The Venus Hottentot

Sarah Baartman was the first and most well-known Hottentot Venus. Her Khoeko name is unknown, and her English name had many variations that include Sara, Saartje, Saartjie, and Bartman. She was likely born in 1789 near Camdeboo in what is now Eastern Cape of South Africa. At the time of her birth, it was a Dutch colony, but became a British colony by the time she reached adulthood. Her mother died when Baartman was an infant. Her father was killed before she reached adulthood.

In her childhood and teenage years, Baartman worked on a farm. In the 1790s, Peter Cesars, a free black trader, encouraged her to move to Cape Town. Willingly or unwillingly, Baartman does end up leaving her family for Cape Town, where she works as a washerwoman and nursemaid for two years. During this time, she may have had two children who died as infants.

Peter Cesars’s brother, Hendrik, and surgeon Alexander Dunlop plotted to convince Baartmans to go with them to London to be exhibited as a curiosity. Dunlop promised that she would make a large amount of money in a short amount of time before insisting that she could return home. Baartman asked for Cesars to accompany her and, initially, he refused. Eventually, he agreed to come. After much persuasion, Baartman leaves with them in 1810. Baartman’s willingness throughout this encounter is unclear. Lord Caledon, governor of the Cape, approved the trip and allowed Baartman to leave.

Dunlop and Cesars’s exhibition of her in London falls in line with the established “freak show” traditions. During her exhibitions, Baartman appeared partially nude, wearing a small, tight-fighting apron over her genitalia. She would perform dances and shake her buttocks. Often, people touched her as well. She was marketed as a living example of a link between animals and humans. While these performances were extremely well-attended, they did create scandal. As slavery had been abolished approximately three years before her arrival, abolitionists protested, as they saw that Baartman was an enslaved woman. The matter was taken to court, but the case was dismissed after Dunlop’s legal manipulations and coercion of Baartman.

In 1814, a man called Henry Taylor took Baartman to France before he sold her to animal trainer Jean Riaux. During these 15 months in Paris, the exhibition became more openly connected to scientific racism and Baartman’s living conditions became even more dire. Scientists came to study her anatomy, especially her elongated labia. One of these scientists was Georges Cuvier. At the time, he was the head keeper of the menagerie at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.

Towards the end of her short life, Baartman was exhibited at wealthy people’s parties and salons. She died a penniless prostitute on December 29, 1815. Her cause of death is unspecified, but was possibly smallpox, syphilis, or pneumonia. No autopsy was conducted before Cuvier dissected her body.

After studying her remains, Cuvier used his discoveries to support his theories of racial evolution, which diverged from Darwin’s theories. He noted many ape-like traits, including small ears, large buttocks, and her elongated labia. With his studies, he sought to create a scientific basis for a racial hierarchy, with white men at the top, and argued against a common ancestor for all human races. Her genitalia, skeleton, and brain were kept as a specimen and a body cast were created. These various body parts and the cast were displayed at various French natural history museums. The exhibits were popular for decades. In 1974 and 1976, her skeleton and body cast, respectively, were removed from exhibitions after complaints about the degrading representation of women.

In 1978, a poem called “I’ve come to take you home,” written by South African poet Diana Ferrus, spurred the movement to repatriate Baartman’s remains. In the 1980s, this movement gained international prominence when American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote The Mismeasure of Man (1981), a book that criticizes scientific racism and biological determinism. In 1994, Nelson Mandela formally requested that France return her remains. On May 6, 2002, France finally agreed to return her body, and her remains were repatriated to the Gamtoos Valley, where she was buried on August 9.