A Quena woman was shown in Europe as a circus

freak during the last century. Saartjie Baartman's

early life is unknown except that she came from a

clan of Quena people, better known in South Africa

by the derogatory term "Hottentot", in the Eastern

Cape. Born in the late 18th century, probably in the

1780s, Baartman migrated to the Cape Flats,

where the records show she was living in a small

shack in 1810. In that year she met a ship's doctor,

William Dunlop, who persuaded her to travel to

England with promises that she would make a

fortune by exhibiting her body to Europeans. It

appears that two settlers called Hendrik and Johan

Cezar, probably themselves descendants of a

mixed-race marriage between a Quena woman and

a Dutchman, were instrumental in setting up the

deal. Baartman sailed with Dunlop to England,

where she was put on display in a building in

Piccadilly, exciting crowds of working-class

Londoners who viewed her with a mixture of morbid

curiosity and malice. Like all Quena woman, she

had a protruding backside and large genital organs

-- billed by the show's promoters as "resembling

the skin that hangs from a turkey's throat."

Contemporary descriptions of her shows at 225

Piccadilly, Bartholomew Fair and Haymarket in

London say Baartman was made to parade naked

along a "stage two feet high, along which she was

led by her keeper and exhibited like a wild beast,

being obliged to walk, stand or sit as he ordered".

The exhibitions took place at a time when the anti-

slavery debate was raging in England and

Baartman's plight attracted the attention of a young

Jamaican, Robert Wedderburn, who founded the

African Association to campaign against racism in

England. Under pressure from this group, the

attorney general asked the government to put an

end to the circus, saying Baartman was not a free

participant. A London court, however, found that

Baartman had entered into a contract with Dunlop,

although historian Percival Kirby, who has

discovered records of the woman's life in exile,

believes she never saw the document. In 1814,

after spending four years being paraded around the

streets of London, Baartman was taken to Paris

and, according to the archival accounts, was

handed to a "showman of wild animals" in a

travelling circus. Her body was analyzed by

scientists, including Cuvier, while she was alive and

a number of pseudo-scientific articles were written

about her, testimony at the time to the superiority

of the European races. Her anatomy even inspired

a comic opera in France. Called The Hottentot

Venus or Hatred to French Women, the drama

encapsulated the complex of racial prejudice and

sexual fascination that occupied European

perceptions of aboriginal people at the time. It

appears Baartman worked as a prostitute in Paris

and drank heavily to cope with the humiliation she

was subjected to. She died in 1815 of an

"inflammatory and eruptive sickness", possibly

syphilis. Cuvier made a plaster cast of her corpse

before dissecting it. He removed her skeleton and

cut out her brain and genitals, which he pickled in

bottles that were put on display at the Musee de

l'Homme for more than 150 years. Her remains

were removed from public exhibition 10 years ago

but remain the property of the museum.