Syphilis And Sexuality And Sara Bartman Analysis

‘One pinched her, another walked round her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; and one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, “natural.” This inhuman baiting the poor creature bore with sullen indifference, except upon great provocation, when she seemed inclined to resent brutality [...]. On these occasions it required all the authority of the keeper to subdue her resentment. At last her civilized visitors departed […].’

Taken from her native land of South Africa and brought to the island of Britain, Sara Baartman was put on display and exhibited to the general public. She was poked, prodded and pointed at as she stood, nearly half-naked, to be examined by the people of Europe owing to the abnormal nature
Vaughan states that there was a myth of black sexuality; and that although there was never any real effort put in by the colonial powers to understand these myths of the people that they were trying to civilize, they automatically assumed that black sexuality was associated with excessive sexuality. European men had never viewed a South African woman prior to their arrival in the present-day Western Cape and they were thus, greeted with an unfamiliar site in the form of the Khoisan women. These women were not the fair skinned, prudish women that they had grown accustomed to in England; these women would be labelled as primitive, exotic and hypersexual by the imperialist bureaucrats upon their return to ‘civilization’. Sara was the one bit of living proof that they could bring back to Britain in order to show the masses how obscure and backward the continent of Africa
The entry of images of the ‘sexualized savage’, such as the image labelled A Pair of Broad Bottoms, into popular culture were the first of their kind. Earlier representations of black people showed them as poor and degraded and mainly male; there seemed to be none that included either women or representations of any form of sexuality. Despite the fact that any public representations of sexuality had been deemed taboo, the increasingly visible appearance of black people in Britain gave rise to panic and thus, images of sexuality became permissible (provided that the images were of black