VV(18) - Bring back the Hottentot Venus

[David Morris]

http://www.sn.apc.org/wmail/issues/950615/wm950615-12.html

Bring back the Hottentot Venus
June 15, 1995

A Quena woman who was shown in Europe as a circus freak last century is to 
be the subject of a documentary reviving the memory of South Africa's 
aboriginal people, writes Eddie Koch

IN 1815 George Cuvier, surgeon general to Napoleon Bonaparte, was given the 
body of a Quena, or Hottentot, woman called Saartjie Baartman, who had died 
after living as a circus freak in England and France. The doctor made a 
plaster cast of the woman's corpse before he cut out her brains and genitals 
and preserved them in laboratory bottles.

Ten years ago these commodities were still on display at the Musee de 
l'Homme in Paris -- macabre icons of those "little people" who suffered the 
worst forms of ethnocide anywhere in the colonial period and who are today 
largely forgotten, even though their descendants fill the ranks of South 
Africa's rainbow nation.

Now a local researcher is spearheading a movement to return Baartman's 
remains so that the woman can be given the dignity that she was denied in 
her lifetime. The operation, dubbed "Bring Back the Hottentot Venus", is 
also designed to revive a popular memory of the aboriginal people who played 
a major role in shaping South Africa's past and present.

Saartjie Baartman's early life is unknown except that she came from a clan 
of Quena people, better known in South Africa by the derogatory term 
"Hottentot", in the Eastern Cape. Born in the late 18th century, probably in 
the 1780s, Baartman migrated to the Cape Flats, where the records show she 
was living in a small shack in 1810.

In that year she met a ship's doctor, William Dunlop, who persuaded her to 
travel to England with promises that she would make a fortune by exhibiting 
her body to Europeans. It appears that two settlers called Hendrik and Johan 
Cezar, probably themselves descendants of a mixed-race marriage between a 
Quena woman and a Dutchman, were instrumental in setting up the deal.


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com