Frances Wilson
THE ALLURE OF OTHERNESS
The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjje Baartman, Born 1789 – Buried 2002
By Rachel Holmes (Bloomsbury 256pp £14.99)

Venus, Roman goddess of love, was born in the sea and came to earth floating on a scallop shell. The Hottentot Venus, otherwise known as Saartjie Baartman, was born in the Gamtoos River Valley in South Africa, and came to England as a stowaway. She was taken - along with a massive and stinking giraffe skin - by a British military doctor called Alexander Dunlop and his South African servant, Hendrik Cesars. Together, the men saw the potential of exhibiting Saartjie's prominent buttocks and extended labia in a freak-show.

'The Hottentot Venus' was advertised across London during the winter of 1810 as 'the greatest phenomenon ever exhibited in this country'. Saartjie's stage name was inspired: combining the erotic otherness of the 'Hottentot' with the iconic allure of the 'Venus', Dunlop and Cesars mixed two potent myths in the form of one 22-year-old, four-foot-six woman. She represented primitive, uninhibited sex to a culture which took seriously the new pseudo-science of ethnology and delighted in nothing more than the public display of strangeness. As Rachel Holmes puts it, 'The Hottentot Venus arose in London as the very apotheosis of Europe's invented Africa, the dark continent of feminised impenetrability and crude potency.' In other words, she offered 'sexual tourism dressed up as education'.

Saartjie appeared on stage between twelve o'clock and four o'clock, six days a week, in a prime location at 225 Piccadilly (funded by the sale of the giraffe skin), where she stood alongside a mock-up of an African village. Amongst those who paid the two shillings to see her posterior clad in a skin-tight body suit while she danced and played her 'ramkie', a form of guitar, were the dandy Beau Brummell and the actor Charles Kemble ('poor, poor creature', Kemble muttered when he was introduced to her after the show by Cesars). She lived for the next five years as an exhibit, first in England and then in Paris, where she died aged twenty-six, by which point she was addicted to brandy. Within hours of her death, she was dissected by the eminent surgeon Georges Cuvier, who made a plaster cast of her body, removed her skeleton and pickled her brain and labia in jars, where they were displayed in the Musée de l'Homme until 1985. Saartjie's life, which was nasty, brutish and short, was followed by an afterlife which was just as nasty and brutish, only much, much longer.

Descended from the Eastern Cape Khoisan and the nomadic San, Saartjie's ancestors are now understood to have been the world's first peoples. Her mother died when she was one year old; her father was murdered when she was a teenager. She had a child herself who also died, after which the baby's father went his own way. Alone and unprotected, she was picked up by Pieter Cesars, a free black hunter and trader from Cape Town who wanted a wet nurse for his niece, the daughter of Hendrik Cesars, the man who would eventually manage her career in England. The extent to which Saartjie knew what lay in store for her when she allowed herself to be smuggled aboard the ship is not known, and the degree to which she was willing to exploit herself became the subject of a court case brought by the abolitionist Zachary Macaulay (father of the historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay), who was determined to prove against Cesars that Saartjie was illegally transported, kept as a slave and forced to perform against her own free will and consent. 'I have read somewhere', Macaulay wrote to the press, ' ... that the air of the British Constitution is too pure to permit slavery to exist where its influence extends.' Saartjie would become, as Holmes says, 'the first black South African woman whose right to liberty would be put to the test of the constitutional law in Britain'.

The case rested on the tricky issue of consent. When she was interviewed by Dutch-speakers, Saartjie, who could neither read nor write, insisted that she had come to England willingly, that she was well looked-after, that she was taking a share of the profits, and that she was confident she would be returning home with her takings in six years' time. But as far as her interviewers were concerned, 'to the various questions we put to her whether, if she chose at any time to discontinue her person being exhibited, she might do so, we could not draw a satisfactory answer from her. She understands very little of the agreement made with her by Mr Dunlop on the 29 October and which agreement she produced to us.' As Holmes succinctly puts it, 'Saartjie was caught in the contradictions of Enlightenment redefinitions of human freedom. In legal terms, abolition made the difference between slavery and servitude a question of self-possession, not escape from economic poverty. But for Saartjie, there were also economic advantages to be gained.'

It took nearly a decade for Nelson Mandela to persuade the French Government to return her body to South Africa, where, after 187 years away, Saartjie is now buried in the valley where she was born. Her funeral, on 9 August 2002, was a national event, presided over by Thabo Mbeki, but, inevitably, her resting place has not been left in peace. Saartjie is still an icon, only now she represents South Africa's brutal history.

Written with authority and economy, The Hottentot Venus is a significant and timely book, appearing as it does in the year we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Slave Trade. Never overdramatising the horrors she describes, never romanticising, sentimentalising or patronising her subject, Rachel Holmes has produced a laceratingly powerful story. Saartjie Baartman has found the perfect biographer.