Hottentot Venus Read Online Free PDF Page B

hold up their own weight. There was one maiden, Fulikiki, who had to be carried from place to place on a stool, her hind parts were so heavy. If she stood up, she toppled over backwards like a doll. Her brother would set her in place, her earlobes pierced with gold, a plate of honeycomb in front of her into which she sank her perfect white teeth, making the gold glitter. But the crowning glory of our beauty was our sex, now hidden under the elaborate beaded apron all maidens had to wear. My aunt began to cultivate its size and shape for it was the ultimate symbol of my femininity, my sexuality, my worth as a bride, much more so than my virginity. My aunt was charged with this treatment and she applied herself diligently. She knew it was my only chance in life: a husband.
    She herself carried me to the compound for young girls when my menses came, lugging me piggyback so that my feet would not touch the ground. She cooked the porridge and flower bulbs and honey to fatten my hind parts. She taught me the medicine I needed to know. She performed the numerous rituals that had to be performed daily. She heated the water for my daily bath because washing with cold water was taboo. She groomed my skin, my feet and hands, rubbing them with coconut butter and beef fat. She showed me how to weave aprons out of multicolored feathers, to make necklaces from crushed ostrich eggs. To tan the thongs of skins I wore around my ankles. I was an orphan, after all, with no mother to guide my steps forward towards marriage.
    She also occupied herself with the ways of Khoekhoe women who made their sex more attractive by artifice.
    Aunt Auni made two incisions on each side so that the flesh curved downwards and placed a small pebble within. As the stones stretched the delicate membranes, she would insert a larger, heavier pebble until the flesh had descended to the length she desired and found beautiful. She explained, but I already knew from my sisters, that for my future husband, the act of love was not only the penetration of my vagina but also the enfolding of his gland within those fleshy lips. This would augment the ultimate moments of his pleasure. For my husband, I could procure rapturous levels with this apron of pulsing flesh filled with racing blood, fluttering like the burning wings of a butterfly or the fiery folds of a medusa. Each month the pebble got heavier and my bride-price increased. My aunt beamed with satisfaction.
    It had been so through generations of Khoekhoe women, though no one knew how or why the apron had begun, not even the midwives, not even the rainmakers. Auni believed that there had been an ancient goddess so endowed and that my mother and her mother and her mother’s mother’s mother, nearly all the women in our clan, followed this custom. It went back to the beginning of time before the Flood when we lived in Namibia, the land of the People of the People. Then, we had lived along the coastline formed by soft warm currents which blew the waters of the sea northwards, creating a garden of rich underwater plants, providing food for the penguins, seals and sea lions that bred in the rocks and caves. Ever since the Flood we had lived here in ten clans of hunters and herders of cattle. Our chiefs were not born but elected, mostly for their ability to make rain. There was no central authority over the clans. There was no dictator, no hereditary prince, no king, no nobles. There was no word in Khoe for property or slave. The territory between the Orange River, which we called the Chamtoo, and the coastline from Namaqualand to the Umzimvubu River where it empties into the eastern Cape was ours until the Dutch came along and took it. We lost our grazing lands, our stock, our trade routes with the Bantu. We lost three wars, endured ten famines and four smallpox epidemics. We the hunters became the hunted, first as slaves, then for sport. We lost all idea of the past, even the names of our own rivers. And we clung to a few