In the Beginning, There Was a Body: Saartjie Baartman, the Gaze, and the Coin of Costless Consumption
In the Beginning, There Was a Body
Saartjie Baartman, the Gaze, and the Coin of Costless Consumption
The Gamtoos River Valley, Eastern Cape was the home of Saartjie Baartman. A landscape of return and of silence.
You scroll. A prophet is in the stocks, a woman is on a pedestal. The platform is different, the coin is the same. You pay with your attention, and you receive a regulated inner state: a hit of moral certainty, a thrill of transgression, a soothing of anxiety. The human on the other side of the screen is not a person; they are fuel. A stimulus for your biopsychological regulation.
This is not new media. It is old sin, wired into the reward pathways of a fallen world. And its most precise, unforgiving historical map is the body of a woman named Saartjie Baartman.
Her exhibition was not an anomaly. It was a liturgy. A sacred, repeating ritual of a distortion Genesis diagnoses at the very beginning: the reduction of the God-imaged person to a consumable spectacle. Lust and revulsion are not opposites—they are currencies in the same broken economy of seeing another human as a tool for managing the self.
In the beginning, God spoke order into chaos and called it good. The sinful gaze does the inverse: it speaks chaos into a person. It erases particularity, history, and name, leaving only a generic shape to be consumed. This is the story. We will trace the erasure—from the Babel contract to the exhibition placard. We will feel the weight of the coin—lust and revulsion as two sides of the same reward hack. We will stand in the aftermath of dissection and anonymity. And then, inheritors of this neural architecture, we must turn. We must ask what it means to witness in a digital age that runs on the same ancient, brutal currency.
Erasure: The Babel Contract and Lost Particularity
Before there was a spectacle, there was a person. She was born among the Gonaqua Khoikhoi around 1789, near the Gamtoos River. A life of cattle-herding, kinship, and oral tradition. A world woven into place and relationship. Her birth name is unknown to us—Saartjie is a Dutch diminutive, a colonial marking of servitude and possession. This loss is not an accident. It is the first, deliberate erasure.
The 1810 “contract” that brought her to London is the document of this violence. Written in an English she could not read, drafted under the duress of handlers, it fabricated legal consent where there could be none. This was linguistic imperialism as a weapon. At Babel, God confused language to protect humanity from its own unified hubris, to fracture a will to power. Here, the unified language of Empire was wielded to enable that very power. It inverted the divine safeguard into an instrument of consumption.
Empire’s first act is translation. It translates a living, particular body into a generic category for market and myth. “Saartjie” became the “Hottentot Venus.” Hottentot—a mocking colonial onomatopoeia for Khoekhoe click sounds. Venus—a stolen archetype of beauty, twisted into a pornographic joke. Every syllable of the stage name enacted a double negation: of her culture and of her soul.
In Genesis, God’s first creative acts are speech that names and orders: “Let there be light,” and “God called the light Day.” Creation begins with particularity. The consumptive gaze begins with generic labeling. It is anti-creation. It unmakes a world to make a product.
The Coin: Lust, Revulsion, and the Broken Reward Loop
The crowds that paid to see Baartman were not monolithic. Some leered with desire. Others looked with pious horror, clucking at the “savagery” on display. We like to think these responses are opposites. They are not. They are the two faces of the same coin, minted in the same broken economy.
Augustine saw this in the Roman games: the crowd feels pity for the gladiator, but not the costly pity that stops the show. It is a pity that luxuriates in its own feeling, a costless catharsis. The thrill of lust and the shudder of revulsion serve the same master: the regulation of the spectator’s inner world. Both provide a dopamine hit—one of transgressive dominance, the other of moral superiority and safety.
This is the neural core. The body on the pedestal becomes an external regulator for an internal state. Her presence is not an encounter; it is a tool. The brain’s reward pathways, designed to navigate a world of costly, reciprocal relationships, are hacked. Relationship is replaced by consumption. Covenant is replaced by contract.
The aftermath literalized the gaze. After her death in 1815, Georges Cuvier, the eminent French anatomist, dissected her body. He preserved her brain and genitals in jars. He sought the “scientific” particular—the evidence of racial hierarchy—and in doing so, completed the consumption. The person was now entirely reduced to biological specimens, curated for a different kind of gaze: the cold, classifying stare of imperial science.
Here, the biblical counterpoint screams in silence. In Genesis 16, Hagar, the exploited Egyptian slave, names God El Roi: “the God who sees me.” God sees the particular, the named, the suffering. The system that consumed Baartman sees only the generic, the renamed, the useful. God’s sight confers dignity; the consumptive gaze annihilates it.
The Turn: From Consumption to Witness in the Neural Age
We are not spectators to history. We are its inheritors. The gaze is not archived; it is encoded. It is the default setting of our neural architecture in a fallen world, now supercharged by digital platforms that run on the precise economy of attention-for-regulation.
True crime documentaries binge-sold as entertainment. Viral videos of suffering, scrolled past or consumed with vague unease. The comment-section frenzies of lust or moral condemnation. These are not new sins. They are the old liturgy, performed at broadband speed. We are all holding the same coin.
So what do we do? There is no easy, numbered practice. There is only the difficult, daily turn.
The next time my thumb pauses on an image of pain or difference—a body in conflict, a person made into a meme—I feel the old coin in my palm. It is warm from my grip. The transaction is queued: spend this attention for a hit of sensation, for a confirmation of my worldview, for a moment’s regulation.
The turn is to step back. To let the transaction fail. To see the generic label (“controversy,” “freak,” “villain,” “star”) and actively wonder about the particular person behind it—a person with a name I likely do not know, a history I have not learned, a humanity I am wired to ignore. This is not empathy. Empathy can be another coin, another way to feel good about feeling bad. This is witness. It is a refusal to consume. It is agreeing to hold the unbearable weight of another’s particularity without converting it into fuel for my own state.
Beginnings matter. God’s first word was creative speech into chaos. Our first word, in the face of the consumptive chaos within us, can be a lament. A lament that turns into a vow of attention that demands nothing in return.
The Cross enters here, not as spectacle, but as the ultimate refutation of the gaze. Here is a body, stripped and exposed to the ultimate lust for violence and the ultimate revulsion of sin. And God does not look away. He enters it. He sees its particular agony from within. He redeems it by suffering it, not by consuming it. The resurrection is the vindication of the particular body that the world tried to erase.
In 2002, after decades of activism, her remains were repatriated from France and buried near her birthplace in the Eastern Cape. It was a return, but a shadowed one. A body came home, but the life that was lived, the name that was spoken, the person who laughed and wept in that landscape—these remain in the silence. It is a faint, earthly echo of El Roi, the God who sees the one whom the world has labored to render nameless. A witness that arrives, grieving, two centuries late.
This is the hard beginning. The only one that has ever mattered.
