Sarah Baartman
Sarah Baartman, also spelled Sara, sometimes in the Dutch diminutive form Saartje, or Saartjie, and Bartman, Bartmann, was a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus, a name that was later attributed to at least one other woman similarly exhibited. The women were exhibited for their steatopygic body type – uncommon in Northwestern Europe – that was perceived as a curiosity at that time, and became subject of scientific interest as well as of erotic projection.
"Venus" is sometimes used to designate representations of the female body in arts and cultural anthropology, referring to the Roman goddess of love and fertility. "Hottentot" was a Dutch-colonial era term for the indigenous Khoikhoi people of southwestern Africa, which then became commonly used in English, and was shortened to "hotnot" as an offensive term; the term "Hottentot" refers to the tribe, like Zulu or Xhosa. The Sarah Baartman story has been called the epitome of racist colonial exploitation, and of the commodification and dehumanization of African people.
Life
Early life in the Cape Colony
Baartman was born to a Khoekhoe family in the vicinity of the Camdeboo Dutch Cape Colony, a British colony by the time she was an adult. Her birth name is unknown, but it is thought by some to have been Ssehura, supposedly the closest to her given name. Saartjie is the diminutive form of Sarah; in Cape Dutch the use of the diminutive form commonly indicated familiarity, endearment or contempt. Her surname has also been spelt Bartman and Bartmann. She was an infant when her mother died and her father was later killed by Bushmen while driving cattle.Baartman spent her childhood and teenage years on Dutch European farms. She went through puberty rites and kept a small tortoiseshell necklace, most likely her mother's, until her death in France. In the 1790s, a free black trader named Peter Cesars met her and encouraged her to move to Cape Town. 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 finally moved to be a wet-nurse in the household of Peter Cesars' brother, Hendrik Cesars, outside Cape Town in present-day Woodstock. There is evidence that she had two children, though both died as babies. She had a relationship with a poor Dutch soldier, Hendrik van Jong, who lived in Hout Bay near Cape Town, but the relationship ended when his regiment left the Cape.
In exchange for cash, Hendrik Cesars began to show her at the city hospital, where surgeon Alexander Dunlop worked. Dunlop,, a Scottish military surgeon in the Cape slave lodge, operated a side business in supplying animal specimens to showmen in Britain, and he suggested she travel to Europe to make money by exhibiting herself. Baartman refused. Dunlop persisted, and Baartman said she would not go unless Hendrik Cesars came too. In 1810 he agreed to go to Britain to make money by putting Baartman on stage. It is unknown whether Baartman went willingly or was forced.
Dunlop was the frontman and driver of the plan to exhibit Baartman. According to a British legal report of 26 November 1810, an affidavit supplied to the Court of King's Bench from a "Mr. Bullock of Liverpool Museum" stated: "some months since a Mr. Alexander Dunlop, who, he believed, was a surgeon in the army, came to him to sell the skin of a Camelopard, which he had brought from the Cape of Good Hope.... Some time after, Mr. Dunlop again called on Mr. Bullock, and told him, that he had then on her way from the Cape, a female Hottentot, of very singular appearance; that she would make the fortune of any person who shewed her in London, and that he was under an engagement to send her back in two years...." Lord Caledon, governor of the Cape, gave permission for the trip, but later said he regretted it after he fully learned the purpose of the trip.
On display in Europe
Hendrik Cesars and Alexander Dunlop brought Baartman to London in 1810. The group lived together in Duke Street, St. James, the most expensive part of London. In the household were Sarah Baartman, Hendrik Cesars, Alexander Dunlop, and two African boys, possibly brought illegally by Dunlop from the slave lodge in Cape Town.Dunlop had to have Baartman exhibited and Cesars was the showman. Dunlop exhibited Baartman at the Egyptian Room at the London residence of Thomas Hope at No. 10 Duchess Street, Cavendish Square, London. Dunlop thought he could make money because of Londoners' lack of familiarity with Africans and because of Baartman's large buttocks, which was viewed as variously grotesque, lascivious, and obscene. She became known as the "Hottentot Venus". A handwritten note made on an exhibition flyer by someone who saw Baartman in London in January 1811 indicates curiosity about her origins and probably reproduced some of the language from the exhibition; thus the following origin story should be treated with skepticism: "Sartjee is 22 Years old is 4 feet 10 Inches high, and has a good capacity. She lived in the occupation of a Cook at the Cape of Good Hope. Her Country is situated not less than 600 Miles from the Cape, the Inhabitants of which are rich in Cattle and sell them by barter for a mere trifle. A Bottle of Brandy, or small roll of Tobacco will purchase several Sheep – Their principal trade is in Cattle Skins or Tallow. – Beyond this Nation is an other, of small stature, very subtle & fierce; the Dutch could not bring them under subjection, and shot them whenever they found them. 9 Jany, 1811. " The tradition of freak shows was well established in Europe at this time, and historians have argued that this is at first how Baartman was displayed. 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. She became a subject of scientific interest, albeit of racist bias frequently, as well as of erotic projection. She was marketed as the "missing link between man and beast".
Her exhibition in London just a few years after the passing of the 1807 Slave Trade Act, which abolished the slave trade, created a scandal. A British abolitionist society, the African Association, conducted a newspaper campaign for her release. The British abolitionist Zachary Macaulay led the protest, with Hendrik Cesars protesting in response 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 24 November 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 William Bullock of Liverpool Museum, was intended to show that Baartman had been brought to Britain by people 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.
Some historians have subsequently expressed doubts on the veracity and independence of the statement that Baartman then made. She stated that she was not under restraint, had not been sexually abused and had come to London of her own free will. Nor did she 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. Her statement contradicts accounts of her exhibitions made by Zachary Macaulay of the African Institution and other eyewitnesses. A written contract was produced, which is considered by some modern commentators to be a legal subterfuge.
The publicity given by the court case increased Baartman's popularity as an exhibit. She later toured other parts of England and was exhibited at a fair in Limerick, Ireland in 1812. She also was exhibited at a fair at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. On 1 December 1811 Baartman was baptised at Manchester Cathedral and there is evidence that she got married on the same day.
Later life
A man called Henry Taylor took Baartman to France around September 1814. Taylor then sold her to a man sometimes reported as an animal trainer, S. Réaux, but whose name was actually Jean Riaux and belonged to a ballet master who had been deported from the Cape Colony for seditious behaviour. Riaux exhibited her under more pressured conditions for 15 months at the Palais Royal in Paris. In France she may have been 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 other Khoekhoe women to have 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.She was brought out as an exhibit at wealthy people's parties and private salons. In Paris, Baartman's promoters did not 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". She was sometimes exhibited with a collar around her neck. At the end of her life she was penniless, which was probably connected to the economic depression in France after Napoleon's defeat, resulting in a dearth of audiences that were able and willing to pay to see her. According to present-day accounts in the New York Times and The Independent, she was also working as a prostitute, but the biography by Crais and Scully only notes that as an uncertain possibility.