Black Women for Sale: The Saartjie Baartman Story

Saartjie Baartman

Featured artwork from Senzeni Maresela’s Covering Sarah series (2012). Image courtesy Kalashnikovv Gallery and the artist

By Unam Ntsababa and Luvuyo Mabe

I’ve been recently listening to Thandiswa Mazwai’s latest release, “Kulungile“, from the album SANKOFA, which means “to go back and fetch what has been left behind” in the Twi language. It is a beautiful and painful song that has made me reflect on displacement – being moved from one home to another without consent, and the urgent need to address the wrongs of the past. What saddens me is how this theme still resonates today, particularly for Black women who have faced such injustices for over 400 years. I will begin this article with a prayer and a declaration: #Justice4SaartjieBaartman, may your spirit be the salt to our wounds.

There are numerous opinions, dissertations, and records about Baartman – some reliable, but most not. Many accounts of her early life, her entry into sexual trafficking and slavery, and descriptions of her personality and phenotype were written by European travel writers and scholars. These writers contributed to the near-complete erasure of her birth name, referring to her by the derogatory epithet, “the Hottentot Venus”. These same “explorers” who under the guise of documenting Africa and its peoples, sexually and emotionally abused indigenous peoples through non-consensual probing and prodding of their bodies. What I assert unequivocally is that the egregiousness of her history, her voice, and all her dimensions were intentionally erased. Those who know the real, ugly, and vile truth know why they have kept it hidden.

Saartjie Baartman was born circa 1789 in the Eastern Cape to a family of herders from the Khoikhoi ethnic group of the Gonaqua people. There are varying reports of her life before her enslavement and how she lost her family, but it is commonly believed that she lost them during a conflict with Dutch settlers. Sold into the sex trade by a wealthy Cape merchant, Pieter Willem Cezar, she became a domestic worker and a wet nurse at 16, after losing her first child with an unknown man. Effectively, she became a slave to the trader’s brother, Hendrik Cezar.

Hottentot Venus and the Perception of the Black Body Through a White Gaze

There are varying reports as to how Saartjie Baartman wound up on a ship headed to an unfamiliar continent far from her ancestral lands. Most consistent sources claim that Hendrik Cezar sold her to a Scotsman, Alexander Dunlop, who was superintendent of a slave lodge in Cape Town. Other accounts suggest that Cezar could not find a buyer and thus exhibited her himself until Dunlop bought her. Saartjie refused to leave without the chaperone of Hendrik Cezar, so all three of them sailed to England. These reports, unsurprisingly, provide an excusatory explanation, claiming she was “persuaded” by Cezar and Dunlop that she would make a fortune as an exhibitionist, perform domestic work, and return after five years. This narrative frames it as a “consensual” business agreement between two slave masters and their slave.

In November 1810, she arrived in London, where she was exhibited as a human curiosity. Word of her “exhibit” spread as far as Ireland. Confined in a metre-and-a-half-long cage, she was forced to sing, walk, and endure constant scrutiny for half a shilling. For a full shilling, spectators could poke her with walking sticks and touch her – a fee equivalent to about R46.57 today.

Zachary Macaulay, an ally of the anti-slavery movement and a founder of London University, learned of Saartjie Baartman’s plight. Her arrival in London came just two years after the abolition of slavery in England, compelling him to act swiftly. On November 24, 1810, a trial began to determine if she was being exhibited consensually. Under oath, Baartman stated that she had given her consent, was not sexually abused, and had come to London of her own free will. The contract she had been forced to sign supported the defence, leading to the dismissal of the case, and her handlers faced no charges. The “agreement” was amended, supposedly entitling her to more profits, better clothes, and improved working conditions. Shortly after, they moved to Manchester, where she was baptised. Whether this bargain was honoured remains unknown.

When one of her slave masters died, Saartjie was sold in Paris to an animal handler named Reaux. There, she was exhibited as a circus animal, locked in a cage next to baby rhinos, presented naked, and pleaded for the decency of a small apron-like garment. Scientists and physiologists freely examined her, campaigning her as the missing link between animals and humans. These white men now considered the standard-bearers of epistemology and academia, gained generational “clout” by violating, raping, and stealing Saartjie’s body both in life and death. Today, these scientists are heralded by contemporary scholars as the fathers of various schools of thought and science, their legacies sanitising the violent and racist foundations of their work.

