Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  —Oh, said Master Darwin, she is superb, varnished, polished, waxed, magnificent. I didn’t know the Zoological Department had made such a superb skeleton . . .

  —I stole her skull in 1817, the very year her skeleton was put on display here. I spirited it away to my atelier and kept it for more than a year, drawing it every day. I drew it more times than I can count, but it was not only for that reason . . . I imagined her very lonely in this place. I . . . wanted to keep her company. I don’t regret it. I’d do it again. No one was the wiser. I returned it because I believed she was haunting me, and I got scared. I come to visit her here once or twice a month, but when there aren’t the crowds that are here on Sundays. This is the first time I have ever found someone else at this hour. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except that I am Nicolas Tiedeman, one of the artists who sculpted her from life and in the nude in 1815 during Napoleon’s hundred days. I never turned over my model to Baron Cuvier, or exhibited her death mask, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  —Ah, the late esteemed Dr. Cuvier, replied Master Darwin.

  —Sir, Master Nicolas blurted, I must congratulate you on your stupendous On the Origin of Species . . .

  —Well, thank you, although I am fully convinced of the truth of my views, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all considered, during numerous years, from a viewpoint directly opposite to mine . . . It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the “plan of Creation,” “unity of Design,” “the great Chain of Being” . . . Monsieur Tiedeman . . .

  —Small, isn’t she?

  —Yes, quite.

  —I never fail to be surprised by her smallness. Her air of surprise, the yellow color of her skin, her silence, her lack of recrimination . . .

  —I personally am revolted to find human remains amongst the stuffed animals.

  —I have studied and drawn every line, wrinkle, pimple and muscle of her body, the shape of her ears, the set of her jaw, the layers of fat over bone . . . It took me far into her wildness, her geography, and convinced me that the whole human race was one, said Master Tiedeman.

  —Of course, remarked Master Darwin, there is only one race of mankind. One tree with many branches advancing from its origins in the midst of time towards the perfection of the species by natural selection. One day, with instruments and techniques we can only dream of, in one great leap of the imagination which scientists call discovery and artists like yourself call inspiration, but which in both cases is divine intuition, it will become clear and common knowledge.

  —What about the ethnographic chart established by Count Gobineau and so eloquently refuted by the Baron Humboldt?

  —We think we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Anyone whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory. A few naturalists endowed with some flexibility of mind, like Huxley for example, may be influenced by my volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of this question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed. When the views entertained in On the Origin of Species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, there will be a considerable revolution in natural history . . .

  —A considerable revolution! laughed Master Tiedeman, more like a cataclysm or, as Baron Cuvier would say, a catastrophe . . .

  With this, Master Darwin chuckled, a mild, gentlemanly snort. He seemed not sure why he was having this conversation with a man he didn’t know. Master Darwin was nothing if not the caricature of a stiff, reserved Victorian gentleman, who didn’t speak to strangers. Yet I had brought them together.

  —I have a confession to make. I saw the Hottentot Venus when I was a little boy, with my mother. I must have been six or seven. She is as fascinating to me now as she was then . . . to my childish eyes. I recall that my mother was disgusted, for she was an abolitionist, like my wife, Emma. I have rarely seen her so angry. She knew people, like Jane Austen, who had seen the Venus in the flesh when she had been on display in the circus in London . . . then to see her here, in that glass cage . . . stuffed . . . Poor creature . . . Cuvier’s brain may have weighed twice as much as hers, but he was also her double or triple in body weight. He was twice as tall and I’m sure his kidneys too were twice as heavy.

  —Is it true that the heart is practically the same size and weight in all grown humans whether they be six feet two and weigh six stone or four feet and weigh two?

  —It is one of the mysteries of human anatomy, replied Master Darwin.

  —Baartman’s heart was not preserved.

  —Anatomists don’t consider it a scientific organ of measure . . .

  —I wonder why?

  —Perhaps it’s not a scientific organ at all, but a metaphysical one . . .

  —I don’t think scientists, in their own heartlessness, trust that organ . . .

  —Perhaps they don’t. But one day, a heart will be interchangeable with another . . . a damaged heart will be replaced by another—all organs will be.

  —Incredible . . .

  Master Tiedeman’s eyes returned to my skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

  —Strange, seeing her this way always brings tears to my eyes. I will never forget those three days that I sculpted her right here in the museum’s amphitheater. Forty-five years ago, March fifteenth, 1815, during Baron Cuvier’s famous lecture . . .

  —Then you knew the baron personally . . .

  —As a young man of twenty-six. I’m seventy-one now.

  —Well, sir, I’m fifty-one. Strange . . . but I have the same birth date as Abraham Lincoln.

  —Really? The American President?

  —Yes, February twelfth, 1809.

  —What’ll he do now, after Fort Sumter?

  —He will abolish slavery, sir, and keep the Southern states in the Union by force of war . . . he has said that he’ll free some slaves, all slaves or no slaves, in order to preserve the Union of the United States of America . . .

  —The Confederate states think differently.

  —The Confederacy is like the dodo bird, it is a doomed species, ready for extinction, because it has not adapted to its environment . . . I have collected many geological and biological specimens, studied many fossils and made observations of the numbers, diversity and living habits of different forms of life. One day I came across a species of ant in which I discovered the slave-making instinct. This remarkable instinct is found in the Formica sanguinea. This ant is absolutely dependent on its slaves; without their aid, the species would certainly become extinct in a single year. The males and fertile females do no work. The workers or sterile females, though most energetic and courageous in capturing slaves, do no other work. They are incapable of making their own nests, or of feeding their own larvae. When the old nest is no longer suitable and they have to migrate, it is the slaves that determine the migration, and actually carry their masters in their jaws. So utterly helpless are the masters that when I shut up thirty of them without a slave, but with plenty of the food which they like best, and with their larvae and pupae to stimulate them to work, they did nothing; they could not even feed themselves, and many perished of hunger. I then introduced a single slave (F. fusca), and she instantly set to work, fed and saved the survivors; made some cells and tended the larvae, and put all to rights. What can be more extraordinary than these well-ascertained facts? If we had not known of any other slave-making ant, it would have been hopeless to speculate how such an instinct could have been perfected. I tried to approach the subject in a skeptical frame of mind, as anyone may well be excused for doubting the truth of so extraordinary and odious an instinct as that of making slaves. Hence I will give you, Mr. Tiedeman,
the observations that I have myself made. I opened fourteen nests of F. sanguinea and found a few slaves in all. Males and fertile females of the slave species are found only in their own proper communities, and have never been observed in the nests of F. sanguinea. The slaves are black and not above half the size of their red masters, so that the contrast in their appearance is very great. When the nest is slightly disturbed, the slaves occasionally come out, and like their masters are much agitated and defend their nest. When the nest is much disturbed and the larvae and pupae are exposed, the slaves work energetically with their masters in carrying them away to a place of safety. Hence, it is clear that the slaves feel quite at home. I never saw the slaves, though present in large numbers in August, either leave or enter the nest. Hence I consider them as strictly household slaves. The masters, on the other hand, may be seen constantly bringing in materials for the nest, and food of all kinds. The slaves habitually work with their masters in making the nest, and they alone open and close the doors in the morning and evening.

  —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. sanguineaoriginated. 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 Engli
sh. 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!