consent: Sara Bartman and Khoisan Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony and Britain,” South African Historical Journal 35 (1996): 89–114Google Scholar, and “Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington, IN, 1998), 220–36.
10 This is the danger in an approach that assumes victimization without leaving any room for agency. See Abrahams, “Disempowered to Consent.” For a popular treatment, see Holmes, Rachel, African Queen: The Real Story of the Hottentot Venus (New York, 2007).Google Scholar See Sharon Marcus, “The Evidence of Theory in Sexuality Studies,” paper presented at the session on evidence at the North American Conference on British Studies, Denver, October 2005, for a discussion of how theories help render particular experiences.
11 For a detailed discussion of this question, see Clifton Crais, “Heterographies: Writing the Self after the Linguistic Turn,” Distinguished History Lecture, Southwestern University, 26 October 2006; and Scully, Pamela, “Peripheral Visions: Heterography and Writing the Transnational Life of Sara Baartman,” in Biography across Boundaries: Transnational Lives, ed. Deacon, Desley, Russell, Penny, and Woolacott, Angela, submitted to Duke University Press for publicationGoogle Scholar.
12 On subjectivity, see Woollacott, Angela, “The Fragmentary Subject: Feminist History, Official Records, and Self-Representation,” Women's Studies International Forum 21, no. 4 (July 1998): 329–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie, “Narratives of Deviance and Delight: Staring at Julia Pestrana, the ‘Extraordinary Lady,’” in Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, ed. Powell, Timothy B. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1999), chap. 4.Google Scholar
14 Butler, Judith, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Both Strother in “Display of Body Hottentot” and Qureshi in “Displaying Sara Baartman” discuss Sara Baartman's exhibit in the context of the history of freak shows in London. The advertisement in Bury St. Edmunds, in October 1812, claimed that the Hottentot Venus was a “perfect Specimen of that most extraordinary Tribe of the Human Race, who have for such a length of Time inhabited the more Southern Parts of Africa, whose real Origin has never yet been ascertained” (printed notice, “Hottentot Venus at Mr. Crask’s, Angel Hill, Bury St. Edmunds,” 1783/91, Suffolk Record Office, Bury St. Edmunds).
16 Strother, “Display of Body Hottentot,” 29, 35. On the links between imperial knowledge production and racism, see Skotnes, Pippa, Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen (Cape Town, 1996)Google Scholar.
17 Altick, Shows of London, 34. For an excellent analysis of the notion of freaks, see Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.
18 Altick, Shows of London, 45–46.
19 See Faery, Rebecca, Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (Norman, 1999)Google Scholar; Townsend, Camilla, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (New York, 2004).Google Scholar
20 Cook, however, did not imagine that such trappings of culture would indeed change Omai into an Englishman. See Wilson, Kathleen, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), chap. 2Google Scholar.
21 See Wilson, Island Race, chap. 2; on the Irish and portrayals of Africans in a later period, see Nadja Durbach, “Exhibiting the Cannibal King: Irishmen and Africans in the Victorian Freakshow,” paper presented at the panel on “Spectacular Men,” at the North American Conference on British Studies, Denver, 2005. In these later ethnological exhibits, promoters exhibited people ostensibly from other countries in groups, often in family groups, and in settings supposed to represent timeless ethnographic truths about their natal society.
22 See, e.g., Qureshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman”; Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation.”
23 We are grateful to Jonathan Frost, curator of the Bensusan Museum of Photography at Museum Africa, in Johannesburg, for his help with our research on Kirby. Kirby composed music informed by his interest in indigenous musical forms. His “Three African Idylls” was performed on 3 July 2004 at the NewMusicSA music festival in Grahamstown, South Africa.
24 Authors have accepted that she was twenty-six when she died, which places her birth in 1789. This seems incorrect. Sara gave birth to a child around 1796, which, assuming the 1789 date, would have placed Sara at seven years old. Our cross dating of land records showing when settlers came into the region, the movement of Pieter Cesars to the frontier, and testimony by a variety of witnesses, including Sara Baartman, lead us to put her age at much closer to forty when she died. The deed of the farm from which Sara's surname is derived can be found at CA RLR 17/1, 4 March 1763. See esp. Cape Papers: Correspondence, Reports and Legal Papers Concerning the Female Saartje's Departure to and Exhibition in England, 1810–11, a microfilm of records located in the PRO, Northern Ireland, ZI 1/25 2431/12/1, CA. The inscription in the museum case at the Jardin des Plantes that held her remains listed her age at death as thirty-eight, and thus born in 1777 (Kirby, “Hottentot Venus,” 61).
