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South African director Zola Maseko's documentary, The Life & Times of Sara Baartman — `The Hottentot Venus', is punctuated with the jazz singer Gloria Bosman's catchy continental refrain, `I'm going back to Africa'. In 1998, when the film was completed, this projected homecoming was an optimistic conclusion to a nearly two-hundred-year-old story. Maseko's film turned out to be timely. In January 2002, the French government — apparently inspired to act by a poem to Saartje Baartman which appeared on the internet —announced that her remains would indeed be returned for burial in South Africa.² Following a ceremony in France in early May, they were flown from Paris back to Cape Town; and in August, marking her birthday (on the 9th) and nationwide Women's Day celebrations, Saartje Baartman was finally buried in her natal earth — in the Gamtoos Valley area of the Eastern Cape — as thousands looked on and a female choir sang `You are returning to your fatherland under African skies' (see `"Hottentot Venus" Laid to Rest', online.)

This is and is not an article about Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2001). It circles around her text, primarily to discuss two very allusive and elusive characters who figure in it, only to slip out of the story. As Dorothy Driver writes in her afterword to the Feminist Press edition of the novel: `Where history is silent, myth often speaks, and Wicomb's reinvention of history needs to deal with a current mythification involving two early South African women, Krotoä/Eva and Saartje Baartman' (2001 228). Despite their fleeting presence in Wicomb's novel, both of these women, I would argue, are integral to a book that refuses to engage them wholeheartedly in its plot.

In history, Krotoä-Eva was a woman of considerable linguistic talents; she was also the first indigenous woman to have appeared in early Cape official records — including the governor's own journal. Saartje Baartman, born over 100 years later, was by no means the only African woman to be exhibited in Europe, but her story — even to the present day — has been particularly spectacular.

Travelling through History, `New' South African Icons: The Narratives of Saartje Baartman and Krotoä-Eva in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story1

Travelling through History, `New' South African Icons: The Narratives of Saartje Baartman and Krotoä-Eva in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story¹