Hottentot Venus (31 page)

—To conclude, said Cuvier, raising his pointer, among us, the Caucasian forehead is pushed forward, the mouth is pulled back as if we were destined to
think
rather than
eat;
the Hottentot has a shortened forehead and a mouth that is pushed forward as if he were destined to
eat
instead of
think.

—What is most striking about the physiognomy of the Hottentots? The face resembles in part the Negro in the curve of the jaw, the obliqueness of the incisors, the thickness of the lips, the shortness and regression of the chin, and in part the Mongol in the enormous height of the cheekbones, the flatness of the base of the nose and the forehead and the eyebrows and especially the horizontal slits of the eyes.

—Her hair is black and woolly like that of Negroes, the eyelid horizontal and not oblique like that of Mongols; her eyes are light brown rather than dark, her complexion is a brownish yellow . . .

—On the contrary, the white race to which the civilized people of Europe belong, with its oval face, straight hair and nose, appears to us the most beautiful of all. It is superior to others
also
by its genius, courage and activity. There seems to me to be a cruel law which has condemned to an eternal inferiority the races of depressed and compressed skulls . . . as we see in the Hottentot—and experience seems to confirm the theory that there is a relationship between the perfection of the spirit and the beauty of the face.

—Therefore, the Hottentots are the most appallingly barbarous of men, sharing this honor with the polar people. According to Linnaeus, there is a serious question about their human status.

—The Hottentots have no language to speak of, no social organization, they believe in no religion, do not cultivate the land, have no money or manner of official barter, have no government, no fixed residences, no concept of property, no cuisine, no hierarchy of nobles and leaders or even a priestly class. They are the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere near great enough to arrive at a regular government. They are at present wards of the English government in the Cape for reason of their imbecility.

—In other words, interrupted a voice from the audience, your purpose is to provide a detailed comparison of this woman with the lowest race of humans, the Negro, and the highest specimen of apes, the orangutan . . .

—Correct. And number two, continued Cuvier, to provide the most complete description of the abnormalities of her genitalia . . . which I will now attempt to do.

—Moreover, said another voice, we can thus use the premise of phrenology to identify individuals or races that stand out at both poles of society: those with a propensity for making important social contributions and those with a greater than normal tendency towards evil. The former are to be encouraged, nurtured and developed in order to maximize their potential for good. The latter need to be curbed and segregated to protect society from their predisposition to crime.

—May I just add here, interjected a second phrenologist, that according to my studies, the African skull is overdeveloped in the organs of philoprogenitiveness and concentrativeness, accounting respectively for the African’s alleged love of children and proclivity for sedentary occupations. Thus he is underdeveloped in conscientiousness, cautiousness, identity and reflection.

—The shape of their heads binds them more than us to the animals, said an anthropologist. The animal world, as you all know, is divided into four branches; the invertebrates, the amphibians, the mollusks and the protozoans. This division depends on the brain and the nervous system— the brain of the Hottentot being by nature the smallest and weakest of the species . . .

—As a physician and a proponent of polygenism, I would say it is obvious from your lecture today and the specimen standing before us that the black race is an entirely different species and does not originate from the common stock with the white race. As for cranium size, which marks the difference between the two, I estimate the brain size of different races by filling the cranial cavity with sifted white mustard seed. I then pour the seed back into a graduated cylinder and read the skull’s volume in cubic inches . . .

—I think it’s fair to say that in competition with the white race, the African that you see before you represents the missing link between ape and Caucasian . . .

—May I quote Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, who wrote, The more I reflect on the color of these peoples, on the gobbling that they use to make themselves understood instead of an articulated language, on their countenance, on the apron of their ladies, the more I am convinced that this race cannot have the same origin as we do . . . I ask you, is this a separate race gentlemen, which we are dealing with here, independent of both the Negro and the Caucasian? Or, a sub-race of the Mongolian race? Or a hybrid? Or is this a mythic creature!

—Race, added a Scottish naturalist, rising from his seat, is everything. Literature, science, art—in a word, civilization.

The baron now made a motion to preclude comments and return to his exposition.

There was some commotion as an English physician rose to contradict Cuvier.

—Whatever Negroes lack in intelligence, they make up for in instinct and feeling. They have excellent heart and above all the possibility of all virtue, he concluded.

—Hear! Hear! repeated a Belgian naturalist. The Negro has the same possibilities as a European child. It remains a matter of education. We, as anthropologists, as men of science, can only record, measure, examine, observe scientifically, not make qualitative judgments . . . That is for
political
science to make . . .

—Monsieur, added an American anthropologist, I have personally studied more than a thousand skulls in my laboratory in Boston. So many in fact that my students call me Golgotha!

At this, the entire audience laughed in unison.

—I have determined, the American continued, that the scientific hierarchy of intelligence is as follows: the Germans, the English, white Americans, on one end of the scale, the Hottentots and the aborigines of Australia at the other end.

—Speaking of white Americans, added an anatomist from Lyon, Thomas Jefferson, the naturalist and former President, has stated in his
Notes on the State of Virginia,
so excellently translated by our colleague, the Marquis de Condorcet, that blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the white in the endowments of both body and mind . . . The first difference that strikes us, he wrote, is that of color. Whether the black of the Negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarfskin or in the scarfskin itself, whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed by nature.

—I too, added another naturalist, excitedly, have studied hundreds of skulls exhumed from three cemeteries in Paris and have compared them with those of other races. As comparisons I choose skulls where the inequality of intellect is evident: African Negroes, American Indians, Hottentots, oceanic Negroes and Indians.