25 For a general introduction, see Elphick, Richard and Giliomee, Hermann, eds., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Middletown, CT, 1988)Google Scholar.
26 This we know from the records of men contracted to labor for white farmers: Contracts, 1786, Magistrate of Graaff Reinet, (1/GR) 15/43, CA.
27 Thanks to Lydia de Waal, Petra Kalshoven, and Zoe Wicomb for this insight.
28 Loan farm deed granted to David Fourie, 4 March 1763, CA RLR 17/1.
29 We are able to trace the location of settlers through land and estate records. Our very deep thanks to Leonard Guelke for sharing his extensive (Excel) database with us, EDLF1.WK3 and EDLF2.WK3. This database contains information on all farms established during the Dutch period.
30 For information on the location of various Baartmans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Contracts, 1786, (1/GR) 15/43, CA; tax roll, Theopolis, n.d., J 405; tax roll, Bethelsdorp, 1822, J 405.
31 Various members of the Baartman clan have Christian names such as Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob. See Contracts, 1786, (1/GR) 15/43, CA. This suggests that these were members of the second generation of people associated with European colonists. On the impact of missionaries, see Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991), esp. 60–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 In November 1810, Sara said that Pieter Cesars brought her to the Cape (TNA: PRO, KB 1/36/4). Anna Catharina Staal's deposition mentioned Pieter's employer, the butcher Jan Michiel Elzer (statement by Anna Catharina Staal, in Civil Court, Cape Town, February 26, 1811, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA). We know that Sara was in the Western Cape by the beginning of 1799 because Elzer died in February of that year. See Cape Papers, 1810–11, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
33 Cape Papers, 1810–11, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
34 Information on the Cesars household can be found in the tax rolls, esp. List of Free Blacks, 1797, J 443, CA; and the Cape tax rolls for 1805 (J 39) and 1807 (J 41). On Sara's working life, see Cape Papers 1810–11, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
35 Cape Papers, 1810–11, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
36 Ibid.
37 Cape Papers, 1810–11, Anna Catharina Staal, 26 February 1811, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
38 Shell, Robert, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hanover, NH, 1994)Google Scholar.
39 Cape Papers, 1810–11, Anna Catharina Staal, 26 February 1811, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
40 The Dutch East India Company established the slave lodge in the seventeenth century to house company slaves. Under the British the slave lodge was also a hospital. Dunlop stated in a memorial to Caledon that he looked after “sick Hottentots” and other people (Memorial of Dunlop, 16 June 1809, Colonial Office [CO] 3871, CA).
41 Cape Papers, 1810–11, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
42 On urban slavery, see Bank, Andrew, The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 1806–1843 (Cape Town, 1991)Google Scholar.
43 Cape Papers, 1810–11, Anna Catharina Staal, 26 February 1811, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
44 For a discussion of free blacks at the Cape, see Elphick, Richard and Shell, Robert, “Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, Settlers, Slaves and Free Blacks, 1652–1795,” in Elphick and Giliomee, Shaping of South African Society, chap. 4Google Scholar. For different definitions of free black status, see Robert Shell, “Cape Slave Transactions 1658–1731,” http://www.stamouers.com/Shell.PDF, n. xvii.
45 On marriages between settlers and free blacks, see Malherbe, Vertrees C., “Illegitimacy and Family Formation in Colonial Cape Town,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 1153–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 On the early Cape, see Elphick and Giliomee, Shaping of South African Society. For details relating to Sara Baartman's time in Cape Town, see Cape Papers, 1810–11, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
47 On gender and slavery, see Scully, Pamela, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth, NH, 1997), chap. 1Google Scholar.
48 Ross, Robert, “The Occupation of Slaves in Eighteenth Century Cape Town,” Studies in the History of Cape Town 2 (1980): 1–14Google Scholar.
49 Elphick and Shell, “Intergroup Relations,” 208.
50 Given the sources available, we cannot prove such an analysis, but given the ways in which European travel accounts produced ideas about Hottentots and, especially, Hottentot women, this seems likely.
