Biography:On August 9th 2002, a few thousand people gathered on a hilltop in South Africa to listen to their president, Thabo Mbeki, pay homage to an extraordinary woman who had died 187 years previously and whose bones were only then being buried.
The woman was Saartjie Baartman, who belonged to the Khoisan people of the Eastern Cape. Born in 1789, she was taken from her ancestral home and put to work as a maid cum wet nurse in Cape Town. Looking back on her short life, this was probably the best part of it.
Her home was a one-roomed concrete dwelling, which she shared with a soldier from the British garrison by whom she had a child. The child, however, died, the soldier disappeared, and Saartjie was transported to London to be exhibited as the Hottentot Venus.
South African-born Rachel Holmes has done some excellent research not only into Saartjie's background but also into the London of the times, when showmen displayed anything they felt would bring in the cash, whether it was Siamese twins, albino children, people with gross deformities or, as in 1824, a whole family from Lapland.
Saartjie's selling point was her large bottom, and the cartoons of the day, reproduced in the book, left nothing to the imagination.
Displayed against a backdrop of paintings of the African veldt, a grass hut and sundry trinkets such as shells and ostrich feathers, Saartjie was modestly clad in a body stocking sufficiently tight to display her physical endowments.
The men who had brought her to England, threatened with prosecution when slave trading was outlawed, sold her on to a man who took her to Paris and it was here that she went into a decline.
Forced to remove her clothes so that she could be examined by notable scientists of the day under the guise of scientific research, she took to the bottle, caught a fever, was refused medical attention and died. Such was Saartjie's short life, which lasted no more than 26 years. It wasn't until South Africa gained independence that Nelson Mandela requested her remains be returned to her homeland.
THOUGH SHE COULD speak three languages as well as sing and play a string instrument, Saartjie was unable to read or write and would have known little about the tumultuous times in which she lived. In England, the abolition of slave-trading predominated, while in Paris it was the comings and goings of Bonaparte. Holmes, however, has been meticulous in filling in the political background as well as the pseudo-scientific research leading to the so-called theory of eugenics, which sought to back up the theory of a superior, white race.
There is, too, an apposite parallel between the exploitation of Saartjie's body and the imperialistic rape of Africa which, so often, has been represented as dark, female and mysterious.
There is only one area of this study I found unacceptable: Holmes's attempts to get into the mind of her subject, in itself both an intrusion and an imposition. To her minders, Saartjie recounted the story of her childhood, her betrothal and her violent kidnapping, and though we know that she resisted, as well as she could, attempts to unclothe her, her reaction to London and to Paris, her opinion of the various people who came along to prod and poke her have not been recorded and it seems a pity that Holmes, who has done such a good job in bringing Saartjie to our attention, should resort to guessing or asking us to imagine what the sad and lovely Saartjie might have been thinking.
Interestingly, while the press and the voyeurs took a prurient interest in Saartjie's large bottom, the women of England and France were seeking to emulate her by attaching bits and pieces to their own bottoms.
These, in French, were called le faux-cul or false bottom. In England, they were known, more genteelly, as a bustle.
Mary Russell is a writer who has spent some time working in South Africa's Eastern Cape
The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman By Rachel Holmes Bloomsbury, 239pp. £14.99