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Sartjie (Sarah) Baartman was born around 1790 in South Africa. A descendent of the Khoisan tribe native to the Eastern Cape, she left her home for England in a dubious partnership with businessmen Alexander Dunlop and Hendrik Cezar. Once in London, Cezar exhibited Baartman as a "freak" in Picadilly Circus under the appellation "The Hottentot Venus." She was depicted as primitive, hypersexual, and anatomically anomalous because of her (by European standards) large posterior. She became famous. From Sartjie Baartman, we may draw a direct line to the bustle, Josephine Baker's banana dance, Sir Mix-A-Lot's biggest hit, Kim Kardashian's 2014 cover of Paper magazine, and the fastest growing segment of the cosmetic surgery industry: butt implants.
Following years of dehumanizing exhibition, Baartman found herself in a court case brought by British abolitionists demanding an end to her show. She defended her right to exhibit herself. Questions surrounding her agency during this trial will never be answered, but for an African woman alone in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth-century, exhibition may have equaled survival. When Dunlop died, Baartman relocated to France and found new audiences. She also increasingly became the subject of scientific curiosity and scrutiny.
A famous French anatomist and zoologist named Georges Cuvier (some refer to him today as the "Father of paleontology") visited her performances and took an interest in Baartman. Once in France, she didn't live long. On 9 December 1815, Sarah Baartman died from an unknown condition, and despite her wishes to the contrary, Cuvier acquired and dissected her corpse. He wrote and published studies comparing her to non-human species, and displayed her remains in the Musee de l'Homme. Until 1974, you could still find her body cast, skeleton, brain and genitals on display. It was only through the long and concerted efforts of Nelson Mandela that Baartman's remains (incomplete - her genitals were never returned) were finally repatriated to South Africa and buried in her homeland in 2002.
In 1996, coinciding with efforts by artists and activists in South Africa to bring those remains home, a new play by Suzan-Lori Parks premiered at the Public Theater in New York City. Loosely based on the life of Saartjie Baartman, Venus was staged by avant-garde director Richard Foreman. It was both...