Touching Story of 'Big Booty' African Slave, Sara Baartman Who was Abused by Europeans and Used as a Circus Animal (Photo)

                      

On 29 October 1810, Saartjie “Sara” Baartman, a nineteen year old Khoisan woman signed a contract to be taken from Cape Town to London to be exhibited for entertainment purposes. Though she was illiterate, history allegedly claims she signed the contract with an English ship surgeon named William Dunlop who was a friend to Pieter Willem Cezar and Hendrik Cezar. Pieter Willem Cezar had bought Sara Baartman as a slave at sixteen and she worked for Pieter’s brother, Hendrik. It was here that she was named Saartjie, the Dutch form of Sara.

 

The history of colonialism was so unfair to her that she was stripped of her identity and her bodily integrity. Her story is the full representation of the evils of a hybrid of colonialism, slavery, racism and sexism. The Europeans even disrespected her humanity to the extent of displaying her brain, skeleton and sexual organs in a Paris museum until 1974. She only got a dignified burial almost two centuries after her death, in 2002.

The woman who lost everything…even her name

 

Sara Baartman was born to a Gonaquasub group of the KhoiKhoi in 1789 at the Gamtoos River which is found in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Her first major loss was that of her mother who died when Sara was just two and her father, a cattle driver died when she reached adolescence. She got married to a Khoikhoi drummer and had a child together. The child died soon after.

 

Death

 

With the coming of colonialism, came conflicts between the natives and the settlers. Her husband was murdered by the Dutch colonists, her first loss to a system that would take her life from her. After working for the Dutch in Cape Town, she allegedly signed the contract which would take her to London to perform. What made her special? BBC says she had what was called “steatopygia”, resulting in extremely protuberant buttocks due to a build-up of fat.

 

What she had, most women can only dream of but at this point, the Europeans were eager to gobble up anything that asserted their superiority and somehow, Baartman was used in that narrative. They used her as a confirmation of the dark skinned people’s inferiority; their insatiable appetite for sex as shown by the size of their buttocks and their genitalia. Promoters even described her genitals as resembling the skin that hangs from a turkey’s throat.