Exploitation: the act of selfishly taking advantage of someone or a group of people to profit from them or otherwise benefit oneself.
Sarah Baartman:
Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman who, under “Hottentot Venus”, was exhibited as a freak show attraction in Europe. She was one of the first black women known to be subjugated to human sex trafficking. The name, Hottentot, was a colonial-era term for the Khoikhoi people of South Africa.
Sara Baartman was born in 1789 in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, then known as the Gamtoos River. She and her family were members of the Gonaquasub group of the Khoikhoi people.
At the age of 2, she lost her mother and her father, a cattle herder, died when she was a young child. In her teenage, she got married to a Khoikhoi drummer, and they had a child who died soon after her birth.
When Sarah Baartman was 16, her husband was murdered by Dutch colonists, and soon she was sold into slavery to Pieter Willem Cezar, a slave trader who took her to Cape Town, where she served his brother Hendrick.
In October 1810, William Dunlop, a physician and a friend of the Cezar brothers, alleged that the 21-year old Sarah Baartman, who could neither read nor write, signed an agreement with them.
This contract allowed them to take her to Europe as a domestic servant since slavery had been abolished then. It also permitted them to exhibit her for entertainment purposes, on the condition that she would receive a percentage of her earnings and be allowed to return to South Africa after five years.
However, this document, which was false on all counts, was all Dunlop and Cezar needed when the British abolitionists charged them to court for holding Sarah Baartman against her will. Sarah also testified to having signed the contract and not being mistreated.
The court ruled in their favour when they presented the contracts that Sarah Baartman had allegedly signed. However, her contract was amended, and she got better living conditions, warm clothes, and an increase in earnings.
The publicity from the trial increased Sarah Baartman’s popularity as an exhibit.
Sarah’s buttocks and colour made her an object of fascination by the colonists, who presumed they were racially superior. She was then brought to London, where she was displayed half-naked to the English audience from a cage about a metre and a half high. She was taken on tours throughout England, and by 1812, she had gone as far as Ireland.
In 1814, a year before her contact ought to have ended, she was taken to France and sold to Reaux, an exhibitor who showcased animals. He put Sara Baartman on display and allowed her abuse by patrons who paid for it.
He made a lot of profit because of how fascinated by her body the public was. He also let her be painted in the nude and examined by physiologists and zoologists who concluded that she was a link between animals and humans, amplifying the false belief that Africans were a lesser race.
Sara Saartjie Baartman died at the age of 26 in Paris on December 29, 1815. For unknown reasons and hours after her death, Georges Cuvier, a French scientist, was permitted to dissect her, and he took her private parts and her brain.
The rest of her body parts went on display at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) and remained on display full 1974 to support the racist theories.
In 1994, the South African president, Nelson Mandela, formally requested that the French government return Sarah Baartman’s body to be laid to rest. This process took eight years, and on March 6, 2002, Sarah Baartmann’s body was returned to South Africa, where she was buried on August 9, 2002.
