One pound for a skull in good order. In a Cape Town museum, Dr. David Schlosz stands in front of a 1923 letter pricing human remains and faces how much he was never taught. Sarah Baartman was a Khoekhoe woman from the Gamtoos Valley. She was taken to London in 1810 and put on display, then exhibited in Paris, then dissected after her death, and her remains stayed on show in a French museum for generations. In 2002, one hundred and ninety two years after she left, she was carried home and buried on a hill above Hankey, in the valley where she was born. In this episode, David tells her story through Homecoming: Ancestral Returns, Museum Reckonings, and the Future of Care, an exhibition at the Iziko South African Museum made by Khoi and San descendants. It fills the room that once held the museum’s Bushman Diorama. From there, the episode widens from one woman to the system that measured, classified, and priced a people. Then it turns to what this asks of us now. As a white South African, David speaks openly about his own positionality and about the comfortable not-knowing he grew up inside. He comes back again and again to the people whose story this is. In this episode, we explore: Sarah Baartman’s life, death, and return, told with dignity and without recreating the gazeHow museums, archives, and science built “controlling images” that justified harmShame as something done to a people and then lived as if it were personalWhat helping professionals inherit from the disciplines that built race scienceWitness, not looking away, as the repair for a harmful gazeUbuntu, and what a homecoming means for descendants and for the rest of usA guided practice: Soft Eyes, Steady FeetContent note: This episode discusses colonial violence, racism, the sexualized public display of a woman’s body, grave robbing, and human remains held in museums. It quotes some colonial terms in the way the archive used them. If you are Khoi, San, Nama, Griqua, or Coloured, or you descend from any people who were measured and named this way, please listen in whatever way your body needs. Use the chapters below to skip ahead or come back later. With gratitude to Joniff Cleophas (The Observed), Lukretia Booysen (Point of View), and the descendant artists of Homecoming at the Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town. Historian Yvette Abrahams, for insisting that Sarah be understood as a full human being. The late Diana Ferrus (1953 to 2026), whose poem I’ve Come to Take You Home helped bring Sarah home. Please read it in her own words, in her collection of the same name. Further reading Abrahams, Y. (2000). Colonialism, dysfunction and dysjuncture: The historiography of Sarah Bartmann [Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town].Crais, C., & Scully, P. (2009). Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A ghost story and a biography. Princeton University Press.Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery. Basic Books.Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands. Central Recovery Press.If you need support: This podcast is education and reflection, not therapy. In the US, call or text 988. In South Africa, contact SADAG at 0800 567 567. Elsewhere, please reach out to a local crisis line or a counselor you trust. Project I Am is hosted by Dr. David Schlosz , psychotherapist and counselor educator. I am because you are. Keep becoming.
