After spending years in European freak exhibits, Sarah Baartman passed away around two centuries ago. Her real photo has now been circulating on the internet.
Rumors regarding a potential Hollywood biopic of Baartman’s life have raised concerns.
One of the first black women to be implicated in human s*x trafficking was Sarah Baartman. She was mockingly dubbed the “Hottentot Venus” by Europeans because, during her short life, her body was cruelly exposed and subjected to public scrutiny.
Moreover, her experience confirmed the Europeans’ incredibly harmful s*xual obsession with the bodies of African women.
She was reportedly brought to Europe under false pretenses by a British doctor.
Dubbed the “Hottentot Venus,” she has performed at freak exhibitions in London and Paris, where the public was allowed to gawk at her enormous buttocks.
She is now widely seen as the poster child for racism, colonial exploitation, and the denigration and commodification of black people.
Beyonce’s agents refuted rumors that she intended to create and feature in a movie about Baartman.
Beyonce was criticized for lacking ‘the essential human decency to be capable of authoring Sarah’s story, let alone acting the part,’ according to Jean Burgess, a chief from the Khoikhoi tribe that Baartman belonged to.
Due to her wide hips and unusual body coloring, Sara Baartman attracted the attention of colonial Europeans who believed they were racially superior.
Dunlop desired Sara to relocate to London and turn into a showpiece.
She was eventually transported to London, where she was shown in a building on Piccadilly, a street known for having the plus ultra of hideousness and the biggest deformity in the world, among other curiosities.
Sara’s half-naked body was placed in a cage that was about a meter and a half high for white men and women to pay to view. She attracted individuals from many regions of Europe.
Although Sarah Baartman passed away on December 29, 1815, her show continued.
Her skeleton, reproductive organs, and brain were displayed in a Parisian museum until 1974. In 2002, her bones were finally returned and interred.
Even though denying any connection to a movie, Beyonce’s agent stated: ‘This is a narrative that needs to be told.’
Who was Sara Baartman?
The Eastern Cape, now known as the Gamtoos river, is where Sara “Saartjie” Baartman was born in 1789.
She belonged to the Khoikhoi Gonaquasub tribe, which tended cattle. Little Sara was raised as a servant on a farm in the colonial era.
Her mother passed away when she was just two years old, and her father, a cattle driver, passed away while she was growing up.
Sara also wed a Khoikhoi drummer who was a member of her clan, and the two had a child together. Sadly, their newborn child passed away quickly.
Sara’s spouse was killed by Dutch colonists when she was sixteen years old. She was later sold into slavery by a trader named Pieter Willem Cezar, who took her to Cape Town and employed her as his brother’s housekeeper.
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