JOANNA HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN ABOUT Saartjie until The News at Nine carried the Baartman memorial celebrations – the same footage, over and over again, of girls dancing around the gravesite, of wind-blown portly ministers, their wives in East African turbans and cheap gold bracelets. Joanna and Jan sat together on the couch, a rare occurrence.
“Why are you still here? Go to bed!”
“I know. I will. I just want to watch this,” she told him. There was something mesmerising about the scene. When James is in high school, he’ll probably have to watch this for History, she thought, or Social Sciences, or whatever it’s called then. Joanna wasn’t complaining. The governmental flipping and flopping meant that the textbooks had to be rewritten every two years or so as the curriculum changed. She would be making a nice living out of the confusion and misdirection, thank you very much, just as soon as she had decided how exactly she would earn her keep.
Joanna got up and drew the curtains over the picture windows. Although Jan didn’t care, she hated the idea of anyone outside being able to look in at them. And tonight was so bright, as well, the fat moon wading through clouds like the old swimmers that thronged on the beach. Joanna had a quick look over the garden, satisfied. Big enough to bury us in, she thought. Ha ha.
The Baartman Booth was open for business, whether you were a high-school drop-out living on a reserve and turning tricks for Taiwanese tourists, or a junior lecturer scrambling for a place on the first rung of the university ladder. Saartjie was a safe bet: distant enough to be snugly in the past, close enough to look a little like some of the people hungrily crowding round, howling that they were her descendants. Any one of the wide-hipped women waiting for the bus on Kommetjie Road could have been a blood relation.
You could say anything you liked about Saartjie – Joanna knew because she had done it herself – precisely because she was already dead and dishonoured. The only place to go was up.
The new government was making sure that Saint Sara was ascending, rescued from her position as the prostitute of the European media, dead of “an eruptive sickness”, syphilis or smallpox or cirrhosis, the diseases of the exploited and unhappy.
Or else she was the sexless martyr that Thabo Mbeki had invented and signed away R10 million to repatriate like a fractious Nigerian grandmother. He had forked out – We had forked out, thought Joanna. We eight per cent of the population that pays income tax! Me, myself and I! – another R1 million for the dancing girls, snacks and SABC coverage during the day-long media circus that was supposed to have been her funeral-cum-memorial service on August the ninth. Women’s Day.
“Because what this country needs is more talk,” Joanna said to Jan as they watched the tiny pubescent tits of the Griqua girls jiggling on the TV. “Not houses or clinics or scholarships. Big parties are the thing.” Jan, who had once filmed The Reed Dance, said nothing. He was concentrating on the buckskin bikinis on-screen.
It depressed Joanna that Saartjie would never just be what she was: a tired, lonely woman in her thirties who had looked around her, seen that she had made the wrong choices, and given up. It was despair, when you got down to it, the Shakespearean universal, despite the melodrama that followed the dead woman around. Nunnish or whoreish, Saartjie was trapped in a foreign language. They talked a lot about her freedom, the greasy men on the screen who had their speeches written by their underpaid aides. Saartjie wasn’t an ambitious little baggage who had signed herself into a silly contract and sent herself to her death. No, she was the Mother of Africa; she was the heroine of the downtrodden and oppressed; she had abolished colonialism and restored our dignity; she was the architect of patriotism and democracy!
She looked again at the wives, sullen and bored, or preeningly conscious of the cameras. Joanna would have bought into the rhetoric more if those fat men were interested in giving the high-heeled women of Masiphumelele a tarred road to walk on, or if they punished their compatriots who still routinely hurt girls in the twenty-first century, or if they ever, once, showed real concern with fidelity or equality or respect.
But it was all a bit of a joke in Africa, really – women’s rights. Your only place in the new dispensation was as a collectible, a trophy. As she looked at what her careful and loving research was reaping, how it was being used to prop up a banana-shaped republic, Joanna despaired. What is it all for? The Baartman Centre would do the same good work by any other name. Saartjie hasn’t taught us a thing, she thought, and knew the feeling for what it was – rage at the unlovely way of the world.
“Go to bed. You’re always complaining about how tired you are.” Jan was drowned out by the ululation on the screen. People were weeping and fainting on the shadeless dome of Vergaderingskop.
The chaos ended abruptly. Into the filmed silence Joanna heard the first raindrops falling outside in her garden. He was right, but he didn’t have to be such a bully about it. She was well out of the whole Baartman debacle, wasn’t she? She wouldn’t have to give interviews or write think-pieces for the Mail & Guardian or have a public opinion about the book. She would stay here in Fish Hoek, where things were as they had always been, and muse on what she would do with James so that he didn’t turn out like his father. She thought of the statue at the beach. They would bloody frolic on the bloody sand every single bloody day. I’m not going to care, Joanna thought crossly.
Jan nudged her. “Isn’t that your boss?”
Viola was at the podium, dressed in another one of her complex embroidered outfits. She was holding the microphone with one regal hand. Her nails were red and perfect ovals, like drops of blood, her features drawn back tightly by the matching turban. She looks like a revenge goddess, thought Joanna. Mami Wata or Artemis or Kali.
Viola waited for silence and then held up her right fist in the Black Power salute.
Joanna watched, aghast, as Viola announced, “My name is Sara Baartman! I am a womanist of mixed-race descent, the daughter of the Gonaqua!”
The crowd buzzed, then resumed its ululation, as if Saartjie herself had risen from her grave and was walking among them, her organs restored to their rightful places, her revenant cellulite rippling in the Eastern Cape afternoon.
“I thought her name was Viola,” said Jan.
“You aren’t the only one,” said Joanna.
“This is not a metaphor!” cried Sara-Viola on the screen. She was stripping her embroidered shirt off over her head.