Saartje will be home in May

JOHANNESBURG -- The remains of Saartje Baartman, the Khoi woman who was exhibited in Paris as an ethnological and sexual curiosity in the 19th century, will finally arrive home on May 3.

Deputy Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Minister Bridgitte Mabandla will lead a delegation to the South African Embassy in Paris on April 29 to receive Baartman's remains at a formal ceremony organised by the French government.

"I personally am quite overwhelmed. This is a story of a woman who was greatly humiliated," an emotional Mabandla told journalists here yesterday.

The remains would be stored at a military mortuary in Cape Town for at least three or four months while a "consultative forum" decided on how best to inter Baartman with the appropriate dignity.

The interment would probably take place either on National Women's Day, August 9, or on Heritage Day, on September 24, Mabandla said.

"Nothing has been decided yet as we want to make the consultative process as inclusive as possible and this is going to take some time."

She also said that, in all likelihood, a monument would eventually be erected to honour Baartman.

"The return of Saartje is hugely political; her story is a reminder of how we human beings can disregard each other," Mabandla said.

Baartman had come to symbolise the oppression of all indigenous minorities and it was hoped that her tragedy would serve as a valuable lesson for future generations.

"Maybe this should be a lesson to say this should not happen again," Mabandla said.

Born at the Cape in 1789, Baartman was taken to London in 1810 by a British ship's doctor, William Dunlop, who persuaded her that she could make a fortune by displaying the anatomical features particular to the Khoi people. On arriving in Britain she found herself to be a virtual slave to Dunlop, who exhibited her to curious Europeans who were eager to view Baartman's steatopygous buttocks and genitalia.

She was paraded as a circus freak until her death in 1815 at the age of 25, then given to George Cuvier, Napoleon Bonaparte's surgeon.

He made a plaster cast of the corpse, dissected it and preserved certain body parts -- including the brain and genitalia -- in bottles.

The exhibit remained on display at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris until 1974. -- Sapa