By Mashingaidze Gomo

PUBLIC reactions to the first installment of the Sarah Baartman story have ranged from acceptance to outrage, not necessarily against the abuse, but against the picture used. 
Moralists have argued that the picture used is a culturally unacceptable public display of African nudity.
Yet, conversely, that is actually the point in its choice.
The revulsion must force the objecting public to imagine the shame it must have brought on Sarah Baartman, a lone black woman, stripped naked for commercial exhibition to a sea of perverted white eyes.
White men did not display Sarah’s picture.
They exhibited her nudity in the same spirit they exhibited apes of the wild.
In fact, they went further in that while they obviously would not have allowed the white public visiting the zoo to poke the genitals of apes, the white exhibitionists actually made money out of any white pervert who wanted to poke the poor African woman’s genitals with fingers or sticks. And, the strong possibility that Sarah could have died from syphilis speaks volumes of the other liberties they took on her.
And even worse, it is not the picture of her privates that the French exhibited.
It is the mutilated genitalia in flesh!
And, the exhibition amounted to a mutilation of black human dignity for over one-and-half centuries.
And today, my challenge is for those black people sponsored by Western non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to demonise the African man and African cultural institutions as gender-violent, to show me gender violence that is worse than what the South African Boer, the English and the French did to Sarah Baartman.
The irony that Sarah was brought into post-revolution France is sad.
The French Revolution had marked the beginning of modern times whose driving force was ‘liberty’ and ‘the replacement of privilege with rights’.
The feminist component of the French Revolution had risen against domestication of the woman for the exclusive interests of men arguing that it would be difficult to demonstrate that men’s superiority over women came from nature, inasmuch as the principle was contrary to natural human equality.
And, consequently, they were demanding the right to bear arms in self-defence.
And, ironically, in the same space, Sarah was being held in zoological captivity!
Meanwhile, earlier on, at the birth of the USA on July 4 1776, the most fundamental statement in the white American Declaration of  Independence had been: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ‘all men are created equal’, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’.”
And, almost a century later in 1884, as Europeans were scrambling for Africa to enslave the black woman in her homeland in an act of colonisation, the French gave white Americans the gift of the Statue of Liberty.
The monument was informed by Libertas, the Roman god of freedom, who was worshipped by emancipated slaves.
And, it was the colossal image of a free white woman holding a torch burning with the ‘light of freedom’.
Mounted in New York Harbour, facing out to sea, Libertas beckoned to white people to come to a bloodied ‘free world’ where native American Indian women were being wiped out.
They were derogatorily called  ‘squaws’ and they were having their breasts cut off, emptied of the life-giving glands and tanned into tobacco pouches.
And in France, where the American Libertas had been fashioned and then donated to the ‘free world’ the black woman’s spring of life and therefore freedom lay severed in a preserved state of shame testifying gender violence of the most horrific state.
And it is sad that after what happened to Sarah Baartman, black women have taken the Michael Jackson approach of if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them and the majority of them now aspire to be white.
They bleach their skins white and weave white people’s hair onto their own scalps in order to appear white.
And in their African homes, they teach their black children to speak impeccable European languages and then show off this ignorance of their own language and history as a form of sophistication.
And in current beleaguered Great Zimbabwe, the mass suicide is evident everywhere.
Every way one looks, one is confronted by legions of ghosts of murdered black women, false from the very contents of their ‘blonde’ heads to the toes of their pedicured feet!
False self-knowledge, false white skin, false European hair, false nails, false lashes, false accent, false walk and false culture.
And the majority of the foot soldiers in the regime change Western sponsored NGOs have actually been black women blissfully pushing an agenda deliberately planned to exclude their own interests.
It is this mass grave that African movements against gender violence must confront.
The black woman seems to have learnt nothing from the history of race servitude.
There is no recognition that even before Charles Darwin arrived on the scene to capture the European racist mindset in words, it is still his same race principle that was used to define Sarah Baartman’s place in European society.   
It is the same principle they used to place Sarah Baartman closer to apes than to humans.
It is the same principle that was used to absolve all of the poor black woman’s tormentors from any wrong-doing.
European courts ruled that she had come to Britain and France of her own free will.
They sugar-coated and sanitised her exhibitions as the free will of a liberated African.
Sarah Baartman had been orphaned in a slave raid.
She had been owned by a Boer.
She had been sold by the Boer to a military surgeon engaged in the poaching of African animals for European circuses.
She did not get the profits of her exhibition.
It could not have been her will to have her genitals mutilated and displayed as a scientific curiosity for over one and a half centuries after her death.
It could not have been her will to have her skeleton cooked from her flesh and then again displayed.
In light of all this, is this frenzy by black women to mutate into white women really defendable as the free will of mature people not acting under the duress of 500 years of slavery and colonial domination?

(To be continued)