Sara Baartman was a Khoikhoi (Khoekhoe) native South African woman who was put on display in fairs and human zoos for her physical features including honey-colored skin and a steatopygic body type; in other words, most of her body's fat was stored in her buttocks.
An illustration titled "Sarah ‘Saartjie' Baartman"
Sara ‘Saartjie’ Baartman was born in approximately 1789 at the Gamtoos River, in what is now known as the Eastern Cape. She belonged to the cattle-herding Gonaqua sub group of the Khoikhoi. Sara grew up on a colonial farm where her family most likely worked as servants. She spent her childhood and teenage years on settler farms. She went through puberty rites, and kept the small tortoise shell necklace, probably given to her by her mother, until her death in France. Her mother died when she was aged two and her father, who was a cattle driver, died when she reached adolescence. Sara married a Khoikhoi man who was a drummer and they had one child together who died shortly after birth.
Due to colonial expansion, the Dutch came into conflict with the Khoikhoi. As a result people were gradually absorbed into the labour system. In the 1790s, a free black (the Cape designation for individuals of enslaved descent) trader named Peter Cesars met her and encouraged her to move to Cape Town, which had recently come under British control. Records do not show whether she was made to leave, or went willingly, or was sent by her family to Cesars. She lived in Cape Town for at least two years working in households as a washerwoman and a nursemaid, first for Peter Cesars, then in the house of a Dutch man in Cape Town. She moved finally to be a wet-nurse in the household of Peter Cesars' brother-in-law, Hendrik Cesars, outside of Cape Town in present day Woodstock.
Sara Baartman lived alongside slaves in the Cesars' household. As someone of Khoisan descent she could not be formally enslaved, but probably lived in conditions similar to slaves in Cape Town. There is evidence that she had another child, both children having died as babies. It was during this time that she was given the name ‘Saartjie’, a Dutch diminutive for Sara. On 29 October 1810, Sara allegedly ‘signed’ a contract with an English ship surgeon named William Dunlop who was also a friend of Cesar and his brother Hendrik. Apparently, the terms of her ‘contract’ were that she would travel with Hendrik Cesar and Dunlop to England and Ireland to work as a domestic servant, and be exhibited for entertainment purposes. She was to receive a ‘portion of earnings’ from her exhibitions and be allowed to return to South Africa after five years. Two reasons make her ‘signing’ appear dubious. The first is that she was illiterate and came from a cultural tradition that did not write or keep records. Secondly, the Cesar families experienced financial woes and it is suspected that they used Sara to earn money.
Sara Baartman spent four years on stage in England and Ireland. She was taken to London where she was displayed in a building in Piccadilly, a street that was full of various oddities like “the ne plus ultra of hideousness” and “the greatest deformity in the world”. Englishmen and women paid to see Sara’s half naked body displayed in a cage that was about a meter and half high. The tradition of freak shows was longstanding in Britain at this time, and historians have argued that this is at first how Baartman was displayed, however Baartman never allowed herself to be exhibited nude and an account of her appearance in London in 1810 makes it clear that she was wearing a garment, albeit a tight-fitting one.
Live portrait of Sara being exhibited in London
Her exhibition in London just a few years after the passing of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 created a scandal. This is in part because British audiences misread Hendrik Cesar, thinking he was a Dutch farmer, boer, from the frontier. Scholars have tended to reproduce that error, but tax rolls at the Cape show he was free black man. Violence was part of the show. An abolitionist benevolent society called the African Association conducted a newspaper campaign for her release. Zachary Macaulay led the protest. Hendrik Cesar protested that Baartman was entitled to earn her living, stating: "has she not as good a right to exhibit herself as an Irish Giant or a Dwarf?" Cesars was comparing Baartman to the contemporary Irish giants Charles Byrne and Patrick Cotter O'Brien.
Macaulay and The African Association took the matter to court and on November 24, 1810 at the Court of King's Bench the Attorney-General began the attempt "to give her liberty to say whether she was exhibited by her own consent." In support he produced two affidavits in court. The first, from a Mr. Bullock of Liverpool Museum, was intended to show Baartman had been brought to Britain by persons who referred to her as if she were property. The second, by the Secretary of the African Association, described the degrading conditions under which she was exhibited and also gave evidence of coercion.
Baartman was then questioned before an attorney in Dutch, in which she was fluent, via interpreters. However the conditions of the interview were stacked against her, in part again because the court saw Hendrik Cesar as the boer exploiter, rather than seeing Alexander Dunlop as the organizer. They thus ensured that Cesar was not in the room when Baartman made her statement, but Dunlop was allowed to remain. Historians have stated that this therefore casts great doubt on the veracity and independence of the statement that Baartman then made. She stated that she in fact was not under restraint, did not get sexually abused, and that she came to London on her own free will. She also did not wish to return to her family and understood perfectly that she was guaranteed half of the profits. The case was therefore dismissed. She was questioned for three hours. The statements directly contradict accounts of her exhibitions made by Zachary Macaulay of the African Association and other eyewitnesses. A written contract was produced, which is considered by some modern commentators to be a legal subterfuge.
After four years in London, in September 1814, she was transported from England to France, and upon arrival Hendrik Cesar sold her to Reaux, a man who showcased animals. He exhibited her around Paris and reaped financial benefits from the public’s fascination with Sara’s body. He began exhibiting her in a cage alongside a baby rhinoceros. Her “trainer” would order her to sit or stand in a similar way that circus animals are ordered. At times Baartman was displayed almost completely naked, wearing little more than a tan loincloth, and she was only allowed that due to her insistence that she cover what was culturally sacred. She is the period she was nicknamed “Hottentot Venus”. Her constant display attracted the attention of George Cuvier, a naturalist. He asked Reaux if he would allow Sara to be studied as a science specimen to which Reaux agreed. As from March 1815 Sara was studied by French anatomists, zoologists and physiologists. Cuvier concluded that she was a link between animals and humans. Thus, Sara was used to help emphasise the stereotype that Africans were oversexed and a lesser race.
