The grave of Sarah Baartman. Picture: Supplied
By Toroga Denver
A while ago I read an article published by UCT News where it justified their cultural appropriation of the /garubes (story) of aboxan (ancestor) Sarah Baartman in their opera called “Sarah Baartman”.
It was disconcerting to hear this reasoning in 2022.
Colonial society who disrespected her in life and in death, who held her remains, was now traumatising us with their re-telling of our story.
Should her oananoagus (children) not have been the ones telling her story?
The world itself is increasingly sensitive towards cultural appropriation, in who tells our stories, who controls and profits from our narratives – critical on portrayal as well as who is given access to witness our stories.
The story of aboxan Sarah Baartman will always be a sensitive issue. She, who is still the most known African woman in the world, still studied at universities across the world, and yet our Khoi people are the most erased group in South Africa. Erased by a colonially created coloured identity and forced to call the words of Jan van Riebeeck our “mother tongue”.
To see a non-First nation professor directing this work and the UCT Opera School not recognising its casting of a non-Khoi person in the lead as deeply problematic, was shocking.
We know that if this was an opera about Shaka Zulu or about FW de Klerk, they would have been intentional in choosing leads from the Zulu and Afrikaner communities, but why not in the case of a Khoi story?
When you take a story that is not yours, when you are still part of a community who benefits from a colonial taking, should you not be more conscious about your artistic decisions?
How again is this deeply problematic and colonial behaviour allowed in 2022, in a world where First Nation communities like our Khoi people in the USA, in Canada, are intentional about saying “nothing about us without us”?
I do recognise Zenobia Kloppers, a Khoi woman, as an assistant director, but that was not enough.
It is also the continued colonisation of aboxan Sara with her story told via a colonial art form, aka opera. As if her life and death was not just defined by colonisation.
It was interesting to read in this UCT News article that she was probably a “smart” businesswoman: “She was the first South African to publish in London. She owned the copyright to her famous posters and, according to her contract, she received 50% of her exhibition fees – a princely sum, even by today’s standards.” Wow.
How, when she was only seen as an animal, a thing? She, who died in poverty, and here we are supposed to believe that she squandered her “wealth”? That she was responsible for her own demise, a quite common narrative of blaming the oppressed for their own oppression.
But this is UCT. An institution that has yet to acknowledge that it is built on stolen Khoi lands, built with Khoi wealth by Khoi and enslaved peoples, funded by colonisers who benefited quite handsomely from the violence on Khoi and enslaved bodies.
A university that still has more Khoi cleaners, gardeners and Khoi human remains than Khoi students.
How in a province where Khoi people are the majority, are we still a minority at UCT? Xhosa students are a majority at the University of Fort Hare and Nelson Mandela University because Xhosa people are majority in the Eastern Cape.
Zulu students are the majority at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and at Wits university, because Zulu peoples are a majority in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, yet the only place our Khoi youth are a majority are in prisons, gangs, maternity wards and Sassa grant lines.
It was interesting to hear that opera does not need proper representation, that it is all about the music, and yet this speaks to UCT intentionally not creating spaces for Khoi students, not prioritising admissions to Khoi students, because if they had, a Khoi person would‘ve been easily found to play the lead.
I recall a conversation with UCT’s faculty of Health Sciences on increasing the representation of Khoi students at the faculty. A Khoi person at a hospital in the Western Cape is more likely to be attended to by a non-Khoi doctor, which results in poor treatment. It was a dead-end conversation as UCT seems to be comfortable with its status quo of Khoi exclusion.
A Khoi taras is the most violated on her lands. A Khoi woman is more likely to be raped, kidnapped and murdered in South Africa. Gang-related murders on the Cape flats, in Worcester etc, affects her. A Khoi woman is more likely to feel the impact of illegal evictions on farms in the Cape Winelands, and yet she is not recognised; the coloured identity enabling the kakapusa (erasure) of the colonial violence on her body.
It is interesting to note that at the time of writing this article, three Khoi women had their stories told on stages in the Western Cape. The Sarah Baartman opera at the Baxter and the story of Krotoa and Bientang at the Woordfees, with no conversations on the systemic violence on the body of a Khoi women.
We see universities in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA built on indigenous lands acknowledging their !ereams (responsibility) to First Nation communities. And yet in South Africa we have UCT and Stellenbosch believing that all they had to do was put a Khoi woman’s name on a building – UCT’s Sarah Baartman Hall and Stellenbosch University’s Krotoa building – and that would be enough.
UCT also has the San and Khoi Centre, which was never going to suffice; not with all the institutional resistance to acknowledging the lands of the people the institution is built on.
I must add that I have had some constructive conversations with some UCT academics who are open to the Khoikhoi First Nation reparative conversation, which is encouraging.
The past can’t be erased but it can be acknowledged and restitutions made to affected communities, as uncomfortable as it is to many in South Africa. UCT has only ever prided itself in being Africa’s “leading university”.
Isn’t it time to show us why they believe they are worthy of this title, because the Khoikhoi First Nation conversation is going nowhere.
Ha da ge a. We are here.
* Toroga Denver is a Khoikhoi First Nation fellow at the Munanai First Nations Institute.
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