Sarah Baartman (; 1789– 29 December 1815), also spelled Sara, sometimes in the diminutive form Saartje (), or Saartjie, and Bartman, Bartmann, was a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus, a name which was later attributed to at least one other woman similarly exhibited. The women were exhibited for their steatopygic body type uncommon in Western Europe which not only was perceived as a curiosity at that time, but became subject of scientific interest as well as of erotic projection.
"Venus" is sometimes used to designate representations of the female body in arts and cultural anthropology, referring to the Roman goddess of love and fertility. "Hottentot" was a colonial-era term for the indigenous Khoikhoi people of southwestern Africa, now usually considered an offensive term. The Sarah Baartman story is often regarded as the epitome of racist colonial exploitation, and of the commodification of the dehumanization of black people.
Life
Early life in the Cape Colony
Baartman was born to a Khoikhoi family in the vicinity of the Camdeboo in what is now the Eastern Cape of South Africa (then the Dutch Cape Colony; a British colony by the time she was an adult). Her birth name is unknown, but is thought by some to have been Ssehura, supposedly the closest to her given name. Saartjie is the diminutive form of Sarah; in Cape Dutch the use of the diminutive form commonly indicated familiarity, endearment or contempt. Her surname has also been spelt Bartman and Bartmann. She was an infant when her mother died and her father was later killed by Bushmen (San people) while driving cattle.
Baartman spent her childhood and teenage years on Dutch European farms. She went through puberty rites, and kept the small tortoise shell necklace, most likely her mother's, until her death in France. In the 1790s, a free black (a designation for individuals of enslaved descent) trader named Peter Cesars (also recorded as Caesar) met her and encouraged her to move to Cape Town. Records do not show whether she was made to leave, went willingly, or was sent by her family to Cesars. She lived in Cape Town for at least two years working in households as a washerwoman and a nursemaid, first for Peter Cesars, then in the house of a Dutch man in Cape Town. She finally moved to be a wet-nurse in the household of Peter Cesars' brother, Hendrik Cesars, outside of Cape Town in present day Woodstock. There is evidence that she had two children, though both died as babies. She had a relationship with a poor Dutch soldier, Hendrik van Jong, who lived in Hout Bay near Cape Town, but the relationship ended when his regiment left the Cape.
Hendrik Cesars began to show her at the city hospital in exchange for cash, where surgeon Alexander Dunlop worked. Dunlop, (sometimes wrongly cited as William Dunlop), a Scottish military surgeon in the Cape slave lodge, operated a side business in supplying showmen in Britain with animal specimens, and suggested she travel to Europe to make money by exhibiting herself. Baartman refused. Dunlop persisted, and Baartman said she would not go unless Hendrik Cesars came too. He also refused, but he finally agreed in 1810 to go to Britain to make money by putting Baartman on stage. The party left for London in 1810. It is unknown whether Baartman went willingly or was forced.
Dunlop was the frontman and conspirator behind the plan to exhibit Baartman. According to a British legal report of 26 November 1810, an affidavit supplied to the Court of King's Bench from a "Mr. Bullock of Liverpool Museum" stated: "some months since a Mr. Alexander Dunlop, who, he believed, was a surgeon in the army, came to him to sell the skin of a Camelopard, which he had brought from the Cape of Good Hope.... Some time after, Mr. Dunlop again called on Mr. Bullock, and told him, that he had then on her way from the Cape, a female Hottentot, of very singular appearance; that she would make the fortune of any person who shewed her in London, and that he (Dunlop) was under an engagement to send her back in two years..." Lord Caledon, governor of the Cape, gave permission for the trip, but later said regretted it after he fully learned the purpose of the trip.
On display in Europe
Hendrik Cesars and Alexander Dunlop brought Baartman to London in 1810. The group lived together in Duke Street, St. James, the most expensive part of London. In the household were Sarah Baartman, Hendrik Cesars, Alexander Dunlop, and two African boys, probably brought illegally by Dunlop from the slave lodge in Cape Town.