Hendrik Cesars and the Tragedies of Race in South Africa

By Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully

When we began researching our biography of Sara Baartman we thought we knew what we would find. Two white men brought Sara Baartman to 19th-century London, where she was put on show in Piccadilly. Every study, every bit of popular knowledge representing Sara Baartman's life as the "Hottentot Venus," had said so.

Newspapers in London at the time described Hendrik Cesars as a colonist. The extraordinary efforts to return Baartman's remains, beginning soon after South Africa's first democratic elections and ending in her state funeral in 2002, had represented her life as that of a black woman taken advantage of by white men. President Thabo Mbeki has said as much in his eulogy, extending his comments to a denunciation of Western science, indeed the entire Enlightenment.

We would discover, however, that Cesars was, in the racial categorization of the Cape, a "free black." His descendants were slaves, brought forcibly to South Africa to work on the farms and in the city. Cesars's wife also descended from slaves. The couples' life in a poor section of Cape Town remained indelibly marked by slavery. Laws prohibited them from wearing fancy clothes. They had to apply for permission to leave the area. And they were barred from many of the economic opportunities "free burghers" enjoyed. One of the men responsible for Sara Baartman's exploitation was, himself, subjected to prejudice.

South Africans, and indeed most of the modern world, can only see others for the color of their skin. Modern racism and its many legacies seems to have forever shaped how one speak of others, our very apprehensions of past and present. This is not how the world always was. Hendrik Cesars's complexion was "white", even as he was known by others in the Cape as "free black." This is why when Cesars traveled
to England Londoners saw him as a white man, a colonial settler, a mean, violent master. They could not see him for what he was, could not understand his humanity even as they criticized his actions, the decisions he made. And this is how it remains, regrettably, today.

Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully are authors of Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography.

Interview: Katherine Howe

Katherine Howe, the author of Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, was adventurous enough to do our first Author Interview for Wonders & Marvels.

Katherine and I had a chance to touch bases this week about her thoughts on the book and why the study of history should matter.

My favorite quote from the interview: "It's unfair to accuse people of being crazy just because they happened to live in the past."

Absolutely. The study of past lives demands a deep level of respect as well as a willingness to enter into a world that may not be at all like our own. It means trying to understand and inhabit the cultural, political, and economic logic of the time--as well as its inconsistencies.

It means listening to the dominant, as well as the silenced, voices. And to do this requires patience, aptitude for meticulous research, and a willingness to share with others (both inside and outside academe) the things that we have seen in our journeys to the past.

What are your thoughts about all of this?

Looking forward to your comments on this first interview. And as Katherine said, she would love to respond to any questions you might have. We'll forward them to her without delay.

Note as well that Harvard University Bookstore will be hosting a book signing with Katherine on June 23 at 7pm.

Can Witch Trials Be Reasonable?

By Katherine Howe

No matter how many Salem books appear, the question of New England witchcraft never seems to be exhausted. It forces us to confront the fragility of some of Americans' dearest assumptions about ourselves: that we are tolerant, that we value the socially marginalized, that we are rational and can be persuaded by reasoned argument. Salem means that we can't take our toleration for granted. Instead, we hunt for justification. Usually we point to “hysteria,” as though living in the past, according to a past set of beliefs, automatically makes one crazy.

But it is not so. They weren't crazy at all.

In 1690s New England, Salem was only the most extreme example of an otherwise common legal problem. We don't bother to legislate against imaginary threats, after all. The Salem participants – accusers, accused, judges, jury, theologians, the lieutenant governor – all lived in a religious system which assumed witchcraft to be real. The Salem episode was unusual for its breadth and longevity, facts not lost on observers at that time. But for people who believed themselves to occupy still-new lands “that were once the Devil's territories,” the presence of Satan working through earthly interlocutors was a credible, and terrifying, threat. Looked at from this perspective, the Salem trials resemble the most rational response available to a community struggling to free itself from the ravages of evil incarnate.

