Content Warning: The following contains unsettling and graphic details concerning the life of Sarah Baartman. Baartman was sold into slavery, and put on exhibit as a “freakshow attraction” due to her naturally curvaceous body. She endured unimaginable cruelty as she was sexually exploited for others’ profit. This piece is intended to educate and bring a broader awareness of racist colonial exploitation, and the dehumanization of Black people. Reader discretion is advised.
Sarah Baartman or Saartjie (named Ssehura at birth) was born in Gamtoos Valley in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Her parents were of indigenous Khoisan decent . Baartman’s exact date of birth is not known, but is estimated to be around 1789.Both of her parents died in her early childhood years; her mother when she was two, and her father by Bushman while driving cattle when she was a teen.
Upon her parents’ deaths, Baartman was sold into slavery to a Dutch trader named Pieter Willem Cezar, and renamed Saartjie, a diminutive form of Sarah in Dutch. She was moved to Cape Town where she lived for at least two years working as a domestic servant. Baartman had a child that died in infancy, and became a wet-nurse for Peter Cesars’ brother Hendrik Cesars.
For extra cash Hendrik Cesars began to show Baartman at the city hospital. A Scottish military surgeon there named Alexander Dunlop worked in the Cape slave lodge, and supplied showmen in Britain with animal specimens as a side business. He took interest in Baartman’s naturally curvaceous body. Baartman had steatopygia, which is a substantial collection of fat in the buttocks and thighs. She also had an elongated labia which would lead to her derogatory moniker “Hottentot Venus,” a reference to the Greek god of fertility. Her appearance was typical for Khoisan people but it was a rare and erotic projection for some. Dunlop saw an opportunity to exploit her and began pressuring Baartman into traveling to Europe to make money as an exhibit herself.
Baartman was not interested. Dunlop persisted, and Baartman finally agreed, saying she would only go if Hendrik Cesars came too. He refused initially but eventually agreed to go in 1810. Being illiterate it is unknown whether Baartman understood the contract she was given and went willingly or was forced.
Dunlop marketed her has a freak of nature. putting her on display in London’s Piccadilly Circus wearing skin-tight, flesh-colored clothing, beads and feathers, while smoking a pipe. For one schilling anyone was permitted to view her half-naked body. Those who were willing to pay a little more were permitted to touch her. Some documentation states that the high interest of men in Baartman’s derriere inspired the Victorian bustle fashion trend.
Baartman’s continued exhibition in London after the 1807 Slave Trade Act caused an outcry among abolitionists. The act abolished slavery trade but not slavery itself. The Dutchman’s exhibition of an enslaved woman became a scandal which caused the African Association, a British abolitionist Society, to call for her release. Hendrik Cesars protested, responding “has she not as good a right to exhibit herself as an Irish Giant or a Dwarf?”
Unsatisfied, the association took Cesars and Dunlop to court. Baartman was interviewed alone for a period of three hours. She testified in favor of Dunlop, stating that she was not being restrained nor had she been sexually abused, she had been working in London for profit of her own freewill, and had no desire to return to her family. Although the judge in the case believed Baartman had been coerced, he had no option but to dismiss the case. Publicity of the case increased the popularity of Baartman’s exhibit before gradually waning in the capital. Her exhibit was then taken on tour around Britain, and eventually to Limerick, Ireland in 1812.
Around September 1814, Baartman was taken to France by Cesars to society parties before being sold to a man named Henry Taylor. Taylor then sold her to an animal trainer named Jean Reaux. Reaux was reportedly the cruelest of all of Baartman’s owners, exhibiting her under more pressured conditions for 15 months at the Palais Royal in Paris, in effect, enslaving her. Rachel Holmes, author of “The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman,” indicated that under these conditions Baartman began to drink and smoke heavily, as she was also likely prostituted out by Reaux.
Previously Baartman’s exhibit was of her singing and dancing but under Reaux she was led around like an animal. She became the subject of stares from zoologists and painters alike who wanted to study her to further scientific racism, and as an object of sexual peculiarity. She was also exhibited at parties of the wealthy.
Baartman’s smoking and drinking worsened, and she died at the age of 26 in 1815 from an inflammatory and eruptive disease, possibly syphilis made worse by alcoholism. Instead of conducting a proper autopsy to determine Baartman’s death, naturalist Georges Cuvier opted instead to make a plaster cast of her body and dissect her, first preserving her skeleton then pickling her brain and genitalia. They were then put on display at Paris’s Museum of Man, where they remained objects for public viewing until 1974.
They were shown as evidence of Cuvier’s theory of racial evolution, with Cuvier falsely arguing her body parts proved her “sexual primitivism and intellectual equality with that of an orangutan.” His aim was to codify a hierarchy of races with Blacks at the bottom nearest animals, and the white man as supreme, a large movement at the time. The truth was of course to the contrary, as Baartman was very intelligent, speaking not only her native tongue, but also Dutch, English, and a little French.
In 1994, South African President Nelson Mandela requested her remains and plaster cast. After first objecting, the French government agreed in March 2002. Her remains were buried in Hankey, in the Eastern Cape province in August of that same year, 187 years after her death.
A native of Phoenix, Arizona Aundrea Sayrie is a firm believer in the power of words, faith and a strong spirit. Her greatest desire is to encourage those around her to discover and honor their truth, and to passionately live on purpose.
