Sarah Baartman
Khoikhoi woman · South Africa · Lived 1789 to 1815 · aged 26
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Something wrong?A Khoikhoi woman taken from southwestern Africa and displayed across 19th-century Europe under the name "Hottentot Venus" - exhibited for her body, reduced to a curiosity, then a specimen. Her story became the shorthand for colonial exploitation at its most dehumanizing.
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Photos 6
''La Belle Hottentote'', a 19th-century French print of Baartman
A caricature of Baartman drawn in the early 19th century
Sarah Baartman's grave, on a hill overlooking Hankey in the Gamtoos River Valley, Eastern Cape, South Africa
Caricature of Baartman by William Heath (1810)
Image from Volume 2 of Natural History of Mammals (1819)About this person
Born around 1789, Sarah Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman from what is now South Africa. She was brought to Europe and exhibited in freak shows, her steatopygic body type - uncommon in Northwestern Europe - presented as spectacle and subjected to both prurient fascination and scientific scrutiny. The name "Hottentot Venus" fused a Dutch colonial slur with the Roman goddess of love, packaging her as entertainment and erotic projection. She died in Paris on 29 December 1815. At least one other woman was later displayed under the same name, extending the practice that made Baartman's experience synonymous with the commodification of African bodies in the colonial era.
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