ONE motherhood among the plural manifestations trending on Mother’s Day is the wife of the Man of God variously known as ‘Mai Mufundisi’, ‘Mai Bishop’ or ‘Prophetess’.

It has become the tradition among churches that on Mother’s Day these mothers collect trainloads of gifts of appreciation from the struggling sheep they pasture. They are normal mothers re-invented as the ultimate mothers in a curious miracle of 5 000 feeding one person. In the original Bible story, the pastor (Jesus) fed 5 000 people excluding women and children and there were 12 basketfuls of left-overs (Matthew 14:13-21).

And yet, one would be hard-pressed to identify the instance of inspiration from the Christian Bible that informs them. There is Sarah, Abraham’s wife, a mother who threw a stepson, Ishmael, and her mother, Haggai, out of inheritance and curiously retained her privileged place with the God of her husband, Abraham (Genesis 21: 8-21).

Then there is the same Sarah’s own daughter-in-law, Rebecca, the wife of Isaac and mother of the twins, Esau and Jacob, who took motherhood to another level; a level that is a far cry from the stereotype that is today hyped on Mother’s Day.

Rebecca connived with her favourite son, Jacob, to disinherit Esau, the son whom the God of Abraham and Isaac already hated even before birth (Genesis 27:1-40).

The deception went through without a hitch and was blessed by the same God who renamed the conman ‘Israel’ and became, himself, the God of Israel.

Then there is Tamar, Judah’s widowed daughter-in-law, who so desperately wanted to be a mother that she snared the father-in-law and conceived (Genesis 38).

Moses’s own mother hid the baby in the rushes of the River Nile to save him from the Egyptian Pharaoh’s ethnic cleansing of Jewish males (Exodus 2).

It is pertinent to note that the foregoing shows that the mother celebrated in the pastor’s wife is pseudo or insincere even in biblical standards so that when the same flocks present Christianity as a movement away from African ways critical attention is drawn to motherhood in African culture. In this respect, Shona motherhood provides an interesting reading.

And, it turns out kuti Shona motherhood is serious business and not just a biological representation. It is a role strategically deployed on multiple sites so that it is never in short supply. The contingency is such that if ever the biological mother died or absconded there was always someone ordained to step in as chigadzamaphihwa, musarapavana or simply, guide.

In Shona social organisation, motherhood is socialised across the extended family structure, so that sekuru, the biological mother’s brother and his children (sekuru namainini) are also mothers. So are the biological mother’s sisters (maiguru namainini). So is the grandfather’s sister (tete vamai). And any woman wedzinza ramai is a mother.

And a daughter named after one’s mother is a mother, too, and one has to be extra careful about the way they treat her.

Such a definition of motherhood in African culture is the reason why there were no orphanages and children’s homes in the African experience until the problems that came with colonisation introduced the institutions.

Mombe yeumai is a critical marriage gift given in appreciation of the mother for bearing and raising the bride. It is a cow that produces for the sole purpose of celebrating family extended from that motherhood. Once the production has reached sustainable numbers a beast is slaughtered at intervals varied at the mother’s pleasure in a feast called Madiro that draws the extended family together to sustain bonds.

In essence, the event translates into Mother’s Day; a real mother bringing her children and their families together in a celebration of unity.

When the mother passes on, the remaining cattle are returned to her people and are inherited by her brother’s children who continue the rite. That is how serious African motherhood is in Zimbabwe. The gravity of punishments like botso that are attendant to the crime of disrespecting one’s mother also confirm the same.

It has already been mentioned that native language is called ‘mother tongue’ and the native land is also called the motherland and, on 25 May 2025 Africans will be celebrating the African motherland.

Africans will be celebrating Mother Africa.

And what is foregrounded by that celebration is a checkered story that brings to mind Sarah ‘Saartjie’ Baartman or Hottentot Venus whom many among the African Diaspora have come to call ‘Mother Africa’, deriving from an experience that is iconic of the racial abuse African women have endured at the hands of their white guests at home in Africa and their white hosts in the western world.

Sarah ‘Saartjie’ Baartman was not her real name. Her remains unknown right to date. And ‘Hottentot’ was a racial slur used by Boers to refer to Khoi San people whom they also called ‘Kiffirs’. Her reference as ‘Venus’ the Roman god of love, was used to caricature the black woman.

Sarah ‘Saartjie’ Baartman was enslaved by Afrikaners or Boers in Eastern Cape, South Africa, and sold to  Alexander Dunlop, a British military surgeon who supplied British circus showmen with animal specimens. This means that the African woman was sold as a freak animal specimen to generate wealth out of the racial curiosity of European racists.

Before her, other ‘natives’ of Africa had been sold to generate wealth as unpaid slaves for racist Americans and Europeans.  In Britain, the slavery of ‘natives’ of Africa had raised Liverpool from a sleepy small fishing village into the largest slave trading port city in the world. And the Barclay brothers had used their slave trading super-profits to found the Barclays Bank that is today being used to effect illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe. Years later, British historian, Arnold Toynbee, was to cross the t’s and dot the i’s in his unambiguous European definition of the word ‘native’ in his Study of History:

“When we, Europeans, call people natives, we take away anything from them; anything that suggests that they are human beings. They are to us like the forest which the Western man fells down. Or, the big game that he shoots down. They have no tenure of land. Their tenure of land is as precarious as that of the animals that they find . . .

