South Africa restores dignity to woman treated like circus freak

WITH a solemn burial ceremony, South Africa yesterday sought to restore dignity to an indigenous woman who was displayed like a circus freak in Europe two centuries ago.

Saartjie Baartman, also know as Sarah, died a penniless prostitute and had her skeleton and bottled organs stored in a French museum until South Africa negotiated their return this year.

Baartman became a symbol of the humiliation and subjugation experienced by both the indigenous Khoisan and blacks under colonialism and then apartheid. “The story of Sarah Baartman is the story of the African people,” President Thabo Mbeki said at the funeral.

“It is the story of the loss of our ancient freedom. It is the story of our reduction to the state of objects who could be owned, used and discarded by others.” Hundreds of people attended the funeral in the town of Hankey, 470 miles east of Cape Town, where Baartman was born in 1789.

The ceremony coincided with National Women’s Day. Government officials and men wearing loin cloths and carrying bows watched as her coffin, decorated by two aloe wreaths, was slowly lowered into the ground as a choir sang softly in the background.

A member of the Griqua tribe, Baartman was sold in 1810 to a British Marine surgeon, who exhibited her in London in a cage. She was then sold to an animal trainer and exhibited naked in Paris, her large buttocks and sexual organs making her the subject of crude fascination and earning her the nickname “Hottentot Venus.”

After her death in 1816, a famous surgeon made a cast of her body, dissected her and conserved her brain and genitalia in bottles of formaldehyde. The painted plaster cast of Baartman’s body was displayed in Paris’ Musee de l’Homme until 1974, when it was stashed in a back room along with her remains.

Mr Mbeki said Baartman was exploited by European scientists to prove their racist theories about white superiority. “Sarah Baartman was taken to Europe to tell this lie in the most dramatic way possible,” he said. However, it was not Baartman who was a barbarian, “but those who treated her with barbaric brutality.” Mr Mbeki said the grave would become a national heritage site.