THE ROOIBOS – UGH! UGH! WHY ARE YOU still drinking this crap? asked Doctor Renfield – at her elbow was cold. Joanna hadn’t noticed. The ping meant that somewhere in the world someone was writing about Saartjie Baartman. She clicked on the link that had landed in her Inbox and went to the site with the mixture of trepidation and anticipation that she always felt when she prepared for trespassers. There were so many of them, jostling leather-patched elbows in the genteel struggle for ethnographic empire. Where had all these academics come from? Who funded their ramblings? It wasn’t fair, Joanna told herself. I saw her first.
It was laughable now, but before she quit, Joanna had worried about what she would tell Viola when all the interviews and speaking engagements and receiving of honorary doctorates were over, the two of them back at the Museum together. Viola would be in her office in her plush chair with its seven settings, like First Class on an aeroplane, and Joanna would be bent around the knee-chair she’d inherited from Jan, an ergonomically sound, physically excruciating piece of furniture on a par with Saartjie’s packing case. She had grown too fat for it and the thing gave her vertigo. She was afraid she would drop forward, the keys on the keyboard imprinted on her forehead, her lumpen behind pitched in the air.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she would have to say, and Viola would launch into one of her tirades. Joanna could quote them chapter and verse. She sometimes played mental drinking games when Viola got going, at Doctor Renfield’s suggestion. Every time she heard “exile”, “the Struggle” or “my people”, Joanna rewarded herself with an invisible shot of tequila. It helped with the vertigo.
If Viola had been present at a tenth of the events she claimed, she would have to be seventy in the shade. She had been trained as a mercenary in the old Zaire, as a scientist in Moscow, as a doctor in Cuba. Joanna kept wanting to ask her, if all this was true, then why had she been seconded to a rinky-dink museum that no one visited?
What Viola was really good at was having friends in high places. It was a craft better than magic. Specifically, Viola was good at delegating, which was how Joanna had ended up writing every single word of Saartjie’s Ghost, and feeling quite proud of herself by the last page.
And she’s good at wearing turbans, don’t forget, said Doctor Renfield, who liked to keep score. They are so Pan-African.
Joanna wasn’t even sure what Viola’s real surname was – something dangerous and double-barrelled. She shifted identities as the mood took her, but Saartjie had become some kind of lynch-pin. Saartjie had given her a purpose.
All the publicity was good for the book, Joanna supposed, and it went some way towards foregrounding women’s rights – the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children had been set up – but Viola’s decisions weren’t entirely reliable. She was, for example, lying outright about the royalties from the book going to the Centre. It filled Joanna with disgust. On paper the woman was so fucking plausible. Convincing, even. And in the Victorian tea-party climate of the new South Africa, she looked okay from the outside. It was only when you dealt with her for long enough that she picked apart her own reasoning, someone fiddling at a scab until it lifted. You couldn’t argue with her. And this Saartjie thing had gone too far. It was one thing to think that you had inherited characteristics from your grandmother or beyond: it was another to think that you could slip on a real person’s skin and possess them.
Joanna, with her single, broken line of heritage, had trouble with a person becoming a thing. Just as she couldn’t merge the many Violas into a single believable whole, she couldn’t reconcile Saartjie-the-woman, the cheeks of her death cast swollen with booze, red as windfall apples, with Saint-Sara-the-symbol-of-exploitation, disembodied and deified in high-school History books. Joanna tried; she looked and looked at the cartoons and illustrations of Saartjie, just as they had in Piccadilly and Paris two centuries back, the lords and ladies and the hoi polloi, each thinking themselves one rung further up the ladder of civilisation. She looked for clues but found none.
Viola didn’t have the same qualms about transubstantiation, if this site was anything to go by. The link was to the South African government’s site, but Joanna had seen the same photographs used by the Department of Arts and Culture and a hundred other local rags. The sites were uniformly decked in ochres and yellows, as if all of South Africa owned one paintbrush. Tiny Bushmen hunted tiny eland along the borders, their lines rendered by designers with more ClipArt than guts. But Joanna could live with poor design: she had, after all, worked at the Spur.
It was the content that filled her with despair. Always ungrammatical and always out of date – which explained why she was only getting this alert now, long after the fact – it made her freelancer’s fingers itch with correction.
