Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud Page A

when I was a little girl. I was more and more apprehensive. Did I have the right to be in Cape Town? Was I a free woman? Did I need a pass? There were also terrible sights: beggars and lepers with no hands or feet, a public gallows with a corpse still hanging, a chain gang of convicts wearing striped pants and shirts, their feet shackled to fifty-pound cannonballs.
    Lost now, not remembering the way to the mission, I felt the hatred all around me, like a thick fog. For the first time, I noticed there was no Khoekhoe on the street. I felt hostile eyes and coarse laughter following me. I stopped in my tracks, thinking, What is it? Am I naked? No. I have covered myself from head to knees. Is it my size? I am the size of a twelve-year-old child. Is it the way I walk? Have I dropped something? Violated some unspoken taboo? Insulted a passerby? Then the words floating around me, rough and contemptuous, became comprehensible.
    —Kaffir.
    —Bushwoman.
    —Really? I thought there was a town ordinance prohibiting these people.
    —Look, Mommy, a Hottentot!
    —Pygmy!
    —Savage!
    —Cannibal!
    —We hunt them in the north.
    —My uncle has a stuffed trophy head . . .
    —Can’t you read the sign that says no dogs or Bushmen allowed?
    —Get off the sidewalk!
    Someone shoved me onto the road. I stumbled on in a trance, the hurtful insults hurled at me from all sides. Some were shouted, some spoken plainly. My stomach curled into a ball of fear. My heart accelerated. I walked faster, steadying the bundle on my head, wishing that the red clay dust beneath my feet would swallow me up. Passersby avoided my eyes. They moved away from me as I passed. Children stared and moved closer to the skirts of their mothers. I remembered what the rainmaker had said about not going to Cape Town, that I would lose my soul, my
n/um.
But now it was too late. Had I been blind to all this at the orphanage or simply too young to understand? Or had things changed in the past years? It was still, I thought, not too late to turn back. To run. But where would I go? How would I live if I didn’t work? Another husband? I couldn’t survive another murder.
    I tried to figure out my way. I finally asked a passerby in Dutch. He looked at me as if I were a talking dog.
    —The St. Luke Orphanage, he repeated slowly in Afrikaans as if he were speaking to an idiot, is on Blacker Street, about a ten-minute walk. Take the next street to the left, all the way to the end, and then turn onto Merriberry Road . . . You’ll see the bell tower . . .
    —Thank you, sir, I said.
    He just kept staring at me. He hadn’t expected me to understand a word he had spoken. Finally, he shrugged, shook his head sadly and went on his way in the opposite direction.
    The familiar sound of the school bell brought me to the gate of the compound. I put down my bundle and rang the gate bell. I knew the guardian who opened the gate, a Bantu.
    —Ssehura, he cried out.
    At least someone was happy to see me.
    —Saartjie, he said, using my Dutch name, how did you get here? What are you doing here?
    —I walked.
    —From home?
    —Yes.
    —And you walked through town?
    —Why, yes.
    We were speaking in Khoe.
    —It’s a wonder you didn’t get arrested! The Khoekhoe are prohibited from entering Cape Town. There are thousands of them camped outside the walls to the north of town. The English, who have defeated the Dutch and taken their colony, have decreed that Hottentots must be in the service of a white person, live in a fixed place and carry a pass in order to enter the town.
    —But this place is built on the People of the People’s land! How can they prohibit us from walking on it?
    —You are prohibited from owning it as well. I heard you got married.
    —My husband is dead. My just-born lived only a few months.
    —Oh, Ssehura. I’m so sorry to hear that. So you are alone in the world once again.
    —Yes. Mambu?
    —Yes?
    —Someone shoved me off the sidewalk coming here.
    He gazed at me