Georges Cuvier, the naturalist, anatomist, and imperial councillor to Napoleon Bonaparte, was obsessed with proving that Africans were more ape than human. He shamelessly created a full body cast of Saartjie’s corpse and dissected her body, pickling her brain and genitals. When you search for Georges Cuvier, his accolades as a “founding father” of palaeontology and comparative anatomy are highlighted, with little mention of the colonial violence at the expense of Saartjie’s dignity. Saartjie catalysed racial studies in Europe, America, and the Antilles. Experiments on her body paved the way for the rise of racist and ableist pseudosciences such as eugenics and unethical genetic engineering, including those during the Holocaust. Harmful beliefs about Black women’s bodies and our pain thresholds persist in the medical field to this day.

“Baartman was the ‘African other’ that confirmed the advanced civility of Europe and whose unruly body, displayed, painted, and ultimately dissected, justified continued, brutal colonization.” – Marguerite Johnson FAHA

Saartjie Baartman tragically died on December 29, 1815, in Paris. Her cause of death remains debated, with claims of smallpox, alcoholism, syphilis, or pneumonia. Diagnosed with various ailments during her life, the cause of her death remaining uncertain is interesting. Cuvier, the celebrated anatomist, did not attempt an autopsy or any diagnosis. His main excitement was to dissect her, believing she was the missing link to his research about Africans being less than human. Her skeleton was displayed at the Musée de l’Homme until as late as 1974.

In August 1998, Dr Diana Ferrus wrote a poem that catalysed France to draft a bill for the repatriation of her remains. Initially, France was unwilling to relinquish her body, claiming ownership. Finally, on August 9, 2002, the remains of Saartjie Baartman were returned to South Africa on National Women’s Day.

Baartman’s Legacy: A Tragedy Echoing Through Time

Saartjie Baartman’s story reverberates through history, a testament to the enduring effects of colonisation on cultures, languages, and the collective self-image of colonised peoples. Trafficked from her ancestral lands to a master’s home and then exhibited as a sub-human spectacle, her exploitation mirrors the perversions that now shape industries such as fashion, media, and beauty standards. Black women are often commodified, their bodies and lives consumed and critiqued en masse.

The European obsession with possessing and studying Saartjie’s body persists across eras and fads. This fascination led to the Victorian bustle dress, which sought to emulate her natural physique, including her steatopygous buttocks, distinct to the Gonaqua ethnic group from which Saartjie hailed. This imitation through fabric extended to corseting, which cinched the waist and accentuated the bust and rear, creating an hourglass figure mimicking Saartjie’s pear shape.

Yvette Abrahams highlights in Colonialism, Dysfunction and Dysjuncture: The Historiography of Sarah Bartmann (2000) that Victorian societal norms conflicted with their obsession over Saartjie’s body, particularly her sexual organs. The same preoccupation that exploited her as a spectacle also influenced European fashion, which paradoxically mimicked her physical features considered repulsive and sinful yet alluring. Saartjie faced sexual violence and prostitution by those who viewed her as subhuman, perpetuating harmful stereotypes about African women’s bodies and sexuality.

This exploitation extends into the present, where the Saartjie Baartman Effect manifests as a form of postcolonial collective body dysmorphia. From 19th-century bustle dresses to modern Brazilian butt lifts (BBL), the beauty standards imposed by Eurocentric ideals have capitalised on and appropriated features traditionally denigrated in Black women. Today’s influencers and fast fashion trends perpetuate these ideals through cosmetic surgery, social media, and AI-driven imagery, reinforcing outdated stereotypes and promoting overconsumption.

“Whether it’s modern-day YouTube commenters or 1800s journals, the media consistently reinforces stereotypical ideals about women’s appearances… these physical stereotypes applied to women from underrepresented groups.” – Beth Hatcher

The legacy of Saartjie Baartman persists in the normalisation and commodification of Black women’s bodies, hard as the world may try to erase her and every Black woman whose body has been a resource for Western consumption and pleasure, it is still the plight of Black women today to be humanised, acknowledged, and to have our dues paid to us.

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