By Mashingaidze Gomo

THE Sarah Baartman story constitutes fundamental human rights discourse outside which Western sponsored black women’s rights movements-against-black-men do not make any sense at all.
And, what this means is that if black people are collectively serious about re-defining their space in human history, they must, as a matter of urgency, recognise the need to quarantine Western delimitation of gender violence to the post independent African context in a manner that absolves the white criminal from blame.
The sponsored definition of violence against the African woman is not sensitive to a colonial history in which the white man’s violence became an institution brazenly structured to optimise exploitation of the black race.
It is the dehumanisation of the black woman by white men that spawned a host of other associated evils which Western-sponsored non-governmental organisations (NGOs) now blame on the black man.
If it is true that to educate a woman is to educate a nation, there must also be recognition that such a truth cannot be a self-sustaining notion.
It can only be true in a paradigm, suggesting other truths that cannot stand alone.
And in that regard, it also suggests that to de-humanise a woman is to de-humanise a nation.
It also suggests that the white men who stripped Sarah Baartman for the public amusement of white perverts also stripped the black race of human dignity because the black woman is the source of black life.
Sarah Baartman went down European history as ‘Hottentot Venus’, but the label was not meant to celebrate black womanhood.
‘Hottentot Venus’ was an oxymoron constructed in bad taste.
While ‘Venus’ is the revered Greek goddess of love, there is nothing affectionate about ‘Hottentot’.
The term ‘Hottentot’ was a sadistic exercise of power relations in a society that had relegated black women to zoological status.
White men called black women whatever they wanted and European rule of law tongue-tied black women not to answer back.
So, black women were variously called ‘Kaffir’, ‘Hottentot’, ‘Nigger’ etc. and none of those terms were meant to make black women feel good about themselves.
They were labels meant to undermine the black woman’s capacity to love herself.
And, once a woman loses the capacity to love herself and starts to stitch another woman’s hair onto her own scalp, speak in another woman’s tongue, bleach her own skin into another woman’s skin, that woman is dead.
And, such a woman dies not alone, but with everyone else derived from her abused loins.
Therefore, the term ‘Hottentot Venus’ was a whiplash not only of sound but meaning too, cutting deep and harmful in the most scatological sense.
In the longer historical context, Sarah Baartman represents the white man’s violence against the black woman in its most absolute sense and, it must be incumbent upon all black Zimbabwean women who have soldiered for Western-sponsored regime change NGOs to re-examine the black woman’s experience (at the hands of the white man) in their own interests.
And, it must never be lost to the people of Zimbabwe that the ZANU PF government never legislated violence against black women.
Rather, it criminalised discrimination against women that had thrived as Rhodesian rule of law.
Regime change Western-sponsored black Zimbabwean women’s rights movements must remember that notwithstanding the irrefutable show of resolute purpose by Nehanda (a black woman) in the First Chimurenga, the Rhodesian administration proceeded to relegate the black woman to child status.
A parliament of racist white men deliberately enacted legislation that held down the black woman and encouraged perverted white men to freely sample her as an object of sexual indulgence.
In Rhodesia, white men raped black women with impunity.
Regime change Western-sponsored black Zimbabwean women’s rights movements must remember that the black Zimbabwean cultural institutions they have been sponsored to spiritedly demonize are unambiguous about the sanctity of the black woman’s property rights. Mombe dzeumai; munda waamai; dura raamai; mapfihwa aamai; bonde raamai, all constitute a sacred property zone which all level headed black people tread with utmost respect.
And, while the property rights of black Zimbabwean men can be willfully violated without overtly deterrent repercussions, everyone knows kuti pfuma yemukadzi haibatwi.
And yet, Rhodesian rule of law, fanatically defended by extremists like Iain Kay, Eddie Cross, Roy Bennett, David Coltart and Mike Campbell, stripped the black woman of those property rights.
Regime change Western-sponsored black Zimbabwean women’s rights movements must remember that the colonial system that looted African cattle to empower white settlers yakabatanidzira nemombe dzeumai and women’s property rights, sanctified in African culture, were lost.
The black woman lost adult citizen status and with it, the right to register property in her own name.
But, to really understand the absolute de-humanisation of the black woman by the white man, one must look at mombe yeumai in the wider cultural context.
Mombe yeumai is an institution deliberately put in place to celebrate the unity of families.
Mombe yeumai is the most critical part of every woman’s bride price because it translates to the life or death of the children she will bear. Mombe yeumai is the property of the bride’s mother.
When the beast reproduces, and grandchildren from the marriage multiply, the woman’s mother routinely slaughters the beasts in ritual festivities meant to bring the extended family together in a spirit of unity which in the wider social context translates to national unity.
And, what this means is that the Thomas Meikles Loot Committee that championed the looting of black people’s livestock became more than just a racist economic sanctions regime in its effects.
In a very critical sense, by targeting black women’s property rights, the Rhodesian loot committees were in effect dismantling the unity of families sustained by those property rights.
The black woman’s definition of her own dignity must be informed by thorough self-knowledge and not what Rhodesians and imperialists who abused her forebears tell her.
Every time a Western sponsored NGO preaches women’s rights, they must be reminded of generations of Afro-American women who have never been able to know the security of family unity because white men placed the policy of slavery above conscience and used them to breed slaves of random paternity in the same manner they bred animals.
Western sponsored NGOs purporting to stand for women’s rights from a holier-than-thou attitude must be reminded of Sarah Baartman, standing in absolute nakedness on the streets of London and Paris, being turned this way and that way by racist white men.
Achipenengurwa (intimately examined), without sanction, until there was no part of her of which she could say: “This is not known.
“This is mine.”
Until every white pervert exhausted their curiosity of vision and touch. Until every white pervert knew her transparently, without the decency of unfamiliarity; without the secrets that make women human; without the inhibitions that give women human anchor.
It is this symbolism of Sarah Baartman as representative of the black woman that must inform all black women who fight gender violence so that they are not taken for a ride by racist white men.