In truth, I’m surprised these didn’t show up sooner
Posted on | January 27, 2010 | 2 Comments
(thanks, Deb, for forwarding)
Colonial Hangover by Gail Smith (Gaily Fleur)
Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 4:23amLast week I dragged two girlfriends to The Space, a trendy clothes emporium in Rosebank. We weren’t there to shop. We were there to do a reality check: was a replica of Sarah Baartman really on sale for R798?
My friends reacted with abject horror and disbelief.
The Space’s decision to put Baartman back on sale reeks of monumental ignorance and gross insensitivity to what Baartman symbolises.
Baartman is a symbol of colonial arrogance and cruelty masked under the guise of science. She represents the colonial obsession with our butts. She symbolizes the hurtful and degrading expectation of licentiousness that was projected onto black women during colonialism. And which continues today.
Having worked on two films about Baartman, people often ask if I can confirm that she was a prostitute. I am asked to confirm that she was licentious, sexually indiscriminate and undiscerning stereotype of African femininity so embedded in the western imagination.
I am expected to affirm a stereotype that degrades the essence of my being.
Oageng Tsatsi, a publicist for Jacana publishers found herself in this invidious position recently when she circulated a cartoon of Julius Malema’s face superimposed over Baartman’s body in an email with the subject line: “Is this funny?”
The image had been on the website of the satirical t-shirt company Laugh it Off.
Tsatsi was suspended – and eventually fired – for her discomfit. Her inability to see the joke ultimately cost her job.
Many black women have heart wrenching stories of humiliation and hurt associated with their bums. Or have at some time in their lives been assumed to be a prostitute.
Western popular culture routinely capitalizes on the familiar assumption that black girls can be had by anyone and everyone.
It is this expectation that renders credible a scene in The Last King of Scotland, the film about Idi Amin’s relationship with Dr Nicholas Garrigan, a young, Scottish doctor in Uganda.Shortly after arriving in Uganda, Garrigan played by James McAvoy strikes up a conversation with a young Ugandan woman on a bus. A few scenes later the two are shown having wild sex.
The film shamelessly exploits the racist stereotype of the licentious and sexually undiscerning African woman.
Because of powerful interventions by black and African feminists big bottomed girls are reclaiming their bodies. They understand that their own self-hatred and the mockery their bums solicit spring from the same root: Sarah Baartman.
Young black women are increasingly challenging the racist stereotyping of black women that began with colonialism and continues today by celebrating their African Trade Marks. They’re renaming and reclaiming their ATMs: the big butts that for centuries have marked black women as sexually available.
As with the Baartman/Malema cartoon, The Space’s decision to sell the statuettes speaks to gross insensitivity and monumental ignorance of what Baartman represents to black women and progressive white people.
It speaks to the fact that while we may have had a Truth and Reconciliation commission to deal with apartheid, we have yet to have a TRC on colonialism.
Seeing Sarah Baartman on sale in a trendy high end clothing store indicates that the same old racist ideologies – of the oversexualised black body available to anyone for a price – are still at work in South Africa in 2010.
That the colonial appetitie for the exotic, erotic, big butted, black woman that greeted Baartman in the 1800s is alive today. And can be satisfied by forking out R798.
It speaks to the misguided perception that everything’s ayoba now and we can just laugh it off.
Its not.
And we’re not laughing.
Comments
2 Responses to “In truth, I’m surprised these didn’t show up sooner”
Leave a Reply
my other sites
photography groups
sites where I contribute
81 Press
- Taking a Break February 8, 2012Site visitors will probably notice that I haven’t updated here frequently. I am taking a break from my site(s) for at least the summer. I’ve been working in this field for 25 years and I’m burned out on photography and art, the site(s) are in need of major updates/ revamping/ retooling, social media is exhausting, [...] […]
- A New Mission for Aperture? February 8, 2012[…]
- Mambu Badu’s Inaugural Magazine February 8, 2012Danielle was briefly a contributor to this site; I am very excited to hear about her latest venture, the collective and now journal Mambu Badu “that seek to find, expose, and nurture emerging female photographers of African descent.”  Congrats, Danielle! As you may (or may not) know, last fall, I co-founded Mambu Badu, a photography collective […]
January 27th, 2010 @ 9:54 am
“It is this expectation that renders credible a scene in The Last King of Scotland, the film about Idi Amin’s relationship with Dr Nicholas Garrigan, a young, Scottish doctor in Uganda.Shortly after arriving in Uganda, Garrigan played by James McAvoy strikes up a conversation with a young Ugandan woman on a bus. A few scenes later the two are shown having wild sex.”
Of course thats the only movie where man meets girl on bus/train/plane and they proceed to have sex. What planet are you on?
January 27th, 2010 @ 10:39 am
I, like the author, am on the planet of our own perspective on history based on personal experience and research. She rightly points out a scene in a film that reinforces a particular stereotype, period. It has nothing to do with that scene being replicated in countless other films–that’s another issue.