51 Sparrman, Anders, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, and Round the World; But Chiefly into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the Year 1772, to 1776, 2nd ed. (London, 1785)Google Scholar; Vaillant, Francois Le, Travels into the interior parts of Africa by the way of the Cape of Good Hope; in the years 1780, 81, 82, 83, 84, and 85, 2nd ed., trans. M. Le Vaillant (London, 1796)Google Scholar.
52 Cezar, Hendrik, “Letter to the Editor,” Morning Chronicle, 23 October 1810, 4Google Scholar.
53 Material for the HMS Diadem and its sister ship, the Raisonable, is located at TNA: PRO ADM 37/1973, 51/2284, 51/2751; see also David Lyon, The Sailing Navy List (London, 1993).
54 Testimony of William Bullock, 21 November 1810; Testimony of George Mooyen, 28 November 1810, TNA: PRO KB 1/36/4.
55 According to Mrs. Charles Matthews, the actor John Kemble was shocked: “They ill-use that poor creature … how very shocking!” Sara apparently much appreciated his empathy (Altick, Shows of London, 270).
56 Humanitas, “Female Hottentot,” Morning Chronicle, 17 October 1810, 3; “Female Hottentot,” Morning Chronicle, 24 October 1810, 3.
57 Affidavit of Zachary Macaulay, 17 October 1810, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
58 Sworn Deposition of Samuel Solly, 27 November 1810, TNA: PRO KB 1/36/4.
59 See Elbourne, Elizabeth, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal, 2002)Google Scholar.
60 Sir Barrow, John, An account of travels into the interior of southern Africa, in the years 1797 and 1798 (London, 1801–4)Google Scholar.
61 Qureshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman,” 253 n. 13; Strother, “Display of Body Hottentot,” 52 n. 40; Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race and Nation,” 76.
62 Kirby, “Hottentot Venus,” 59.
63 List of Free Blacks, 1797, J 443, CA.
64 Malherbe, “Illegitimacy and Family Formation,” 1163.
65 Elphick and Shell remark that free blacks were generally forced into smaller shopkeeping and artisanal trades and that “colonists and officials could very easily stop the free blacks from rising beyond a certain point by not extending credit.” While they say direct evidence for this is hard to find, they say that no free black ever applied for a license in 1715, which would enable them to “practice the more lucrative trades” (Elphick and Shell, “Intergroup Relations,” 224).
66 Will of Jacobus Johannes Vos, 6 May 1819, CA, MOOC 7/1/79. A list of property is located in J 37 (tax roll), 1803. For a discussion of the Vos family, see Elbourne, Blood Ground, 114.
67 Cape Papers, 1810–11, Anna Catharina Staal, 26 February 1811, ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
68 The last record we have of Hendrik Cesars is the letter he writes from Minories, in the East End (Hend. Casar, Morning Chronicle, 22 October 1810). He was dead by 1815. The tax roll for 1815, J 46, CA, identifies Staal as a widow, as do subsequent tax rolls. We suspect that Hendrik had died by May 1811, when Staal filed their will, or at least that Staal concluded he was dead. See “Will of Cesars and Staal,” 29 March 1810, filed 16 May 1811, CA, MOOC 7/1/61.
69 The letter was signed “Hend. Casar” (Morning Chronicle, 22 October 1810). Hendrik could not write his name in Dutch, let alone compose a letter. His will shows him making a mark instead of signing his name (“Will of Cesars and Staal,” 29 March 1810, filed 16 May 1811, CA, MOOC 7/1/61). Free blacks had virtually no access to education. The British had been in the Cape scarcely more than a decade, time enough to master some English but not the written word.
70 “Law Intelligence; Court of the King's Bench, Nov. 28, ‘Hottentot Venus,'” Morning Chronicle, 29 November 1810, 3. The statement is vague as to who acted to remove Cesars—“the keeper,” presumably. Was this Dunlop, in which case he was more involved than he claimed; or rather, as Cesars suggested in his letter, did he himself decide to forgo being involved in the actual tableau as a way of reducing conflict?
