8 June 2011
It is as easy as pie they said and it is. Here I am, have created my own blog. Yes, the technologically challenged one has done something for herself. Hopefully, I will learn more as I go on. Well, hello fellow-bloggers and followers, my name is Diana Ferrus and I am from CapeTown, South Africa. Currently, we are in the heart of winter and it means that at night we are indoors messing around with one or other activity but mostly, yes you guessed right, with the internet. That is how I found my blog tonight, messing around, said  tongue in cheek please, don' take it too seriously.

I am a poet, have been writing for a long, long time and has published my first English collection called, "I've come to take you home" in Dec 2010. The title poem is dedicated to one Sarah Bartmann, an ancestor who was taken from Cape Town at the young age of 20 and shipped off to Europe where she was paraded as a sexual freak. Her body was said to be strange-looking, her beautiful African body was mocked by the Europeans. After a stint in England her owner took her to Paris where he sold her to an animal trainer. Incidentally, while they were on the ship to Paris, she thought she was coming home, hence, "I've come to take you home".  In Paris she was further humiliated and after barely a year she died poor and homesick. Her humiliation did not end then, Napoleon's scientists George Cuvier and Geoffrey St Hilaire, made a plaster caste of her body, took out her brain and genitalia and then dissected the body. They wrote in their book, that there was ample proof that Sarah and her people (Africans) were the "missing link between human and ape"! She stood in a museum in Paris (Musee de l Homme) from 1816 till 1986. Despite various requests from indigenous South African groups like the Griquas for her remains to be returned to her country of birth, the French Govt refused to send her remains home to South Africa.

In 2002 a Senator, Nicholas About was preparing a Bill to have the remains of  Sarah sent home. He came across the poem "I've come to take you home" that I wrote in 1998 while studying in Holland at the University of Utrecht. We learnt about Sarah and reading again about her suffering made me sad and I longed for my homeland, my mother country. This, coupled with the fact that my mother died in June the previous year evoked such strong feelings of nostalgia that I wrote this poem in one go one evening while looking out of the window from my room in Kanale-Eiland in Utrecht. It was as if I heard her voice shouting, "I want to go home, I want to go home". I looked at the stars in the sky and thought that they were so far away, if I had to be in my own country, I would be able to touch them. My pen circled the words automatically. When I came home to SA I read the poem and people cried when I did. I say it was the people's love for Sarah that allowed the poem to fly to Paris. Senator About saw the poem on the internet and contacted me asking if he could translate the poem into French. On the 29th January 2002, Senator About read the poem in the French Senate as part of his Bill - low and behold, the poem must have touched the Senators because they voted unanimously that the remains should be sent home. The reason why a Law had to be made is that the French made a Law in 1850 which states that all artefacts in French museums belonged to the French State. In April 2002 I recited the poem in Paris at the handing over ceremony in Paris. This poem was published in the French Law that was made only for Sarah's remains. There are thousands of remains still in the basement of the Musee de l Homme.
The poem is in my book, "I've come to take you home" available from Amazon.com or Xlibris.com - you may order it as an eBook as well.