In 1810, a young woman from the Eastern Cape, South Africa, was brought to London by colonial…, put on display in a cage, and exhibited under the racially charged moniker ‘Hottentot Venus’. Audiences paid to view her, fascinated by her body’s shape. Exhibited in London (1810–1814) and Paris (1814–1815), Sarah Baartman was prodded, stared at, catalogued, and turned into a spectacle under the pseudoscience of the time. After her death, even her remains became part of a museum exhibit until they were repatriated two centuries later as a symbolic act of dignity restored in 2002.
Today–two centuries on/later, what once required a cage and a crowd now requires only a camera and a connection…
In recent weeks, a European man uploaded on his social media platforms intimate videos of his sexual encounters with African women across multiple countries without consent. As the clips/news spread, they generated commentary, condemnation and debate across social media platforms across Africa. The ensuing public outrage oscillated between nationalist indignation at a foreign man’s audacity/criminality in exposing the women and moral panic about their constructed promiscuity. This binary says a lot about how far the moral economies of African societies have and have not evolved as regards what women do with their bodies. But it also obscures something more important: a deeper architecture to the Russian saga that transcends individual morality or national embarrassment.
The violence of stolen narrative/narrative loss
The clips were short, edited, and structured as proof rather than context. They suggested that a foreign man could persuade large numbers of African women to grant him private access with little effort. What was erased were the conditions: conversation, negotiation, economic context, and boundary-setting. What remained were curated images of uncomplicated consent and ready availability. By distorting context to manufacture a particular story about these women and their agency, the footage produces knowledge about these women that strips them of narrative control in a form of reputational or epistemic violence. It is precisely this manufactured imagery that then fuels public outrage about morality, prompting questions about why the women appeared to give in so willingly to a white man’s advances.
The moral economy of female reputation
As the edited narrative circulated, the women inherited its consequences. Public reaction shifted quickly from the act of exposure to the morality of their behaviour: why they agreed, what motivated them/what they expected, whether money was involved, what this says about ‘African women’. The burden of explanation falls almost entirely on them as seen by public attempts by some of the women to explain/rationalise their actions. In societies where female sexuality is tightly regulated, reputational damage is not abstract. It can affect livelihood, safety, and social standing. The narrative distortion thus migrates into a moral economy in which the violated must defend themselves, even after their narrative authority has already been taken.
The fragility of consent
Some have argued that the women ‘got their just desserts’ for being ‘too easily accessible’. That claim rests on the assumption that sexual agreement automatically transfers responsibility for everything that follows. Even where sexual consent may have been present, control over recording and circulation reshapes the meaning of that consent. Agreement to intimacy is not agreement to documentation; documentation is not agreement to distribution; distribution is not agreement to monetisation. In digital environments built for capture and replication, these distinctions are easily collapsed. Where one person controls circulation and the other does not, consent operates on unequal terms. This is especially so when filming is done secretly using high-end digital technologies that cannot be detected by victims.
The permanence of (digital) capture
Digital exposure does not end with uploading footage. Once they are recorded and circulated, images detach from the moment in which they were created and can be downloaded, reshared, saved/archived, screen-recorded and redistributed endlessly across limitless platforms and jurisdictions systems built for replication and amplification. The wider the footage circulates, the less realistic deletion and containment become, turning single, private moments into persistent digital artifacts/archives that are searchable and reproducible beyond the control of those depicted. But circulation is not only technical; it is also productive. Visibility generates engagement, engagement generates traffic, and traffic generates value for platforms and users alike. The harm is thus not only the humiliation of immediate, involuntary exposure, but also the instrumentalisation and objectification of women’s bodies—reduced from subjects to erotic(ised) resources within a digital economy that profits from visibility.
The gaze has a history
These events do not unfold in isolation. A foreign white man publicly staging sexual access to African women’s bodies across African contexts resonates because it sits within a longer history of looking, display and hierarchy. When Sarah Baartman was exhibited in 19th-century Europe, her body was framed and consumed as racial spectacle. Feminist scholars have long documented how Black women have been cast within ‘controlling images’ of hypersexuality that position them as inherently available. Within imperial and postcolonial visual culture, African women in particular have been eroticised as symbols of conquest and permissive terrain. African feminist scholars such as Pumla Gqola have shown how slavery and colonialism produced enduring representations of Black female sexuality as hypervisible, excessive and available. These representations did not disappear with decolonisation; they persist in contemporary visual culture through a different medium but similar structure. Images of Black women’s intimacy circulate within interpretive frameworks already shaped by this racialised representational history of Black female bodies.
Architectures of inequality
These encounters unfolded within clear power differentials that preceded the recording device. The power at play here was not abstract but operated through mobility, race, currency and jurisdiction. A foreign white man moving across African cities occupies a position within global hierarchies that confer economic leverage, passport privilege and a degree of insulation from local consequence. In one video in which Trahov converses with a Ghanaian woman, her friend can be heard saying, “He wants to marry you o, you’re going to Russia!”, signalling the anticipation of a luxury lifestyle commonly associated with being with a white man or woman. That structural power shapes the terms on which intimacy is negotiated, the risks attached to it and the aftermath. He can leave (as he has) and cross borders while the women remain, navigating social sanction, reputational damage and the practical obstacles of seeking redress within fragmented legal/justice systems. These imbalances are the clearest expression of power in the Russian encounter.
What we are witnessing is not merely scandal; it is the contemporary mutation of an old political economy in which Black women’s bodies are rendered visible, extractable, and profitable under unequal conditions of power. Where Sarah Baartman was once exhibited on a stage, today women’s bodies can be staged, edited and consumed without ever leaving the room. The technology is new, but the asymmetry between those who look and those who are looked at is not.
The issue is not whether these women were prudent. It is whether women’s bodies can exist in digital space without being turned into spectacle, an archive, or an extractive resource. Until control over representation and circulation rests with those depicted, visibility will continue to function as extraction. That is the matter that we all should be troubled by.
Titilope F Ajayi is an African feminist pracademic, researcher and writer specialising in women, peace and security.