—What about the comparison of male skulls with female skulls? May I point out that the relative smallness of a woman’s skull depends on both her physical inferiority and her intellectual inferiority . . .

—The Hottentot should not be classified as
Homo sapiens
but as
Homo
monstrosis monorchidei.

—It is the notion of the great Chain of Being which has cemented the Hottentots into their place in the world!

—Hottentots are the very reverse of humankind . . . So that if there’s any medium between a rational animal and a beast, the Hottentot lays the fairest claim to that species, according to Ovington’s writings. Who better to be the connecting link between the human species and brute creation?

—Such is the dependence amongst all the orders of creatures; that the apprehension of one of them is a good step towards the understanding of the rest. And this is the highest pitch of humane reason: follow all the links of this chain, till their secrets are open to our minds; this is truly to command the world; to rank all the varieties and degrees of things so orderly upon one another; that standing on top of them, we may perfectly behold all that is below and make them all serviceable to the quiet, peace and plenty of Man’s life.

—I am a monogenist, but if we admit the supposition that humankind consists of distinct families, surely there is none that presents a stronger claim to be regarded as a race of separate origin than the Hottentots, distinguished as they are by many moral and physical peculiarities.

—Hottentots are Negroes even though their hyper-negroidness puts them at the bottom of this category and therefore at the absolute bottom of the Chain of Being, with the exception of idiots, lunatics and mixed bloods . . .

—The Hottentots are the most degraded of human races except for the Bushman, whose form resembles that of a beast and whose intelligence is never great enough to arrive at regular government. They were born slaves.

—Probably in no former period of the world has the destruction of any race of animals whatever been affected over such wide areas and with such startling rapidity as in the case of the savage man . . .

—One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying—the living nations will fraudulently encroach on the territory of the dying.

—Like jackals.

—Or cannibals, I thought to say out loud. The fervor of dogma mounted in the stifling room.

—What is the function of steatopygia? Does it function like the tail of the fat-tailed sheep or the hump of a dromedary?

—A change in the environment, said another voice, causes changes in the needs of organisms living in that environment, which in turn causes changes in their behavior. Altered behavior leads to greater or lesser use of a given structure or organ: use could cause the organ to increase in size over several generations, disuse would cause it to disappear. Wouldn’t this be the case with the Hottentot apron? The natural degree of lasciviousness and voluptuousness of the Hottentot has evolved into the perfect organ!

—Hear! Hear!

—That is brilliant.

Cuvier nodded, trying to get to the crux of his lecture, but the anatomists were enthusiastically debating this riveting question, tripping over one another in the stampede to assert their opinions.

—The average standard of the Negro race is two grades below our own based on my intelligence chart. The Lowland Scot and the English North Countryman is a grade superior to the ordinary English. The ancient Greeks were very nearly two grades higher than our own, that is about as much as our white race is superior to the African Negro.

—There is a vast difference, a British naturalist insisted, between the prognathous and the orthognathous people of Britain. The Irish, Welsh and lower classes are prognathous whereas all men of genius are orthognathous. It is part of my theory of Nigressence, which links the Irish to Cro-Magnon man and the Africanoid races . . .

—Look at the Hottentot. Is he shaped like any white person? Is the anatomy of his frame, his muscles, or organs like ours? Does he walk like us, think like us, act like us? What an innate hatred the Saxon has for him!

—A death sentence is justified against those unavowed by God, those who have defrauded natural reason and those who are neither nations in right nor nations in name!

—The decisive events of history are determined by the iron law of race, asserted another French anthropologist. Human destiny is decreed by nature and expressed in race.

Cuvier allowed this to resound throughout the hall as a rallying call and a litany before he reined in his apostles.

—Let us now, continued the baron, come to the crux of our examination: our Hottentot’s
sinus pudoris,
or curtain of shame, better known as the Hottentot apron.

A sudden hush came over the room. I had been busily sculpting the Venus and had hardly followed Cuvier’s lecture and the discussion that had taken place. But when I looked up, I saw that the Venus’s light brown eyes were still upon me after all these hours. Sarah Baartman and de Blainville were at present having a tugging match as she tried to retain the white handkerchief that covered her pubis and de Blainville tried to snatch it away. Each time, Sarah won and de Blainville, angry and frustrated, glanced at Cuvier in despair while the Venus stared at me, defying the ogling scientists by hiding through careful compression of her thighs the very object of their desire. I had to laugh. She stood as frozen as my perfect sculpture, which in the tumult seemed to take on a life of its own.

—It was Péron, continued the baron, in the second volume of
The Voyageto the Austral Lands,
who approached the subject in a different way, stating that the apron didn’t exist in Hottentots, but in Bushwomen, who also have excessively developed buttocks, and that this apron was not the development of any other part of the female anatomy but a special organ added on by nature.

—Linnaeus reported that it was the primitive vestige of the Hottentot’s animal origin. He also reported finding it in the female
Homo
troglodytes,
his second and lowest species of humans. John Ovington wrote in his
Voyage to Saratt
in 1689 that women who had these aprons were hermaphrodites. Voltaire argued that these women must belong to a separate race. Levaillant called the
sinus pudoris
a product of depraved taste and insisted that these aprons were merely caprices of fashion and coquetry.

—Peter Kolb suggested that it served as a natural fig leaf. Sir John Barrow added that it guarded Hottentot women against rape since it was impossible to penetrate an aproned woman without her consent. He believed that it was a hypertrophy of the labia and nymphae caused by manipulation of the genitalia and considered beautiful by Hottentots and Bushmen as well as tribes in Dahomey and Basutoland.