The idea of witch-hunting as rational, however, might be too chilling to contemplate. A mere decade after the panic ended, several participants began to regret their role in the trials; Samuel Sewall, a judge, and Ann Putnam, an afflicted girl, both made humble public apologies for their participation in what they now felt was a miscarriage of justice. The speed with which Salem was reconsidered, even in the colonial world, is itself reassuring – even they thought they were being crazy! Phew.

And yet, for the first many months of 1691/92, inquiry into the presence of witches in Essex County was anything but crazy. In fact, it was imperative, given the cultural and religious structures in place in that community at that time. One wonders what other assumptions, imperative in our own time, will be hysterical in another?

Spread the Wonder, email this to a friend

Katherine Howe is author of The Physick Book Deliverance Dane, just published by Voice (Hyperion).

History as Mirror

By Edith B. Gelles

There are parallels between Presidents Adams and Obama, ways in which our current president can take comfort and, perhaps, learn lessons from this long gone predecessor. Strange as this coupling may appear, there are overarching similarities between them that should offer lessons from history for the new president.

Unlikely though real, both Adams and Obama come to their ideological commitment from similar backgrounds, common experiences that fundamentally shaped their thinking. First, both were “outsiders.” No need rehearse the President’s background that has brought a deep cultural shift in this country. But, as John Adams liked to say about himself: he was a duck among swans. The most popular and influential politicians of his age and four of the first five presidents hailed from the South.

Second, both John Adams and Barack Obama were trained in and practiced law. Training for the bar produces a method of thinking. It is a discipline that is learned and forms an automatic means of responding to problems. But neither Adams nor Obama was comfortable with the practice of law and each found a way out of its standard professional performance. “O that I was a soldier,” moaned Adams at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, but since he lacked the background to become a general, he became a politician. Mr. Obama came to politics via community organizing.

Religion created for both men not just a lifelong belief system, but a moral code and ethical approach that became part of their natures. In fact, Mr. Obama’s now more conservative religious stance conforms in many ways to John Adams’s then liberal religious approach: belief in God, in a hereafter, and the preciousness of the individual life. Moreover, their religion taught them that the divine spark in a person mandates devotion to public service, and service implied the duty to make the world a better place than they found it.

History provides a mirror, not just for us ordinary citizens to understand our own era by seeing it in context with the past with its similarities and differences, but for our leaders in their quest for solutions to their daunting challenges. President John Adams, by his example, provides some perspective to his distant successor President Barack Obama.

Edith B. Gelles is Senior Scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is author of Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage (William Morrow).

The Blue Hour

By Lilian Pizzichini

Once I had got to the end of my book - a biography of the writer Jean Rhys - and I had killed off the main protagonist, I felt intense relief. It had taken me five years to get to this point. Rhys was 78 when she died, and at certain points during the five years it took to write her life, I thought she would never die. Towards the end of her life, my impression was that she felt the same. But, she kept saying, she had to earn her death. I think it is safe to say that she did, and that, like her, I experienced a sense of joy in that moment. A few days later it occurred to me that not once in the 80,000-odd words I had written had I mentioned why I had called the book, “the blue hour."

L’Heure Bleue is the name of her favourite perfume, and it was what first attracted me to her. In fact, I was wearing it long before I wrote the book. In the summer of 1912 the French parfumier Jacques Guerlain concocted a scent from musk and rose de Bulgarie with a single note of jasmine. He intended his new scent, which he called L’Heure Bleue, to evoke dusk in the city, a time when the well-groomed Parisienne prepares for the evening.

For Jean Rhys, the blue hour was also the hour when the underdog she saw herself as being during the day turned into a wolf. Dogs hunt best during twilight. Underneath our mannered surface lurks a predator. Jean Rhys was always concerned with what lay beneath the top notes. In Quartet, her first novel, set in Paris, a young, female character, smarter and bolder than her heroine, is wearing L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain. Rhys’s heroine absorbs the woman’s scent as though by breathing it in she could capture her rival’s self-possession.

