A Quena woman was shown in Europe as a circus
freak during the last century. Saartjie Baartman's
early life is unknown except that she came from a
clan of Quena people, better known in South Africa
by the derogatory term "Hottentot", in the Eastern
Cape. Born in the late 18th century, probably in the
1780s, Baartman migrated to the Cape Flats,
where the records show she was living in a small
shack in 1810. In that year she met a ship's doctor,
William Dunlop, who persuaded her to travel to
England with promises that she would make a
fortune by exhibiting her body to Europeans. It
appears that two settlers called Hendrik and Johan
Cezar, probably themselves descendants of a
mixed-race marriage between a Quena woman and
a Dutchman, were instrumental in setting up the
deal. Baartman sailed with Dunlop to England,
where she was put on display in a building in
Piccadilly, exciting crowds of working-class
Londoners who viewed her with a mixture of morbid
curiosity and malice. Like all Quena woman, she
had a protruding backside and large genital organs
-- billed by the show's promoters as "resembling
the skin that hangs from a turkey's throat."
Contemporary descriptions of her shows at 225
Piccadilly, Bartholomew Fair and Haymarket in
London say Baartman was made to parade naked
along a "stage two feet high, along which she was
led by her keeper and exhibited like a wild beast,
being obliged to walk, stand or sit as he ordered".
The exhibitions took place at a time when the anti-
slavery debate was raging in England and
Baartman's plight attracted the attention of a young
Jamaican, Robert Wedderburn, who founded the
African Association to campaign against racism in
England. Under pressure from this group, the
attorney general asked the government to put an
end to the circus, saying Baartman was not a free
participant. A London court, however, found that
Baartman had entered into a contract with Dunlop,
although historian Percival Kirby, who has
discovered records of the woman's life in exile,
believes she never saw the document. In 1814,
after spending four years being paraded around the
streets of London, Baartman was taken to Paris
and, according to the archival accounts, was
handed to a "showman of wild animals" in a
travelling circus. Her body was analyzed by
scientists, including Cuvier, while she was alive and
a number of pseudo-scientific articles were written
about her, testimony at the time to the superiority
of the European races. Her anatomy even inspired
a comic opera in France. Called The Hottentot
Venus or Hatred to French Women, the drama
encapsulated the complex of racial prejudice and
sexual fascination that occupied European
perceptions of aboriginal people at the time. It
appears Baartman worked as a prostitute in Paris
and drank heavily to cope with the humiliation she
was subjected to. She died in 1815 of an
"inflammatory and eruptive sickness", possibly
syphilis. Cuvier made a plaster cast of her corpse
before dissecting it. He removed her skeleton and
cut out her brain and genitals, which he pickled in
bottles that were put on display at the Musee de
l'Homme for more than 150 years. Her remains
were removed from public exhibition 10 years ago
but remain the property of the museum.
