Hottentot Venus (39 page)

—One day I chanced to witness a migration from one nest to another, and it was a most interesting spectacle to behold the masters carefully carrying their slaves in their jaws.

—Another day I noticed about a score of the slave-makers haunting the same spot, and evidently not in search of food, but of new slaves; they approached and were vigorously repulsed by an independent community of the slave species; sometimes as many as three of these ants clinging to the legs of the slave-making
F. sanguinea.
The latter ruthlessly killed their small opponents and carried their dead bodies as food to their nest, but they were prevented from getting any pupae to rear as slaves.

—Now I was curious to ascertain whether
F. sanguinea
could distinguish the pupae of
F. fusca,
which they habitually make into slaves, from those of the little and furious
F. flava,
which they rarely capture, and it was evident that they did at once distinguish them: For we have seen that they eagerly and instantly seized the pupae of
F. fusca,
whereas they were terrified when they came across the pupae of
F. flava
and quickly ran away.

—One evening I visited another community of
F. sanguinea
and found a number of these ants entering their nest carrying the dead bodies of
F.
fusca
(showing that it was not a migration) and numerous pupae. I traced the returning file burdened with booty for about forty yards, to a very thick clump of heath, whence I saw the last individual of
F. sanguinea
emerge carrying a pupa; but I was not able to find the desolated nest in the thick heath. The nest, however, must have been close at hand, for two or three individuals of
F. fusca
were rushing about in the greatest agitation, and one was perched motionless with its own pupa in its mouth on the top of a spray of heath over its ravaged home.

—Such are the facts, confirmed personally by me, in regard to the wonderful instinct of making slaves. The
F. sanguinea
does not build its own nest, does not determine its own migrations, does not collect food for itself or its young and cannot even feed itself: it is absolutely dependent on its numerous slaves. The masters determine when and where a new nest shall be formed, and when they migrate, the masters carry the slaves. The slaves seem to have the exclusive care of the larvae, and the masters alone go on slave-making expeditions. In England the masters alone usually leave the nest to collect building materials and food for themselves, their slaves and larvae.

—I will not pretend to conjecture by what steps the instinct of
F. sanguinea
originated. But as those ants that are not slave-makers will, as I have seen, carry off pupae of other species if scattered near their nests, it is possible that pupae originally stored as food might become developed; and the ants thus unintentionally reared would then follow their proper instincts and do what work they could. If their presence proved useful to the species that had seized them and if it were more advantageous to this species to capture workers than to procreate them, the habit of collecting pupae originally for food might by natural selection be strengthened and
rendered permanent for the very different purposes of raising slaves.
Once the instinct is acquired, even if carried out to a lesser extent than in our British
F. sanguinea,
I can see no difficulty in natural selection increasing and modifying the instinct, always supposing each modification to be of use to the species until an ant abjectly dependent on its slaves was formed.

—Is this not an ant-sized explanation of the history of slavery in the Western world? laughed Master Darwin, his close-set, black-button eyes glowing with malicious humor. Of the stupid morbid dependence of white American Southerners on their slaves and the institution of slavery?

—I expect President Lincoln would enjoy the fable . . . said Master Tiedeman. I hear he is a formidable tale-spinner, joke-teller and orator.

—And a most unhappy and unattractive man. We are both, Lincoln and I, very ugly men, laughed Master Darwin, my cranium being the exact replica of the Neanderthal man’s, and his being not too far away . . . Just look around you, doesn’t it look like I belong here? Master Darwin gestured with his big square hands. I wondered how he dissected such fragile and delicate fossils with such short pudgy fingers.

—But getting back to Lincoln, he continued, a true leader, like a true scientist, must have the power of reshaping the universally known into what is universal so simply and deeply that people overlook the simplicity in the profundity and the profundity in the simplicity. This is Lincoln’s genius. This isn’t always easy, neither in the battle for survival in war nor in science. An eminently learned man and a great numskull can go together very easily under a single hat.

—Like Cuvier and his great Chain of Being?

—Oh no. The work of Cuvier is primordial, his theory of catastrophe brilliant. Every scientific discovery stands on the shoulders, or rather on the brain, of its predecessor. There are still three questions I intend to address in future volumes: firstly, whether man, like every other species, is descended from some preexisting form; secondly, the manner of his development; and thirdly, the value of the differences between the so-called races of man . . .

—Of all the attempts to account for the differences between the races of man, there remains but one left; namely, sexual selection—which appears to have acted as powerfully on man as on animals . . . I don’t expect that sexual selection will account for
all
the differences between the races . . . An unexplained residuum is left, but it would be inexplicable if man had
not
been modified by this agency—which works such powers and is so overwhelmingly potent and present . . .

—Finally, ended Master Darwin, it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination, it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster brothers, ants making slaves, the larvae of ichneumonoidea feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars, not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings—namely . . . let the strongest live and the weakest die.

—Should we have let the Venus live . . . have left her alone?

—She does live . . . for better and for worse—one day the world will catch up.

—Sarah should have a decent burial, blurted Master Tiedeman. She should not be hanging here, a vulgar trophy, swaying in the wind . . .

—She’s here in the name of modern science, anthropology, ethnology . . . paleontology . . . zoology . . . anatomy . . .

—You really believe that?

—After all, it is science, civilization, history, progress, truth which are at stake.

—Really?

—Absolutely.

—I love those big words, except you left out the one most important: beauty.

