Hottentot Venus Read Online Free PDF

quiet, sulky girl who repented at five o’clock each morning my vanity, my selfishness, my stubbornness, my pride, my vindictiveness, my envy of others, all sins. The Khoekhoe had a very strict code of behavior and a code of honor that was relentless. To this I added the admonishments of the Wesleyan mission with all its Thou Shalt Nots. When this burden seemed to be unbearable, I would go and talk to my tree. I found more comfort there than in the mission’s chapel because, as I saw it, the tree
was
a cross. I don’t know even now if I truly believe that the tree was Christ. All I know is that whenever I was treated with ridicule and contempt, found myself unbearably ugly or alone, I would go to the tree and the tree would not only listen to me, it would talk back to me.
    The Reverend Freehouseland died suddenly of the cholera. On his deathbed he told me that he hoped one day I would consent to talk to a book, especially the Bible, and that I was hereby free, and no longer a slave, that he always prayed for me, his favorite, and that in his will he had left me ten pounds. My only friend, my love, my protector, had abandoned me, just as my mother and father had. Every place in the world was the same to me from then on. For a long time, I dreamed only of going to England, where I believed all men were like him. And above all places in England, I wanted to see Manchester, where he had been born and where his body was now buried.
    The Reverend Freehouseland’s family never awarded me my ten pounds. And for good measure they sent me back to my clan. I returned to find that two of my brothers had died, one from smallpox, the other in one of the never-ending raids of white settlers. Our clan had almost disappeared from the earth like the others. I began to believe the Hottentots were the most wretched beings on the earth.
    When I was freed by the Reverend Freehouseland, I was almost thirteen years old and approaching the age of marriage. My father’s sister, Auni, who, except for selling me to the reverend, had always treated me kindly, like one of her own children, changed completely towards me now that I had been sent back home. She turned harsh and rigid and inflexible, not to say cruel. She suddenly had all kinds of rules and restrictions, mysterious rituals and secret manipulations. She was determined to produce a bride. I was shocked at the malevolence and discontent this project evoked in her. Was it because the task was impossible? Was I as ugly as all that?
    Even so, the village judged me a marriageable and desirable virgin. I had beautiful small hands and feet and a tight cap of black curls that glistened with cocoa butter. On my head I wore a headband of long, thick braids of elephant grass, coiffed in elaborate designs. I had wide horizontal eyes without a fold at the lid and a high round forehead which took up half my face and gave it its heart shape. My cheekbones were high and fierce, my eyebrows plucked into a black line. My broad, full mouth with its jutting bottom lip was almost round, like a split papaya, and made an O. My eyes were light brown with almost no white, which had a bluish tint. My nose was short, my neck slim and long. I had small narrow shoulders and pear-shaped breasts tattooed in indigo with dark areolae. My waist was the smallest of all the virgins of the village and its size accentuated my wide jutting buttocks and sumptuous, mountainous hips. My clan carefully cultivated my shape according to our traditions. Like my peers, my bottom parts were massaged with butter and secret swelling ointments until they sprang a foot from the curve of my spine. I was fed the peanut oils and corn porridge and honey that would add even more flesh to them and more pounds to my thighs above the knees. My shape became my reason for being and that of my guardian. My shape became me and I became my shape. From time immemorial, it had been so for Khoekhoe women.
    Some marriageable females could hardly stand or