Abstract
I'm talking about the 2 caricatures of the African woman in the Western world.
These two images limit the African woman to two main identities:
- She's friendly, ignorant and voiceless - often wife number seven or eleven. She's a good nanny for European children because she's patient and always smiling.
- (I discovered this when I arrived in France, and concluded that it was a male fantasy space) She's the African Gazelle: hot, obedient, a bit of a whore but careful, carrying all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases. Very obsessed with the African woman's body.
In my search for the origin of this obsession, I discovered some answers in colonial literature (Céline, "Voyage au Bout de la Nuit", Conrad, "Au Cœur de Ténèbres", Karen Blixen, "La Ferme Africaine") or in so-called "scientific" observations, Georges Cuvier, "Mémoires du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle", col. III, Belin, 1817 (after the dissection of the corpse of Sarah Haartman, known as the "Venus Hottentote", whose report focuses on the measurements of her genitals). This woman seems to be the same from Cape Town to Cairo.
