"Sarah" Baartman (1789 -- December 29, 1815) was a South African woman
who went to Europe on her own free will to find prominence and
opportunity. For 5 years she was held against her free will to leave
Europe. She was then held captive..exploited ..degraded...and later
died. Baartman was born in 1789. She was working as a slave in Cape
Town when she was “discovered” by British ship’s doctor William Dunlop,
who persuaded her to travel with him to England. We’ll never know what
she had in mind when she stepped on board – of her own free will - a
ship for London.
But it’s clear what Dunlop had in mind – to display her as a “freak”, a
“scientific curiosity”, and make money from these shows, some of which
he promised to give to her.
Baartman had unusually large buttocks and genitals, and in the early
1800s Europeans were arrogantly obsessed with their own superiority,
and with proving that others, particularly blacks, were inferior and
oversexed.
Baartman’s physical characteristics, not unusual for Khoisan women,
although her features were larger than normal, were “evidence” of this
prejudice, and she was treated like a freak exhibit in London.
The 'Hottentot Venus'
She was called the “Hottentot Venus”, 'Hottentot' being a name given to
people with cattle. They had acquired these cattle by migrating
northwards to Angola and returned to South Africa with them, some 2 000
years before the first European settlement at the Cape in 1652. Prior
to this, they were indistinguishable from the Bushmen or San, the first
inhabitants of South Africa, who had been in the region for around 100
000 years as hunter-gatherers.
Khoisan is used to denote their relationship to the San people. The
label Hottentot took on derogatory connotations, and is no longer used.
Venus is the Roman goddess of love, a cruel reference to Baartman being
an object of admiration and adoration instead of the object of leering
and abuse that she became. She spent four years in London, then moved
to Paris, where she continued her degrading round of shows and
exhibitions. In Paris she attracted the attention of French scientists,
in particular Georges Cuvier.
No one knows if Dunlop was true to his word and paid Baartman for her
“services”, but if he did pay her, it wasn’t sufficient to buy herself
out of the life she was living.
Once the Parisians got tired of the Baartman show, she was forced to
turn to prostitution. She didn’t last the ravages of a foreign culture
and climate, or the further abuse of her body. She died in 1815 at the
age of 25.
The cause of death was given as “inflammatory and eruptive sickness”,
possibly syphilis. Others suggest she was an alcoholic. Whatever the
cause, she lived and died thousands of kilometres from home and family,
in a hostile city, with no means of getting herself home again.
Cuvier made a plaster cast of her body, then removed her skeleton and,
after removing her brain and genitals, pickled them and displayed them
in bottles at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris.
Some 160 years later they were still on display, but were finally
removed from public view in 1974. In 1994, then president Nelson
Mandela suggested that her remains be brought home.
Other representations were made, but it took the French government
eight years to pass a bill - apparently worded so as to prevent other
countries from claiming the return of their stolen treasures - to allow
their small piece of “scientific curiosity” to be returned to South
Africa.
In January 2002, Sarah Baartman’s remains were finally returned, and
remained in Cape Town pending a decision on her final burial place.
Marang Setshwaelo, writing for Africana.com, says that Dr Willa Boezak,
a Khoisan rights activist, believes that a poem written by Khoisan
descendant Diana Ferrus in 1998 played a major role in helping bring
Baartman home. Boezak says: “It took the power of a woman, through a
simple, loving poem, to move hard politicians into action.”
Whatever the reason, Sarah Baartman was finally layed to rest 187 years
after she left Cape Town for London. Her remains were buried on Women’s
Day, 9 August 2002, in the area of her birth, the Gamtoos River Valley
in the Eastern Cape.She has finally had her dignity restored by being
buried where she belongs - far away from where her race and gender were
so cruelly exploited.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ7mmMe4klQSaartjie - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ7mmMe4klQSaartjie
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