Ambiguity is my middle name: A research diary

The story of Sarah Bartmann teaches nothing if it does not teach you who you are. Researching her life and talking to people about her I found out that I would remain a brown woman, no matter how many strings of degrees I trailed around behind my name. My race and my gender followed me, even into my academic work. Simply put, my experiences of being black and a woman writing about Sarah Bartmann have proved to be germane to a study of her historiography. Thus, this chapter deals with my relationship with the academic world of knowledge surrounding the Sarah Bartmann story. In the first half of the essay I deconstruct the uses and abuses of Sarah Bartmann in current academic discourse. I then move on to a discussion of my experience teaching this material in racially mixed settings at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The chapter ends with a discussion of my quest for self-understanding and self-retrieval from the obscurities of a language not created for my benefit. My intention is to produce a turn-around polemic against the racist and sexist cultural texts that silenced me through their animosity, and thus contribute towards the communal project of creating a more hospitable mental environment for African creativity. It expresses my human need to understand, come to terms with, and move on from, the dominant Bartmann historiography.