The system of exploitation imposed in the Cape Colony (present-day South Africa) first by the Dutch West India Company (1652-1806, with a brief interregnum of British occupation between 1795 and 1803) and then by the British Crown (1806-1910) was based on a model of slavery and forced labor. Entire populations of native peoples and others imported from India, the East Indies and West Africa were subjugated from the beginning of the colony composing a slave society, as a structure in which there are enslaved and free people but above all as a society in which slavery is central to all economic, social and legal aspects. The British Empire banned the importation and trade of slaves in the Cape with the Slave Trade Act of 1807, although the practice continued until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which was completed with the total emancipation achieved the following year.

The Khoi people (derogatorily called “Hottentots” by the Dutch colonizers) had lived in the Cape area for at least a thousand years before April 6, 1652, the day of the arrival of the first expedition led by Jan van Riebeeck. Their displacement and the occupation of their land was the prerequisite for the establishment of the Colony. Almost immediately, this was followed by the imposition of a system of forced labor for these populations. Although an official decree of 1654 prohibited the enslavement of the original inhabitants of the Cape, violence, physical and psychological abuse, dependency and almost total absence of rights were the norm in the system of forced labor imposed on the Khoi.

Those coerced into this system were captured as children by groups of settlers, reduced to servitude, subjected to a pattern of debt and financial dependency, and permanently held on the land of their employers. Although the Khoi could not be legally bought and sold, they were legally bought and sold on a practical level, and were even subjected to worse living conditions than actual slaves. In the urban context of the Colony, the Khoi people occupied the bottom of the social ladder in demographic, social and economic terms, while in rural areas the punishments for disobedience or failure to perform tasks rivaled those received by people legally defined as slaves.

Although not legally codified in this way, in practice slaves in the Cape Colony were black-skinned and free persons were white-skinned. The former were not an autonomous class, but a legally defined subset of the city’s subordinate class, which also included the Khoi, freed blacks, and “prize blacks” (as slaves from other empires apprehended alongside their ships on the high seas were called).

Sarah Baartman was a Khoi woman born near the present-day village of Hankey in rural Cape Dutch Colony in the mid-1770s. Her first and last name account for her status as a domestic servant, which began as a child on Baartman’s Fonteyn farm. Around 1797 she was sold to merchant Pieter Cesars and relocated to Cape Town, where she performed domestic duties until Hendrik Cesars, the merchant’s brother, began to capitalize on Europeans’ curiosity about Khoi women’s bodies by exhibiting Baartman in exchange for money. Between 1808 and 1809 Alexander Dunlop, a British Crown physician then in control of the area, examined Baartman and discussed with Cesars the possibility of sending her to Britain to be exploited as a public spectacle. The three of them left on April 7, 1810 for London, where Baartman would be received as a “free black,” given the ban on slavery then in force in the British Isles.

In the five years she spent in Europe, Baartman was exhibited first by Dunlop and Cesars in Britain as the “Hottentot Venus” and then by a man named Henry Taylor in Paris, where she remained bound in confinement and died in degrading conditions in late 1815. At the height of both scientific speculation about ethnicities considered “primitive” and freak shows based on European curiosity about the bodies of “savages” from distant lands, her body continued to be investigated as a sexual curiosity after her death. George Couvier, then director of the Museum of National History, concluded in his study published in 1817 in the Histoire naturelle des mammiferes -a volume on mammal studies in which Baartman was the only human represented-that the “Hottentot” body was more closely related to that of the great apes than to the human species. Couvier also dissected her corpse, removed her skeleton, and placed her brain and genitalia in formalin for both study and display. The Musée de l’Homme in Paris displayed her remains intermittently until 1985.

Because of the atrocities suffered during her lifetime and post-mortem, which have made Sarah Baartman a symbol of the struggle against racism, colonialism and gender-based violence in South Africa and across the continent, her image as the “Hottentot Venus” also possesses an important legacy. The varied and enduring iconography of her body as the “Hottentot Venus” reproduced by European artists and scientists functioned for centuries as a visual and symbolic legacy that forms part, according to sociologist Patricia Hills Collins, of “subjugating images of black women” in which “the racist and sexist ideologies that permeate the social structure become hegemonic, considered natural, normal and inevitable. In this context, certain assumed qualities attributed to black women are used to justify oppression”.