71 On colonial cultures and the modernity of racism in South Africa, see Crais, Clifton, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order, 1770–1865 (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar; Scully, Pamela, “Rape, Race and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Cape Colony, South Africa,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 335–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 For an elegant discussion of identity as relational, see Wilson, Island Race. See also Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter?” for an excellent discussion of the theoretical suppositions informing much scholarship on Baartman.
73 Morning Herald, 23 November 1810, 3.
74 For discussion of these, see Kirby, “Hottentot Venus”; Altick, Shows of London.
75 Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, personal communication, November 2006.
76 Duffield argues that life for both African and white working-class women in this period was fragile and very difficult: “The lived experience of plebeian African women in the labour market was not strongly differentiated from that of white plebeian women” (Ian Duffield, “Skilled Workers or Marginalized Poor? The African Population of the United Kingdom, 1812–52,” in Africans in Britain, ed. David Killingray [Ilford, 1994], 73).
77 Norma Myers estimates that there were only some five thousand black Londoners at the end of the eighteenth century (Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain c. 1780–1830 [London, 1996], chap. 2). Myers discusses how difficult it is to come up with accurate numbers.
78 Wedderburn, Robert, Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, Ian (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. See also Edwards, Paul, “Unreconciled Strivings and Ironic Strategies: Three Afro-British Authors of the Late Georgian Period,” in Killingray, Africans in Britain, 28–48Google Scholar.
79 Rendell, Jane, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space, and Architecture in Regency London (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 34Google Scholar. St. Giles was also known as the Irish District (Henderson, Tony, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 [London, 1999], 18Google Scholar).
80 The scholarship on black London concentrates on either the eighteenth century or the Victorian era; see Duffield, “Skilled Workers of Marginalized Poor?” 48–52, for a discussion of the gaps in the historiography. On this period in particular, see Killingray, Africans in Britain, chaps. 1 and 2; Land, Isaac, “Bread and Arsenic: Citizenship from the Bottom Up in Georgian London,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 89–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Important works on black British history include Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984); Gerzina, Gretchen, Black London: Life before Emancipation (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995)Google Scholar; Lorimer, Douglas, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Shyllon, Folarin, Blacks in Britain, 1555–1833 (London, 1977)Google Scholar.
81 Lewis (1779–1856) had trained at the Royal Academy near Piccadilly Circle. He gained fame in the early 1800s for his work in Chamberlaine's, John, Original Designs of the Most Celebrated Masters in the Royal Collection (London, 1812)Google Scholar and had a good career doing aquatints of American landscapes. Like other painters, he worked on commissions for members of the Royal Family. For references to Lewis, see Kenneth C. Lindsay, “John Vanderlyn in Retrospect,” American Art Journal 7, no. 2 (November 1975): 79–90, 83. The National Portrait Gallery online lists his paintings: http://www.npg.org.uk. On aquatints, see Michael Twyman, Printing 1770–1970; An Illustrated History of Its Development and Uses in England, 2nd ed. (London, 1998), chap. 6, 88.
82 See Strother, “Display of Body Hottentot,” for an excellent discussion of the images.
83 See “Sartjee, the Hottentot Venus,” London, published as the Act directs, September 18, 1810, by S. Baartman, MA 54/824, Museum Africa, Johannesburg; “Sartjee, the Hottentot Venus. Exhibiting at no. 225 Piccadilly. Lewis Delin et. Scupt. London. Published as the Act Directs, March 14th, 1811, by S. Baartman, 225 Piccadilly”; Lysons, Collectanea, vol. 1, facing p. 102, by permission of the British Library. On copyright, see Clayton, Timothy, The English Print, 1688–1802 (New Haven, CT, 1997)Google Scholar, esp. chaps. 3 and 6. See also McCreery, Cindy, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 2004)Google Scholar for an analysis of popular prints. We are grateful to Cindy McCreery for discussing with us the possible implications of Baartman being listed as publisher of the prints.
84 Correspondence with Michael Twynam, 26 April 2006.
85 Kirby, “Further Note on 'Hottentot Venus,'” 165–66. In April 1811 Sara Baartman left London and toured the provinces as part of the pleasure fair circuit. By October 1812 she was in Bury St. Edmunds, appearing at the local fair, where tickets were sold at half the price of what people paid to see her in 1810. Her sale to an animal trainer in Paris in January 1815 is further evidence of the continuing degradation she suffered before her death at the end of 1815. On her time in Paris, see Badou, Gerard, L’Enigme de la Venus Hottentote (Paris, 2002)Google Scholar; Holmes, African Queen; and Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, chap. 6.
