Epilogue to the Sara Baartman Story

The last five minutes of the film we watched in class today, The Life and Times of Sara Baartman, were devoted to the issue of whether her remains would be returned to South Africa, which was unresolved when the film was released in 1998. Ultimately, the French government did agree to return her body to South Africa, where she was buried on August 9, 2002. As you can find out from reading some of the news accounts and editorial opinion surrouning the campaign for the repatriation of her remains gathered on the website RaceSci, the film did leave out some important details of her life - a brief marriage to a West Indian Man and two children (evidently while during the time she was in London), and her descent into prostitution in Paris. Interestingly, South Africa chose to bury her on it's National Women's Day public holiday, and the account of her return in burial in the African National Congress's official publication Sephardi indicates the degree to which her story has become connected to the fight against sexism withing South Africa. I have not been able to determine if the national monument for her has been established.

For the French government and museum authorities, part of the issue was the fate of the many thousands of other specimens of human remains from indigenous peoples taken during the colonial era that remain in Museums. Again from the RaceSci site, here is an argument from British scientists that these remains have to much scientific value to be returned without some guarantee that they could continue to be used for research. In the United States, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act gave native Americans the right to reclaim remains if they could establish cultural affilication, though as this ethics website devoted to the issue indicates, it has hardly settled conflicts and controversies.

Obviously, our conversation about this film and the issues it raises could go in many directions. But here are some questions I think it raises:

1) Although scant historical information is available about what Sara Baartman felt about her experience, this film does tries to tell her story as much as possible from her perspective. Does considering her perspective change the way you feel about the racial science that was described in the article by Nancy Leys Stepan that you read last week?

2) Do you think the examination of Sara Baartman depicted in this film qualifies as science? Few if any people today would defend the scientific examination of Baartman that is depicted in this film. What was wrong with it? Do you find anything defensible about it?

3) Do you think it is important to remember what happened to Sara Baartman? Why? What is the most appropriate way to memorialize it? As the film indicates, the men who examined Sara were among the very elite of the scientific world. A google search of Cuvier will pull up dozens of biographical hits for him -- only one of which even mentions his racist views, but does not explain what they were. The closest to mentioning the Baartman episode is Wikipedia's entry, which has a link to an article about "Sarji Baartman, the Hottentot Venus which [sic] Cuvier Examined" that describes the episode you saw in the film. Why do Cuvier's many biographies omit reference to this episode? Is it right to ignore this? What are the implications of this for the stories we tell about science?

4) Are there any parallels in this 19th century case with today’s world?