MARCH 8: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

Women participating in a vegetable garden project in Casamance (Senegal)

The source of the following article is from the newspaper Vila-Web:
SYMBOL OF ANTI-COLONIAL AFRICAN FEMINISM

There are tragic stories from the past that over time have become symbols of the struggle and denunciation of the most modern and radical young African feminists and artists. They are stories of lives that embody the brutality and injustice of ancient colonialist thought, with resonances in the present, either as identical practices 'adapted' to current political correctness, or as an object of study to discover political and social attitudes that are children of that ideology, or to keep alive the historical memory of the suffering of African women.

At the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris – called 'Arts and Techniques in Modern Life' – the world saw Picasso's Guernica, Joan Miró's The Reaper, Vera Ignatievna Mukhina's sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, Leni Riefhenstal's Triumph of the Will, the murals of Sonia and Robert Delaunay, the architecture of Albert Speer, Alvaar Alto and Josep Maria Sert, among many other wonders of modern art and technology.

But at the ultra-modern Universal Exhibition of 1937, the Museum of Man was also created, where the skeleton, brain and genitals (preserved in formaldehyde) of an African woman were exhibited, alongside a life-size plaster replica of her body. She was Sara Baartman (1789-1815), a South African Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited in circuses, fairs and aristocratic parties like a wild animal, mistreated, prostituted and, finally, tutored by the most important scientists, who analyzed her as an animal in the mammalian category.

When he died, of syphilis or tuberculosis, at the age of twenty-five, the father of comparative anatomy, Georges Cuvier, performed an autopsy on him and preserved his brain, skeleton and genitals, which were exhibited at the Musée du Homme in Paris until 1974. Nelson Mandela, when he became president of South Africa, claimed his body from François Mitterrand, who agreed. But it was not until 2002, after much legal and parliamentary debate, that what remained of his remains were given a dignified burial in his homeland, South Africa, where it is now a national symbol.