Saartjie Baartman, who performed under the name of ‘the Hottentot Venus’, became one of the most famous theatrical attractions of Georgian London. Exhibited like an animal for the entertainment of a paying crowd (‘two bob a head’), she was routinely obliged to suffer sharp prods in the buttocks from her curious audience who ‘wished to ascertain that all was nattral’. Tears would roll silently down her heart-shaped face. The deathly sighs she emitted on stage became as great a wonder as her Venusian form.
Saartjie was born in the Eastern Cape in South Africa in 1789. Her Afrikaans name translates into Little Sarah, an apt choice for a girl who would grow no taller than four foot six and a half inches. Murderous Europeans blighted her childhood by slaughtering the male members of her peaceful, cattle-herding family. The 12-year-old girl was captured and taken to Cape Town. There she worked as the unpaid servant of a villainous freed slave named Cesars, who was in turn the servant of Dunlop, a roguish English naval doctor.
When Dunlop lost his job through malpractice, he hatched an audacious scheme to exhibit Cesars’s Hottentot maid in London. Her ‘tribal savage’ origins and talent for playing the guitar would be a certain crowd-puller, but, most importantly, her notable bottom would prove a sure-fire draw to the novelty-hungry English. The Hottentot derrière was poised to make Dunlop and Cesars’s fortune.
In the spring of 1810, Saartjie was smuggled aboard a London-bound ship, since it was illegal to export Hottentots. Dunlop and his entourage took lodgings in York Street near St James’s Square, where their illustrious neighbours included Beau Brummel, Lord Grenville and Sheridan. As ‘the Hottentot Venus’, Saartjie was obliged to perform for four hours a day, six days a week, whilst wearing a dress ‘so tight’, a shocked Macaulay noted, ‘that her shapes above and the enormous size of her posterior parts are as visible as if she were naked’.
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