Hidden History: The Display of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman

Sarah Baartman. Have you heard her name? She was a South African Khoikhoi Woman who in the early 1800s was hired to be a dancer but instead put on display in Europe for thousands. Maybe you might know her as “The Hottentot Venus,” the name her handlers gave her. ‘Hottentot’ was the word the Dutch used to describe the way the Khoikhoi people spoke in their native language. She was considered as an “other” and treated like an animal because her skin color was darker and her backside was larger than many Europeans were used to. She was made into political cartoons, the topic of a play about French men’s desire for her, and a fashion trend which inspired dresses that enhanced the bottoms of white women.

I learned about Sarah Baartman at the beginning of Black History Month. I was utterly shocked and appalled by the way she was treated. Besides being put on display at events like the Picadilly Circus, she was also fascinating to scientists. Georges Cuvier, a naturalist, took a full body cast of her when she was alive. After her death in 1815, he dissected her and placed her genitalia in a jar which was housed at Musée de l’Homme until the 1980s. Cuvier’s data on her body lead to the hypothesis that black women are hypersexual and animalistic, that they were found to be “scientifically” different than European women and closer to primates. Black women were placed on the opposite side of the beauty scale when compared to white women. In 2002, her remains were repatriated back to South Africa by request of Nelson Mandela. These stereotypes created by Sarah Baartman’s depiction as “The Hottentot Venus” perpetuated how black women’s bodies are still looked at today — still fetishized, deemed inappropriately sexual, and deviant, but perfectly fine when appropriated by women of other races. This can be seen with the criticism of Serena Williams and her tennis attire.

It is sad that we are unable to know more about Sarah as a person, only her tragic story. I wanted to share about Sarah Baartman because of the impact her story has made on me and in history. I think learning stories like these teach us to be more empathetic and to question how socially constructed the world around us is.

• black women
• feminism
• history
• women
• Women's History Month