Who is Sarah Baartman (WATCH FILM)

Baartman objectified: an early nineteenth century French print titled,'La Belle Hottentot'

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.

When 20 year old Sara Baartman got on a boat that was to take her from Cape Town to London in 1810, she could not have known that she would never see her home again. Nor, as she stood on the deck and saw her homeland disappear behind her. Could she have known that she would become the icon of racial inferiority and black female sexuality for the next 100 years.

The fascinating story of this Khoi Khoi woman who was taken from South Africa, and then exhibited as a freak across Britain because of her 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.

She was called the "Hottentot Venus", 'Hottentot' being a name given to people with cattle. The image and idea of "The Hottentot Venus" swept through British popular culture. A court battle waged by abolitionists to free her from her exhibitors failed.

In 1814 she was taken to France, and became the object of scientific and medical research that formed the bedrock of European ideas about black female sexuality. She was forced into prostitution and later died the  following year. 

Even after her death, Sara Baartman remained an object of imperialist scientific investigation and her sexual organs and brain were displayed in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris until as recently as 1974 she was finally removed from public view.

In 1994, then president Nelson Mandela requested that her remains be brought home and she was finally laid to rest 187 years. Her remains were buried on Women’s Day, August 9th, 2002, in the area of her birth, the Gamtoos River Valley in the Eastern Cape.

See Film About Her Here. 

PART 1

PART 1