Saartjie Baartman: The "Hottentot Venus"

Now that I've already invoked the name of Anarcha, whose history is virtually unknown to many, I think it's time to do a piece on another woman, who has been given a great deal of attention recently. I am talking about none other than Saartjie (Sara or Sarah) Baartman (ca. 1788-1816), the original "Hottentot Venus."

Before Baartman's remains were finally returned to South Africa in 2002, I had already gone to Paris to bear witness. I will never forget the time I encountered her skeletal frame at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris and the plaster cast that was made of her by George Cuvier, the celebrated 19th-century scientist and Surgeon General to Napoleon, who dissected her brains and genitalia, soon after Baartman's death, and preserved both in jars of formaldehyde fluid, which were then placed on public display as late as 1985. Baartman was one of many other skeletons, whose remains were gathered by European scientists to prove the "inherent inferiority" of non-white peoples, and in my mind, seeing her bones among so many others suggested to me the mad-house horrors one would find in a haunted mansion. Instead, what haunts us in this case is the legacy established by scientific racism. Here is Baartman's story.

Baartman was born at a time during the period of Dutch colonization in South Africa. Her indigenous name is uncertain, but the name Saartjie is Dutch for “little Sara.” Baartman was raised in a rural indigenous community of Khoisan, the descendants of the Khoi Khoi people (who were already rumored to have been wiped out during her time period) and the San. The Khoi Khoi were derogatorily referred to as “Hottentots,” while the San were called “Bushmen.” Both Khoi Khoi and San were labeled “missing links” between humans and apes in racist scientific arguments because of their hunter-gatherer lifestyles and unusual speech patterns, which the Dutch dismissed as guttural animal sounds. Such views dehumanized the Khoi Khoi and San, who were targeted for extermination and removal.

Baartman was already a married woman when she experienced one of these extermination raids on her community;. she lost her husband and family in this the raid, and eventually she migrated to the urban center of the Cape Town for survival, where she worked as a servant to a Boer farmer named Peter Cezar.

It was at Cezar’s home where his brother, Hendrik Cezar, first noticed Baartman during a visit to the house and later conceived of the “Hottentot Venus” show during his visit. The show, which would take place in London at the famous Piccadilly Circus, would exploit European interests in African natives, especially in the “Hottentots,” who had already become mythical in the European imagination. The Hottentot Venus show would also capitalize on the prurient interests in so-called primitive sexuality, described in the tall-tale accounts of explorers who fabricated stories of “Hottentot” women’s oversized buttocks and mysterious “Hottentot apron,” an extra flap of skin covering the vaginal area.

Hendrik Cezar formed a partnership with a British ship surgeon, Alexander Dunlop, who both entertained the idea of Baartman's exhibition. They convinced Baartman to enter into a contract on the “Hottentot Venus” show, in which she would share in the profits of her exhibition. They left the Cape for London in 1810 and arrived in September of that year. Dunlop eventually dropped out of the business transaction when a local merchant purchased a giraffe skin from the two men but refused to invest in Baartman. Nonetheless, Cezar advertised the show and billed Baartman as a “most correct specimen of her race.” The “Hottentot Venus” exhibition, which took place at 225 Egyptian Hall at the Piccadilly Circus, was instantly popular and inspired bawdy ballads and political cartoons, thus demonstrating how the icon of the Hottentot Venus became a fixture in the culture. This image created a fetish out of her backside, and it possibly served as the basis for a fashion development: with the mid- to- late--nineteenth-century bustle, which gave the illusion of a large bottom.

The show also provoked outrage, as various witnesses complained about seeing Baartman in a cage. These witnesses also described Baartman appearing nearly nude and being threatened with violence by her exhibitor. These complaints soon led to the intervention of the African Institution, an abolitionist organization that brought Hendrik Cezar to trial for practicing slavery and public indecency. Baartman testified on her own behalf, but she did not corroborate stories of being held against her will and only complained about not having enough clothes to wear. The courts eventually dismissed the case but mandated that Cezar discontinue in the show’s indecency. As a result, the show disappeared from London but may have surfaced in the English countryside.

In 1814, Cezar and Baartman arrived in Paris, where Cezar abandoned her to an animal trainer named Reaux. Baartman continued in the “Hottentot Venus” show, which caused the same sensation in Paris as it had in London. Baartman later attracted the attention of three revered natural scientists, including the infamous George Cuvier. In March 1815, Baartman was subjected to scientific observations; she was already an alcoholic at the time, and the scientists enticed her with alcohol and sweets to pose nude. Baartman refused, however, to reveal what they had hoped to witness: a view of her “Hottentot apron.”

In less than a year after this scientific inquest, Baartman died from complications of alcoholism. Upon her death, Cuvier acquired her cadaver, using it to write his 1817 scientific thesis unveiling the mystery of her “apron.” In this thesis, Cuvier compared her genitalia with those of apes and crafted racist scientific theories, which circulated for more than a century, on African women’s oversexed and subhuman status.

In 1995, under Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid government, South Africa agitated for the return of Baartman’s remains and began a nearly decade-long feud with the French government over this troubling history. Seven years later, in March 2002, the French Senate finally agreed to return Baartman’s remains—including her preserved organs—for burial in her homeland. On August 9, 2002, National Women’s Day in South Africa, thousands attended Baartman’s centuries-delayed funeral in Cape Town. She was buried along the River Gamtoos.

Further Resources:

www.hottentotvenus.com

Exhibiting the "Other" in the West

Altick, Richard. The Shows of London. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Gilman, Sander. Difference and Pathology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Gould, Stephen Jay. “The Hottentot Venus.” The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History. New York: Norton Press, 1985. 291-305.

Hobson, Janell. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. NY: Routledge, 2005.

Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Willis, Deborah and Carla Williams. The Black Female Body: A Photographic History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.