Sarah Batman was born 1789 on the Gangtas River at the southern tip of the African continent. It was 1998 that the French Revolution broke out on the European continent, which impacted the civilized world with the ideas of freedom, equality and fraternity. At that time, her hometown was ruled by Dutch colonists, and she soon became a slave of Dutch Peter Seza's farm. Of course, she never dreamed that something happened afterwards, which made her fate closely linked with the distant European continent and France, a strange country. When Peter's brother Henrik and British military doctor Dunlop visited the farm, they accidentally discovered Batman, a special character, and were full of curiosity about him. They think Batman's huge protruding hips are evidence of the popular African racial backwardness in Europe, and it is a cash cow to transport them to European exhibitions. So, the two men described the bright future of a civilized world to Batman with sweet words and lured him to Britain.
18 10, Batman, aged 2 1 0, started his inhuman foreign life in London. Her eating and living conditions are like pigs and dogs, and she is treated as a monster for nude exhibitions in broad daylight. At that time, The Times of London reported that Batman was ordered to walk back and forth in public like a beast, and each performance lasted for three hours. Her hips and drooping bare genitals became the object of ridicule. Because European whites called African blacks hottentots, they gave her the stage name of Huotundu Venus and creatively baptized her to become a Christian.
18 14, Batman was taken to Paris by Henrik, and then sold to the French animal trainer Leo, who continued to play the role of an eccentric exhibitor, and the situation went from bad to worse. A French reporter wrote: Tears welled up from the corner of her eyes, and her skin turned light green. She danced, she sang and she played drums. She is regarded as an emotionless animal and exhibited in the Botanical Garden with exotic birds, animals and plants plundered from Africa. In order to put a scientific label on this dirty human body exhibition, Batman was chartered into the Natural History Museum. Three scientists became interested in this living human specimen, invited painters to paint her from four directions, and proposed to keep her body after death in the name of scientific research.
18 16 1, three months before the contract expired, 27-year-old Batman died in a humble residence in Paris, ending her short life full of humiliation, indignation and helplessness. However, her tragedy did not end because of her death, and then she became a prisoner of science in civilized society, which served as the basis for some anthropologists to write racist papers. Gourville, a paleoanthropologist, made a comparative study of Batman's buttocks and female orangutans, trying to find the genetic relationship between blacks and chimpanzees and establish a so-called new theory. After being made into a plaster statue, her body was dissected and made into a skeleton specimen. Her brain and genitals were placed in two large glass bottles and preserved in formalin solution, which became a legal and non-transferable national collection. Gypsum statues and bones of Batman are on display at the French Museum of Anthropology. It was not until 1974 that the French parliament passed the bioethics law that the public exhibition was terminated according to the relevant provisions of human remains.
Batman's fate before and after his death seems destined to be closely linked with hardships, and her trip to Sang Zi has gone for seven years. From 65438 to 0995, then President Mandela formally asked France to return Batman's body. However, France turned a deaf ear to this and shirked in many ways, while the South African government, people, scientists and writers persisted, and with the help of international friends, France finally passed the bill to return Batman at the beginning of this year. Batman returned to her native land on May 3rd this year, restoring her dignity as a person and a nation.
In the process of asking Batman to return, South Africa set up a special organization, and Professor tobias, a famous anthropologist in South Africa, and Ferras, a female writer, played a unique role. Professor tobias pointed out that through research, they decided to give up the derogatory nickname Satidi for Batman and replace it with his real name Sarah. He stressed that Batman's body is not an ordinary human body. We know her name and birthplace, and we have the right to ask for it back. Ferras wrote a poem specially for Batman in 1998, which was full of passion and moved French parliamentarians. At today's funeral, she recited her poem in tears. This poem has four paragraphs, and the following is the first paragraph:
I'll take you home.
Hometown, do you remember the grassland?
Lush grass grows under the big oak tree.
The weather there is crisp and the sun is no longer burning.
The bed I arranged for you is at the foot of the mountain.
Your bed is covered with herbs and coins.
The emperor has red and white flowers.
The river is singing a happy song.
That's the splash when the clear stream climbs over the stone.
Batman can be buried in his native land, which has far-reaching historical influence and great practical significance. She is an idol, and her image, life, death and dignity after death have overcome racism, colonialism and gender discrimination; She is a symbol, and her experience reminds people of how human beings were neglected and trampled on each other. Her tragedy is a rich human heritage, telling the world that we must never repeat the same mistakes. As President Mbeki pointed out at the funeral: Batman should not have been transported to Europe, her name should not have been taken away, her birthplace, Khoisan and African identity should not have been taken away, and she should not have appeared in the street as a savage monster. He stressed that it was not the African woman who was lonely in Europe and alienated her life and motherland, but those who abused her with barbarism; It's not those humiliated humans who are monsters, but those who insult Batman.
Batman's tragic fate and humiliation is a dark and ugly heavy page in human history. It exposes the ugly behavior of human enslavement and trampling on each other in broad daylight and completely shreds the mask of so-called human rights defenders. The historical tragedy in Batman is ironically after the French Revolution. With the return of Batman's remains, it seems that the debts left over from the colonial era have been paid off legally. However, the humiliating history that she was exhibited as a monster in London and Paris before her death, and then made into human specimens and plaster statues for display in the French Museum of Anthropology, and the amazing fact that her human rights were brutally trampled on, are still indelible historical witnesses of the civilized world.
Batman's funeral is an important step to heal historical wounds and promote national reconciliation, inspiring people to safeguard human rights, respect women's dignity and take the road of peaceful reconciliation and unity. It is also based on this consideration that the South African government declared the tomb of Batman as a national key cultural relic and built a memorial hall for it in Cape Town to warn the world to safeguard women's dignity and educate the younger generation to remember historical tragedies.
Castle peak can't cover up, after all, it flows east. With the progress of human civilization, history has finally turned this heavy page. After suffering and humiliation, Batman finally realized his fate and called on human conscience with his own tragedy. From this point of view, the date of Batman's return to his hometown coincides with the establishment of the African Union, which is not an accidental encounter, but a requirement of the pace of historical progress and the development of the times.
After two centuries of hard and tortuous fate, Batman finally returned to the embrace of the motherland. People in her hometown affectionately called her mother and specially sent her to be buried. President Mbeki lovingly placed a washed stone on her grave ... Rest in peace, Sarah Batman!