Welcome to the human zoo, Susan Boyle

Welcome to the human zoo, Susan

In 1810 a black South African woman, Sara Baartman, was put on show in Piccadilly. The “Hottentot Venus”, as she became known, was an instant attraction. Crowds paid large sums of money to gawp at her scantily clad body and at the large buttocks and apparently “distended” genitals characteristic of her Khoisan tribe. She was an exhibit in a human zoo — the more adventurous visitors daring to pinch her, or poke her with their walking canes.

Some liberals of the day objected to what they saw as a cruel and exploitative display, and they brought Baartman’s case to court. But her managers produced a contract to show that she was taking a proportion of the profits and Baartman’s testimony backed this up. The case was thrown out. The “Hottentot Venus” spent the rest of her short life (she died in 1815) on public display in Britain and France. You could still gawp at her skeleton and genitals in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris as late as the 1970s.

The arguments of Baartman’s managers were little different from the arguments of those in ITV who now seek to justify the display of Susan Boyle. This is an opportunity for wealth and fame, they say. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be plucked from the obscurity of the Eastern Cape or Blackburn. It’s not voyeurism and it’s not exploitation.

Of course, it is exploitation. And Western society has been enjoying this kind of voyeuristic pleasure for centuries — while also coming up with equally weak alibis for doing so.

Two thousand years ago the Romans used to turn up to see dwarfs on show in the arena, alongside the wretched and the destitute who performed as gladiators or fought wild beasts. Crowds flocked in their thousands to watch these murderous games — or occasionally the rather more artistic, but equally murderous, tableaux (one favourite involved dressing a criminal up as Hercules and burning him alive on a pyre, as the mythical hero was supposed to have died).

When it came to the end of a fight, the crowd would get its chance to vote. It could bay for the blood of the losing man and see him killed.

Or, if it judged the loser a plucky fighter (like Hollie Steel, perhaps), it could spare him to fight another day. Those in the crowd who booed Boyle on Saturday were not so different from the rabble of the amphitheatre. Nor, in a way, were we who took up our phones to vote against her from home.

The Romans sometimes fondly imagined that these gladiators were getting their chance of glory, too. They could even treat them as glamorous sex symbols, the pin-ups of the Roman world.

The truth was quite different: gladiators were poor, sad slaves, destined for an early grave.

For us, the truth is that Susan Boyle is a vulnerable and exploited middle-aged woman. She is not a star in the making, being given a lucky break thanks to BGT.

Mary Beard
Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and Classics Editor of the TLS

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