Joanna had seen it all before. There was a limited amount of information available about The Hottentot Venus in life or in death, and journalists went around in circles trying to generate content. There was the usual potted bio: stolen from her birthplace, blah-de-blah, the wrong date of birth again (where had that come from?), no mention of three children she’d had by different fathers by the time she jumped ship for England. Paraded, exploited, sinus pudoris, steatopygia, Cuvier, death, dissection. Nothing new there.
And the same photographs of the delivery of Saartjie’s death cast, skeleton and jars to the airport. The mortuary van was a small white vehicle with the new South African flag on it (not upside down, thank goodness, the way it was on the smaller sites). The six little Griqua children in traditional dress escorted the packing case through the crowds that included their fully clothed parents and friends.
The last photograph showed Viola and the French Minister of Arts and Culture standing with the open packing case between them. Viola stood coyly next to the box, which was upended on its pallet, while the minister lurked, grim and awkward, on the other side.
Saartjie, in the middle, saw nothing: the eyes of the death cast were closed as they always were, squinted in confusion. She was small, an odd shade of grey-brown, her arms bent at the elbow and stuck straight out from her torso as if she was sleepwalking or carrying a tray or waiting for a man to pull her strings. James had slept like that as a baby in his car seat, hands outstretched as if he was afraid he would fall. Saartjie’s lower lip gaped, exposing her teeth. Someone – whose idea was that? – had draped an absurd leopard skin cloak around her waist to hide her genitals. Viola mimicked the pose, holding her clipboard (devoid of any meaningful paperwork, Joanna was willing to bet) in front of her own hips, like a factory-floor foreman checking bales of cotton or bottles of milk. Her mouth was also open, but she was smiling, inappropriate, triumphant.
Viola’s finest hour, Joanna thought. The two Saartjies, then and now. How far we have come! There was some footage of her speech, but Joanna was in no mood for I am an African womanist of Gonaqua extraction. More than anything, she wanted to throw her arms around that stiff figure and protect her from any further scrutiny.
It was the infighting that galled Joanna – the pomposity of the politicians and the greed of the so-called sons and daughters. Here was an opportunity to cash in, and the queue grew longer every day – people standing with their hands out. There was even a woman who was claiming that she had a photograph of Saartjie, though she refused to let the newspaper reprint it. She had been put in her place by the reporter, who had pointed out that the first permanent photograph had only been produced ten years after Saartjie’s death.
But the hunt – unsuccessful, so far – was on for the descendants. Graaff-Reinet, where the Baartman clan was supposed to have ended up, hadn’t seen this much activity since the rinderpest.
“I’m all for nation-building,” Joanna had muttered to Oswald while he made tea one morning, “but this is ridiculous.”
“What is?”
“This!” She stabbed a finger at the screen. It was the KhoiSan Collective again. FIRST PEOPLE’S CONFERENCE HOSTS SARA BAARTMAN! “They’re actually going to parade her all over the country so people can howl and throw themselves at the casket! I ask you: how is that any different to making her jiggle her bits on stage?”
“Well, it’s more respectful, for a start.”
“Is it?”
“Joanna, no matter what you yourself think, Saartjie didn’t receive traditional funeral rites. Her soul is still trapped in her body.” He was matter-of-fact.
“Oswald, there is no body. There’s a death cast and a skeleton in a packing case. She was boiled down, for God’s sake!”
“You can’t ignore thousands of years of culture, Joanna. It’s what people want. It’s what they believe.”
“Do you believe that she needs” – Joanna checked the Eastern Province Mirror site again – “a ‘dressing rite by KhoiSan elders, to prepare the body for proper burial’? Do you know how much money they’re spending on this carnival?”
He shrugged. “She needs some kind of memorial service, don’t you agree? They can’t just tip her into a shallow grave and hope for the best.”
“But she was baptised as a Christian,” argued Joanna. Her face was getting hot. They were going round in circles, and she hated feeling like she was on the side of the thieving, murdering fucks that had streamed down to Africa from Europe for centuries.
“But this is her home,” he said gently. “That is the point. They went to bring her back home from exile. The prodigal daughter. She’s a symbol, Joanna. We all want to take someone back and show how we’ve forgiven them.” He smiled crookedly at her.
“Even if they aren’t asking for forgiveness?”
“Come on. Leave the nation-builders alone and have some tea.”
But she had kept looking at that stupid photograph, with Viola standing as close as she could to Saartjie, as if they were family.
And now here it was, back again.