“What shall we, the lords of creation, the white people, do with the natives we find? Shall we treat them as vermin to be exterminated or shall we treat them as hewers of wood and drawers of water. There is no other alternative if niggers have no souls. ‘When we, Europeans, call people natives, we take away anything from them; anything that suggests that they are human beings. They are to us like the forest which the western man fells down.

“Or, the big game that he shoots down. They have no tenure of land. Their tenure of land is as precarious as that of the animals that they find . . . What shall we, the lords of creation, the white people, do with the natives we find? Shall we treat them as vermin to be exterminated or shall we treat them as hewers of wood and drawers of water. There is no other alternative, if niggers have no souls.”  

In 1810 Sarah Baartman travelled to London for exhibition as a freak animal species. The trip was sanctioned by Lord Caledon who was British governor of the Cape at the time. While European trips to Africa have never been restricted, regardless of purpose, African trips to Europe have always been strictly controlled by their European hosts.

Europeans came to Africa to enslave and to colonise. They are still coming to exploit, to make war, to sabotage and to change regimes they don’t like.

On the other hand, Africans are not just allowed into Europe. They originally went as mass hostages destined to be sold as slaves to generate wealth for European masters. The visa is still the same today but less overt.

In London, Baartman was exhibited to entertain British people with her ‘exotic’ looks of huge posterior and  enlarged genitalia which racist naturalists hypothesised as evidence of race-specific ape origins of Africans.

Sarah’s experience in Europe was notwithstanding the fact that  Britain had passed the Slave Trade Act banning the practice in 1807. In the same context, not even the African Association, an abolitionist pressure group could secure her release.

When the matter was taken to court on 24 November 1810 Dunlop produced a written contract in the same manner Cecil John Rhodes would in 1889 produce the Moffat Treaty and Rudd Concession as evidence that a Lobengula (who could not read, write or speak the English language of the written treaties) had, for virtually no benefit at all given the British settlers exclusive mineral rights over Zimbabwe.

The showman, one Hendrick Cezar, argued that Baartman had ‘. . . as good a right to exhibit herself as an Irish Giant or a Dwarf’ and was entitled to earn her living by that means. It is alleged that Baartman (who was entirely dependent on her captors for her life thousands of kilometres away from Africa) was questioned before the court in Dutch, in which she was allegedly ‘fluent’, and stated that she was not under restraint and understood perfectly that she was guaranteed half of the profits of exhibition. The case was conveniently dismissed even though her declaration directly contradicted the evidence on the ground.

 

It is repeated that, the publicity given by the court case ironically increased Baartman’s ‘popularity’ as an exhibit and this should have made her super-rich given the understanding made in court that she was guaranteed half of the profits of exhibition. Racist perverts paid to poke her privates with fingers or sticks and they paid extras to sexually sample her.

On 1 December 1811 Baartman was ‘christened’ at Manchester Cathedral. It was the same church that had endorsed and sponsored the trade that had enslaved her. Almost a century later, during the First Chimurenga in Zimbabwe, Father Beihler, of the same religion, would suggest the massacre of all Shona people above the age of 14 for armed resistance to colonial occupation.

Baartman was subsequently ‘sold’ to a Frenchman who took her to France where an animal trainer, S. Réaux, exhibited her under more abusive and humiliating conditions that included nude sittings for scientific paintings for fifteen months from around September 1814. French naturalists, among them, the head keeper of the zoo at the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle used her to postulate  racial evolution notions that linked Africans to apes.

It is reported that once her novelty had worn thin with Parisians, she began to drink heavily and support herself with prostitution notwithstanding the fact that in the London court on 24 November 1810, a written contract had been produced guaranteeing her half the super-profits of exhibition. And she had been exhibited for five years!

She died from syphilis on 29 December 1815.

A body cast was made from her corpse for continued display.  Thereafter, her womanhood and brain were sectioned, preserved and displayed.

The rest of the body was then boiled to separate the skeleton for separate display.

Mother Africa’s body cast, skeleton, womanhood and brain remained on public display in Paris’ Musee de l’Homme until 1974, when they were removed from public view and archived. This was 167 years after the abolition of slavery and she had been displayed for 158 years.

This was also 26 years after the United Nations Universal Human Rights Declaration whose proponents had included both Britain and France.

When South Africa got her independence in 1994, President Nelson Mandela   formally requested Sarah ‘Saartjie’ Baartman’s remains from France and only got them after much legal wrangling and debates in the French National Assembly. Repatriation of Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman’s remains to her homeland, the Gamtoos Valley took place on 6 May 2002.

There was no mention of compensation for an insult that lasted almost two centuries in the same manner there was no mention of the reparations for the harm inflicted by the harm of Afrikaner apartheid on black Africans.

There was no mention of reparations for ‘the experience(s) of the extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long.’

The Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children, a refuge for survivors of domestic violence was opened in Cape Town in 1999 to commemorate that Mother of Africa. And, Africans who celebrate the proffered purpose have obviously missed that it is decoy that hides the slave trade holocaust and the extraordinary crimes of apartheid. These were not and should not be classified as domestic violence!

And, today in 2025 as Africans celebrate Mother’s Day and (Mother) Africa Day under the theme, “ Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations”, we must introspect kuti:

How do we celebrate a mother we have helped to strip of all self-respect?