Its hints of pastry and almonds make L’Heure Bleue a melancholic fragrance, as if in mourning for a time passed by. The curves of the Art Nouveau bottle, the stopper in the form of a hollowed-out heart, allude to the romance of the years leading to the First World War. The story Jean Rhys tells in Quartet describes the last days and weeks of a relationship, the loss of love and safety, and, implicitly, the death of old Europe. L’Heure Bleue, as I have said, was her favourite perfume, and The Blue Hour is an attempt to re-capture her life. Another thing that occurred to me on finishing this book was that Jean Rhys died on my birthday, 14th May 1979. I was 14, and I almost feel as though I was carrying her torch long before I came to write her story.

Lilian Pizzichini is author of The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys.

Wide Saragasso Sea

It has been years and years since I've read Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. It is haunting, strangely monstrous and beautiful all at once. In a word, unforgettable.

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few months ago, critic Carlin Romano reminds of why Rhys should be rediscovered over and over again.

Lilian Pizzichini's biography shows clearly how Rhys' unflinching study of life's brutal realities parallels an equally turbulent and heartbreaking odyssey. Pizzichini will be here on Thursday to talk about her experience of writing The Blue Hour.

For more about The Blue Hour and Jean Rhys do have a peek at these:

Telegraph (review)

The Independent: Jean Rhys, Prostitution, Alcoholism, and the Mad Woman in the Attic

The Motor Bandits

By Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler

On the night of December 13, 1911, three men stole an automobile from the home of a family in the wealthy Paris suburb of Boulogne-sur-Seine. The car was a Delaunay-Belleville, France’s finest make: the czar of Russia was said to own twenty. The three men were to use it to become, for a time, the most wanted criminals in Europe.

A week later, that same car sat idling on the Rue Ordener in Montmartre. At the wheel was Jules Bonnot (police mug shot above), a former racing-car driver who had embraced anarchism and turned to crime as a protest against society. His two cohorts, Raymond Caillemin and Octave Garnier, stepped out of the car when they saw a man with a briefcase approaching.

The briefcase, they knew, was filled with cash and securities being messengered to a bank. Though the two gunmen drew pistols, the messenger surprisingly resisted, and Garnier shot the man twice through the chest before he released his hold on the case.

The gunshots attracted attention and people ran to help. As his accomplices slid into the back seat, Bonnot gunned the motor of the Delaunay-Belleville, made a hairpin turn and sped back down the street. Finding other vehicles in his way, he simply drove onto the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians in his wake. Within seconds, the car was out of sight.

In the annals of crime, this was a singular moment: for the first time, bandits had used what became known as a getaway car to escape from the scene of a crime. French newspapers gave Bonnot the nickname “the Demon Chauffeur” as the gang staged robbery after robbery in the same ruthless fashion.

Bonnot once coolly walked into a newspaper office to correct a story that had been written about him. He admitted that the police would triumph eventually, but he vowed not to be taken alive.

So it was. On April 27, Bonnot’s hideout, a two-story house in the countryside, was surrounded by sixteen members of the French Sûreté. Resisting calls for surrender, Bonnot demonstrated that he had stockpiled plenty of weapons and ammunition. The chief of the Sûreté forces called on the local militia, who brought artillery.

When word of the battle spread, more than ten thousand civilians gathered, as well as a motion-picture newsreel team. Spotlights were set up as the siege lasted into the night. When the building was destroyed by dynamite, Bonnot’s body was discovered inside, next to a final testament he had written in his own blood. His gravesite had to be kept secret to prevent admirers from turning it into a shrine.

Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler are authors of The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (Little Brown).

The Color of Pirating

By Peter T. Leeson

Eighteenth-century pirate features, from skull-emblazed flags to wooden legs, pervade popular culture. One important pirate feature that doesn’t appear in most pop-culture treatments, however, is the fact that upward of a quarter of the average early 18^th-century pirate crew was black.

Historical evidence on the free vs. slave status of black pirates is conflicting. Because of this it’s tempting to conclude that pirates, who were no more racially enlightened than their legitimate contemporaries, typically treated blacks as their legitimate contemporaries did: they enslaved them.