Sara Baartman on display in France as "La Belle Hottentot", 1815
In France, she was in effect enslaved. In Paris, her exhibition became more clearly entangled with scientific racism. French scientists were curious about whether she had the elongated labia which earlier naturalists such as François Levaillant had purportedly observed in Khoisan at the Cape. French naturalists, among them Georges Cuvier, head keeper of the menagerie at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, and founder of the discipline of comparative anatomy, visited her. She was the subject of several scientific paintings at the Jardin du Roi, where she was examined in March 1815: as Saint-Hilaire and Frédéric Cuvier, a younger brother of Georges, reported, "she was obliging enough to undress and to allow herself to be painted in the nude." This was not literally true: although by his standards she appeared to be naked, in accordance with her own cultural norms of modesty throughout these sessions she wore a small apron-like garment which concealed her genitalia. She steadfastly refused to remove this even when offered money by one of the attending scientists.
In Paris, Baartman's promoters didn't need to concern themselves with slavery charges. Crais and Scully state: "By the time she got to Paris, her existence was really quite miserable and extraordinarily poor. Sara was literally treated like an animal. There is some evidence to suggest that at one point a collar was placed around her neck." In Paris, writes Marisa Meltzer, she “developed an addiction to alcohol, and, at some point, became a prostitute. She died in Paris of either a respiratory disease or syphilis - the records aren’t clear - at the age of 26.” But, even in death, the indignities continued. A cast was made of her body and her skeleton went on display at the Museum of Natural History until 1976. And, writes Meltzer, “Her brain and genitals were kept in bell jars just outside one creepy scientist’s private chambers.”
Cuvier conducted a dissection, but did not do an autopsy to inquire into the reasons for Baartman's death. French anatomist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville published notes on the dissection in 1816, which were republished by Georges Cuvier in the Memoires du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in 1817. Cuvier, who had met Baartman, notes in his monograph that its subject was an intelligent woman with an excellent memory, particularly for faces. In addition to her native tongue, she spoke fluent Dutch, passable English, and a smattering of French. He describes her shoulders and back as "graceful", arms "slender", hands and feet as "charming" and "pretty". He adds she was adept at playing the jew's harp, could dance according to the traditions of her country, and had a lively personality. Despite this, Cuvier interpreted her remains, in accordance with his theories on racial evolution, as evidencing ape-like traits. He thought her small ears were similar to those of an orangutan and also compared her vivacity, when alive, to the quickness of a monkey.
Sarah Baartman's grave, on a hill overlooking Hankey in the Gamtoos River Valley, Eastern Cape, South Africa
From the 1940s, there were sporadic calls for the return of her remains. A poem written in 1978 by Diana Ferrus, herself of Khoisan descent, entitled "I've come to take you home", played a pivotal role in spurring the movement to bring Baartman's remains back to her birth soil. The case gained world-wide prominence only after Stephen Jay Gould wrote The Mismeasure of Man in the 1980s. Mansell Upham, a researcher and jurist specializing in South African colonial history also helped spur the movement to bring Baartman's remains back to South Africa. After the victory of the African National Congress in the South African general election, 1994, President Nelson Mandela formally requested that France return the remains. After much legal wrangling and debates in the French National Assembly, France acceded to the request on 6 March 2002. Her remains were repatriated to her homeland, the Gamtoos Valley, on 6 May 2002 and they were buried on 9 August 2002 (South Africa's National Women's Day) on Vergaderingskop , a hill in the town of Hankey over 200 years after her birth. Baartman became an icon in South Africa as representative of many aspects of the nation's history. The Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children, a refuge for survivors of domestic violence, opened in Cape Town in 1999. South Africa's first offshore environmental protection vessel, the Sarah Baartman, is also named after her.
Victorian women wearing
dresses with bustles, 1880s
Sara Baartman's life was one of seemingly constant struggle and pain, from losing both of her children and her Khoisan husband early in life, to be coercively sold into a life of lonely exhibitionism by a free black man she seemed to trust, caged, collared and enslaved to live with animals and be used for racist propaganda, and finally to be released into a culture and society that she would not be able to survive without support, and dying without intervention. When we look deeper, we can see this woman's spirit did not live in the bondage her body endured. Through all of her hardship caused by people of all different nationalities, cultures, languages, and color; she continued to trust and be gentle to people, even if it was the people who were harming her. Sara Baartman had real and true love in her heart, and there are many lessons we need to take from her including having such unconditional spiritual love for human beings deep within us, that even when we humans are in a hellish situation like Sara's, we can still survive by our love and spirit.
In 2018, Sara Baartman is the human link, and not in the horribly skewed way Georges Curier implied. She unknowingly engrained Khoikhoi culture into European, Western, and nearly global culture forever; after the period of "Hottenton Venus", the European culture exploded with the popularity of the "bustle." This was no coincidence. Sara Baartman is a pioneer for human zoo/fairs/exhibit victims, survivors and all of us present-day humans, any shade, color, nationality, or language who can now have any body shape, features, or traits without fear of being exhibited or tested on as animals. Not only this, her story is an excellent representation of many things: from how slavery/human trafficking can happen to and be caused by anyone of any background, to how different physical features and traits were viewed different eras.
After 200 years, finally laid to rest; we need to keep alive her enduring spirit through our love and kindness to each other.
Sources:
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Sarah-Baartman-The-Hottentot-Venus
https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/sara-saartjie-baartman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Baartman
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