86 It is striking that Macaulay never brought the status of the two African boys brought from Cape Town to the attention of the court. For a discussion of Macaulay's reasons for structuring the case in the way he did, see Pamela Scully, “Sara Baartman, Zachary Macaulay and Sierra Leone,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, San Francisco, November 2006.
87 “Law Report, Court of the King's Bench, November 24,” Morning Herald, 26 November 1810, 3. See also “Copy from Mr Guerney's Short Hand Notes of the Proceedings in the Court of King's Bench, 24 November 1810,” ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
88 “Law Intelligence, Court of the King's Bench, Saturday, November 24, 1810, The Hottentot Venus,” Morning Chronicle, 26 November 1810, 3. See also “Copy from Mr Guerney's Short Hand Notes of the Proceedings in the Court of King's Bench, 24 November 1810,” ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
89 See comments of Lord Ellenborough and the attorney general in “Law Intelligence, Court of the King's Bench, Saturday, November 24, 1810, The Hottentot Venus,” Morning Chronicle, 26 November 1810, 3.
90 “Law Intelligence, Court of the King's Bench, Saturday, November 24, 1810, The Hottentot Venus,” Morning Chronicle, 26 November 1810, 3.
91 Kirby, “More about the Hottentot Venus,” 125. See “Statement regarding testimony of The Hottentot Venus 27 November 1810, signed affadavit of Messrs. Solly and Mooijen,” 28 November 1810, TNA: PRO, KB 1/36/4.
92 “Hottentot Venus,” Morning Chronicle, 29 November 1810, 3. Cesars had already left the stage. By this time he had lived in Minories for at least a month.
93 “Hottentot Venus,” Morning Chronicle, 29 November 1810, 3.
94 “Statement regarding testimony of The Hottentot Venus 27 November 1810, signed affadavit of Messrs. Solly and Mooijen,” 28 November 1808 [sic], TNA: PRO, KB 1/36/4.
95 Two subsequent apparent interviews in Paris seem to have been cobbled together by authors rather than being genuine interviews. Sara gave her statement in Dutch, her second language, not her natal tongue, although by this time she would have been fluent in Cape Dutch, having spoken the language since she was at least four. The Dutch of the Cape was more akin to Flemish but would have been understood, if imperfectly, by Solly and Moojen.
96 Note that the Morning Post's summary of Gaselee's statement to the King's Bench said that she said she had “a black boy and girl to wait upon her,” 29 November 1810.
97 “Copy from Mr. Gurney's short hand notes of the proceedings in the court of Kings Bench 28th November 1810,” ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
98 Abrahams, “Disempowered to Consent,” 89–114.
99 “Hottentot Venus,” Morning Chronicle, 29 November 1810, 3.
100 For a discussion of this issue, see Abrahams, “Disempowered to Consent,” 89–114.
101 “Copy from Mr. Guerney's Short Hand Notes of the Proceedings in the Court of King's Bench, 24 November 1810,” ZI/25 2431/12/1, CA.
102 Macaulay, we argue, took up the case in the first place as a means of defending himself against accusations by the governor of Sierra Leone, Thompson, that Macaulay and others had been complicit in slavery in that colony. See Scully, “Sara Baartman, Zachary Macaulay and Sierra Leone.”
103 For a discussion of Baartman's self-fashioning in Paris, see Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, chap. 6. Magubane and Strother argue also that Baartman was racialized in France in a different way than in England (Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter?”; Strother, “Display of Body Hottentot.”)
104 Ultimately, these indigenous women shared in many ways the same fate. For a consideration, see Scully, Pamela, “Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World,” in “Special Issue on Indigenous Women and European Men,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3 (December 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Pocahontas and Malintzin, see Camilla Townsend's two important books: Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, and Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque, NM, 2006). On Krotoa, see especially Malherbe, Vertrees C., Krotoa, Called “Eva”: A Woman Between (Cape Town, 1990)Google Scholar. See also Wells, Julia, “Eva's Men: Gender and Power in the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–74,” Journal of African History 39, no. 3 (1998): 417–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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