The world is made up of all different kinds of people, and they're all, well, very different. Many have always had a fascination with those who aren't like themselves, and sometimes, that's ended very poorly indeed.
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For centuries, that's led to the uncomfortable, degrading practice of exhibiting "others" for the amusement of those who see themselves as somehow superior. Throughout the 19th century, those exhibitions even took the form of organized "human zoos," and if that isn't enough to make someone lose faith in the human race, then nothing is.
Even before that, people deemed strange or foreign were often exhibited in other ways, and there's no story that's sadder than that of Saartjie Baartman. When she was plucked from her homeland in Africa and taken to Europe to go on display, she was renamed the "Hottentot Venus," (and we'll look at why that's so particularly horrible). Much of Baartman's short life was spent being ogled and touched by strangers who grossly exploited her.
Saartjie Baartman has long been something of an enigma: known by her stage name, the Hottentot Venus, we know that she was put on display to gratify the curiosity of European viewers. But, who was she?
That's the question Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully asked when they started getting curious about the woman behind the costume. They did some digging (via Johns Hopkins), and — after some detective work that would make Sherlock Holmes proud — they found some new insight that proved long-accepted history wasn't entirely correct.
Crais and Scully discovered that, contrary to popular belief, Baartman was born sometime in the 1770s (not in 1789, as often said), in an area called the Green Valley, or Camdeboo, around 400 miles from Cape Town. It was a turbulent time: her people, the cattle-herding Gonaqua, were being actively hunted and enslaved. After the deaths of her parents, she moved to Cape Town — which was, at the time, a bustling, metropolitan port city that had a constant influx of European ships and men. There, she became what Crais and Scully described as "a slave in all but name," serving a series of enslavers and giving birth to three children (who all died in infancy).
While the Hottentot Venus is often painted as a simple or innocent caricature of a woman, Crais and Scully discovered something different: "Our position is that Sara Baartman, while in Cape Town, was basically a cosmopolitan woman who had a great deal of information on European men, including their interest in black women's bodies."