Laying The Past To Rest

Saartjie Baartman was a simple South African native girl who, early in the 19th century, became something of a celebrity in Europe — and a shameful symbol of racist exploitation. This month the preserved remains of the woman once known as the Hottentot Venus will be moved from a dark corner of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris and sent back to her birthplace. After almost 200 years, Saartjie Baartman is going home.

Baartman was born in 1789 into the Griqua tribe of the eastern Cape, a subgroup of the Khoisan people who are now thought to be the first aboriginal inhabitants of the southern tip of Africa. Her family moved to a shack near Cape Town and, while working as a 20-year-old servant to a local farmer, she attracted the attention of a visiting English ship's surgeon, William Dunlop. What made her a curiosity in the doctor's eyes were her extraordinary steatopygia — enlarged buttocks — and her unusually elongated labia, a genital peculiarity of some Khoisan women of the time.

She agreed to go with Dunlop to England where, he promised her, she would become rich and famous as a subject of medical and anthropological research. At first, she was indeed put under anatomical scrutiny by scientists, who named her genital condition the Hottentot apron. Hottentot was a word coined by early Dutch settlers to South Africa to describe the strange clicking language of the Khoisan. But the only success she achieved was as an exhibit before the general public, who queued to see the Hottentot Venus as they would an animal in a zoo.

In London and later Paris, Baartman was displayed in a grotesque parody of the birth of Venus. People paid one shilling to gawk at her in a hall in Piccadilly, where she was depicted as a wild animal in a cage, dancing for her keeper. "She and her people were regarded as closer to the animal kingdom than to humankind," says Marilyn Martin, director of the South African National Gallery. Baartman was supposed to earn half of the proceeds from her performances, but in fact she was employed as a nursemaid by her impresarios and saw little of the profits. Sad and homesick, she was persuaded to go to Paris for further scientific examination and again went on view as a freakish curiosity for a public eager to see what was billed as a "subhuman" species from Africa.

But the European climate was too severe for the young servant-girl from Africa. She fell sick and died in 1815 of what documents from the time describe as "an inflammatory and eruptive sickness" (probably pneumonia). Her remains were handed over to naturalists from the Musée de l'Homme. They made a cast of her body and preserved her brain, genitals and parts of her skeleton as exhibits in the museum. Even in death, the Hottentot Venus continued to titillate visitors until as recently as 1975, when her remains were moved to the museum's archives.

But some Africans never forgot Baartman, and her cause gained momentum amid post-apartheid South Africa's new awareness of tribal identity. All over the country, aboriginal peoples are asserting their heritage rights, claiming not only political and cultural recognition, but also the restitution of ancestral land and the protection of intellectual property rights. The San, once known as the bushmen of southern Africa, have successfully reclaimed historic tribal land and won a share in the proceeds of internationally marketed drugs made from their traditional medicinal plants. And now Baartman's Khoisan tribe, which has been recognized by the United Nations as an indigenous "First Nation," has won a victory for tribal recognition by securing the return of the Hottentot Venus to South Africa.

The National Khoisan Consultative Conference, a tribal representative body, has been pressing for Baartman's return since 1995, even though a change in French law was needed for this to happen. Khoisan leaders enlisted the help of former President Nelson Mandela and South Africa's most renowned paleoanthropologist, Phillip Tobias, to plead their case. In February the French government passed the required bill enabling her remains to be repatriated. Khoisan and Griqua leaders in South Africa say they expect a formal handover before the end of this month. "We are thrilled," said Cecil le Fleur, a Khoisan-rights activist and, like Baartman, a Griqua. "Saartjie Baartman is a symbol of the oppression and subjugation, not only of women and the Khoisan people, but of all First Peoples. We will give her a decent burial. Her grave will be in a prominent place that will stand as a memorial against humiliation and injustice everywhere." Home at last, Saartjie Baartman, symbol of a dark and decadent past, can finally rest in peace.