The tragic life of Sarah Baartman: The woman exploited for her body as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ and displayed even after death, finally came home 192 years later
In the late 1700s, in what is now South Africa’s Eastern Cape, a girl named Sarah (Sara/Saartjie) Baartman was born into a world already shaped by colonial violence. Her mother died when she was two. Her father, a cattle driver, died when she was a teenager. As a young woman, a Dutch colonist murdered her…