But as I argue in my new book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, this conclusion may be mistaken. Although some black pirates were slaves, it’s probable that many, and perhaps even most, black pirates were not. To be sure, pirates were as prejudiced as their legitimate contemporaries. But unlike in legitimate society, in pirate society, prejudiced thinking didn’t necessarily mean prejudiced policy.

The reason for this is straightforward: pirates were profit seekers. They cared more about gold and silver than they cared about black and white. And granting blacks their freedom was often more profitable than enslaving them.

A pirate crew’s benefit of enslaving a sailor was the additional booty the slave’s wage-less labor brought it. But the crew’s cost of enslaving a sailor could be much higher. If the slave escaped and informed the authorities on his pirate captors, or together with other conscripts succeeded in overthrowing his enslavers and delivered them to the law, the pirates faced the unpleasant prospect of hanging and thus the end of their roguish lives. Since the cost of enslaving a sailor often exceeded the benefit, in many cases, granting black sailors their freedom was simply good business.

Pirate profit seeking, not progressivism, prodded some sea scoundrels to practice racial tolerance. But this doesn’t diminish the tolerance they showed. In their pursuit of self-interest these pirates were led, as if by an “invisible hook,” in some ways reminiscent of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” to treat black sailors as equals.

Peter T. Leeson is author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press). Image courtesy of the author.

Book of the Week: The Invisible Hook

Now here's a question that I had never given much thought about: What were the economic conditions for the pirating industry in the 17th century? But what a fascinating question it is!

Peter Leeson's book is very intriguing--and wickedly clever. Who knew that pirates had elaborate systems of what we'd call "constitutional democracy" and "worker's compensation" today? For Leeson, it's all about measured responses to market forces.

To get a better sense of his argument, take a look at these articles or walk the plank mates!

The Pirates' Code (The New Yorker)

Everyone in Favor say Yargh! (Boston Globe)

More to come in the next post. Be sure to sign up for a chance at a free copy. Just click the book cover to your left.

Ahoy!

[Image courtesy of author]

Medical Curiosities, Authorial Resources

By Kirsten Menger-Anderson

Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain began as a short story about phrenology. I was fascinated by the odd idea of determining personality from the bumps in our heads, and intrigued by the diagrams of crisscrossed heads containing "brain organs" ranging from poetic talent to the tendency to murder. What other (now discredited) medical ideas have we held, I began to wonder. And so began my journey through 350 years of medical history.

Early in my research, I discovered the work of Jan Bondeson. His Buried Alive, which tells vivid tales of tobacco-smoke enemas and coffins fitted out with bell towers, inspired a story about a boy who may or may not be dead. Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, an entertaining survey of medical oddities, led to several additional stories that draw from the colorful histories Bondeson tells--tales involving spontaneous combustion and short hirsute women. Past medical techniques and the contemporaneous debates about life, death, and the soul took hold of my imagination. When I came across a review for Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer, I immediately ordered the book.

Soul Made Flesh, which opens in 1662 Oxford, where the "stink of cured fish hanging in fishmongers' stalls mixes with the soft smell of bread in the bakeries," is a history of our search to understand the human brain and the soul--work that inspired the opening story of my collection. From Zimmer, I learned about theories concerning the soul and its relationship to the human body, and how Galen's anatomy, which was accepted well into the seventeenth century, was based on studies of "lower" animals: the brain of a cow, the uterus of a dog, the kidneys of a pig.

I discovered curative radium in Bob McCoy's book Quack! Tales of Medical Fraud. I read about Mesmerism in an essay by Dylan Morgan; I followed the evolution of New York City in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace's amazing book Gotham. The sciences that drive the characters in Doctor Olaf are the ones I learned about as I researched the book. Only I have the benefit of intervening centuries to see that many of the practices and theories are ill-advised. My characters believe in them.

Image: Skull inscribed for phrenological demonstration. 19th century. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.