LESSON 1: THE STORY OF HOTTENTOTS VENUS?

The first image is one of Ssehura, a young Khoisan girl orphaned in 1700's South Africa who was renamed Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman and known as the "Hottentots Venus" because of her pronounced buttocks and genitals. She was kidnapped from South Afrika in 1810 and exhibited like a wild beast in the nude in Europe after William Dunlop, a ship's doctor, told her that she could earn a fortune by allowing foreigners to look at her body.
Instead she became a freak-show attraction who was continuously investigated by pseudo scientists and put under the voyeuristic eye of the general public.

For several years, working-class Londoners crowded around to shout vulgarities at the protruding buttocks of this unfortunate woman, but the shape she had was most admired and desired by her countrymen, so in imitation, European (white) women created and wore a large pad around their waist to mimic that shape, from which the Bustle evolved, setting a major fashion trend into motion. When Sarah died, her buttocks were put on display in a museum in France until as recently as 1985. She became an icon for South African women who continue to suffer abuse and exploitation.

Sara is the short-name used these days for Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan slave woman who at the tender age of 20 was taken from Cape Town to London and then on to Paris to be displayed naked in their streets and at their circuses like an animal her European audiences viewed her to be. Her story is a tearful and moving one. It is at once the story of an everyday woman, a human being, one of us, treated in the most grotesque ways, used as "scientific proof" of "European white superiority."

But it is also a story about the more widespread "social, political, scientific and philosophical assumptions which transformed one young African woman into a representation of savage sexuality and racial inferiority." Finally, her story is one that provokes us to look in some detail at the power of imagery to form opinions, and the way such power has been employed to depict people of color, especially women of color.

Since this story was published in February 2002, Sara's remains have been returned to South Africa. Saartjie Baartman's skeleton and bottled organs -- long stored at a French natural history museum -- were turned over to South African officials on April 29 at a ceremony in Paris, the culmination of years of requests by countrymen who wanted to bring her home.

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