Saartjie Baartman

By: Andrew Lamprecht, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town

The return of the bodily remains of Saartje Baartman to the country of her birth on May 3 2002 ended 192 years of “exile” that began with an offer to earn money as a human display in the sideshows of London and saw her skeleton, preserved genitals and brain being placed on display Paris’s Museum of Mankind until the 1970s.

Saartje (literally “little Sarah”) Baartman is believed to have been born near the Great Fish River in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 1789. After working in Cape Town as a servant she came to the attention of William Dunlop, a surgeon attached to the British Navy. He convinced her that she could make money in Europe as an object of display. She left South Africa in 1810, never to return in her lifetime.

European interest in her focussed on her physical features. “Hottentots” or Khoikhoi (to use the name used by the people themselves) had long held a fascination in the western consciousness. Kant considered them to be among the lowest form of humanity and other intellectuals were fascinated by their alleged savagery. These fantasies were built upon by popular writers of the day, spinning tales of a peculiar, beast-like people from the very tip of Africa. These stereotypes found their way into the received notion of the “Hottentot”. Among the chief points of fascination for Europeans were enlarged buttocks, or steatopygia, and an elongated vagina (both of these “features”, but especially the latter, were more the product of western male sexual fantasies than any basis in physiology). These characteristics were believed to be “typical” of “Hottentot” physiology.

Her show was one of the most successful in London at the time. She was exhibited much like a wild beast with her “keeper” giving her orders to walk, sit, or move about. If they paid a little extra, visitors could touch her buttocks. It was during this time that she was baptised and took the new name of Sarah Bartmann.

Abolitionists, successful in having slavery outlawed in Britain a few years before, now found a new cause in Bartmann. They lodged papers with the courts but the case was thrown out when it transpired that Bartmann had a legal contract, a salary, and had apparently come to the country of her own free will. Nevertheless the notoriety of the case led to her being moved to Paris where she appeared in an animal show. Things went from bad to worse and Bartmann is alleged to have become an alcoholic. She died on January 1, 1816. One of Frances premier scientists, Georges Cuvier, who had examined Bartmann several months before, performed the autopsy. It is alleged that the first organ he examined was her vagina.

The call for the return of Bartmann’s remains can be seen to begin with the noted evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould who first brought the tale of “The Hottentot Venus” to a general reading public, most notably in his The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections on Natural History (1985). Earlier foundational articles by Percival Kirby in the late 1940s and early 1950s tended to be restricted to a small South African antiquarian readership. Gould’s influential account was followed by research by Sander L. Gilman and others, while in South Africa a number of artists and writers took up the cause for a wider knowledge of and final decent burial for Bartmann.

The movement for the return of her remains took on greater weight when, in one of his earliest acts as the State President of a newly democratic South Africa, Nelson Mandela issued a formal request to the government of France for their return. This return was no easy matter to accomplish and required a specific act of the French National Assembly to be legislated. Years of legal and political debate came to an end on March 6 2002 with a carefully worded instrument that authorised the return. It was considered imperative in certain French legal circles that this text be constructed in such a way that it should not be used as a precedent for other claims on museum artefacts and property in France.

At the ceremony of her arrival back in the land of her birth, Western Cape premier Peter Marais noted that “The return of Saartje Baartman is going to give rise to the rediscovery of the pride of the Khoisan people.” A final decision has now been made to bury her near the river where she was born.

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