—Yes. That too, beauty . . .

—Ho ho, you dare pronounce the word beauty in front of the Venus . . .

—She
was
beautiful, wasn’t she?

—Yes, she was. Beautiful . . .

—Did you communicate with this Hottentot?

—We spoke once.

—You spoke?

—In broken but comprehensible English. Sarah was a simple girl, a shepherdess, a herdswoman full of humor and mother wit, whose life had taken a turn that she found to be incomprehensible. She was gentle, as simple people are, neither a monster nor a prostitute—although she had many friends in those circles. She was solitary, without defense and very lonely. She sang sweetly, she loved music, finery, perfume—a girl like any of our peasant girls. I found her much more temperate than a stage actress or a carnival attraction. She was not that kind of person. After all, we invented her, made her what we wanted and expected her to be— without us, she either wouldn’t have even existed or, if she had, wouldn’t have been of much interest, as she was an ordinary, banal human being with the same dreams and reactions as any farm girl of her age . . . That she became a cause célèbre and a paragon of Western ethnology, a living legend and an icon of scientific racism, is incredible . . . or at least a fatality . . . and our own fault.
We
created Venus. She belongs where she will never be: Table Top Mountain, South Africa.

—That day, Sarah told me about the Hottentots. She assured me that they were not at all stupid as whites believed. With a few clicks of his tongue, a chief can command an army of warriors, a mother can sing a lullaby, a father can chastise his son. Two people can make love.

—She told me that a measure of equality exists within the Hottentots between men and women, whereby sons take their mother’s name and daughters their father’s. Equality is implicit in the fact that young people can live together in an unmarried state. Women have control over the allocation and distribution of milk, which is the wealth of a cattle-based society.

—If a man drinks milk without his wife’s permission, her family can take the cow or sheep, even if he owns it, and slaughter and eat it. Women have property rights. Women have the power to punish their brothers if they disobey the rules of etiquette by the device of shaming, of ridicule. Marriage requires a bride-price and the bride’s consent. The dowry goes to the mother, not the father. Divorce is common and is usually requested by the woman. Women are not seen as beasts of burden, the hut remains the property of the wife and she welcomes whom she likes into it, irrespective of the husband’s will or permission. And if anything untoward happens to disturb conjugal harmony, the offended lady can literally pull the house down around his ears by rolling up the woven matting and taking down the poles and branches, leaving home and taking home with her. Women are the equals of men, therefore. They have freedom of speech in domestic disputes. If a notable dies, his wife can succeed him and lead the tribe. The Khoe word for woman is
taras,
which means ruler or mistress. So Sarah had a tradition of independence . . . She forgot that—or we broke that spirit—we ruined it by preaching docility, fatality and godliness and making her think “constant” was reality, not just another concept of ours—that the status quo is the basis of all civilization!

—There is nothing so unnatural as the status quo, said Master Darwin. In this aspect, man resembles those forms naturalists call protean or polymorphic. Man is so indiscriminate, variable and indifferent that he can turn himself into almost anything—having escaped the rules of natural selection.

—Is Cuvier not the greatest poet of the century? He calls forth destruction, death becomes alive; in a kind of retrospective apocalypse, we experience the terrifying resurrection of dead worlds—and the little scrap of life vouchsafed us in the nameless eternity of time, can no longer inspire anything but compassion, as another writer, Balzac, has said . . .

—Certainly no fact is so startling in the long history of the world as the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants, sir.

—It is incredible how those men of the Enlightenment tended to denounce the fables of their predecessors, continued Master Darwin. Philosophy accepts only what it has fabricated itself.

—The philosopher only accepts it as long as it gives him, in turn, an argument to plead the noble savage’s cause: innocent victim in revolt against monsters from Europe. Truth prevails, in the end, only as a variation on the fable of dark, unfathomable Africa.

—So science is a fable for believers? Like religion?

—I didn’t say that.

—Didn’t Voltaire say that history was only fictions of various degrees of probability? continued Master Nicolas.

—Isn’t science the same? What do we really know about man that God hasn’t already shown us?

—I know that man, all men, evolved from One—within that One is God or evolution or godly evolution . . . replied Master Darwin.

—You’ve never said that . . .

—Perhaps, but I believe it. There are prudences to observe because of the ferociousness of some of my colleagues on the matter of race and color . . . Did you ever see her after that day?

—I saw her dead. I saw her dissected, her body parts passed around like cotton candy at a county fair
. . . (Softly)
I see her now . . . I see Cuvier washing his hands of her in his silver basin . . .

—I heard Cuvier once arranged for Napoleon to view her privately . . . It is only a legend I suppose, said Master Darwin.

—Why is it, Doctor, continued Master Tiedeman, that white freaks are always exhibited as oddities, the exception that proves the rule, while black freaks, on the contrary, are exhibited as
typical
of their race? With no distinction between them, when they are as different from one another as we are . . .

The doctor didn’t answer. He was staring at my skeleton, who was listening to him. For a long time, the sculptor and the doctor stood shoulder to shoulder contemplating my bones, bleached, scraped, polished, assembled and mounted as carefully as a church altar. My skeleton was not covered by glass as my effigy was. I hung loose and free, slightly swaying, comic in my magnificence.

—At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries, Master Darwin continued, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphic apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The gap between man and his nearest relations will grow wider, for man will be more civilized. Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do that much by artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may have occurred in the long course of time through nature’s power of selection, that is by the survival of the fittest . . .