With inscription: 'Tho' Venus of old / By Records were told / Excited the Praise of Mankind / Our Hottentot stil l / Let her die when she will / Will not leave her Equal Behind'. Part of the Michael Graham-Stewart slavery collection. This is a typical caricature of Saartjie or Sara Baartman (c.1789-1816), a Khosian tribeswoman from eastern South Africa, who came into domestic service there after the death of her father and, though willingly, was brought to Britain illegally by her employers in 1810 and exhibited as 'the Hottentot Venus'. The 'attraction' of this essentially salacious, exploitative spectacle was her large buttocks and genitalia - though she consistently refused to display the latter even through the body stocking in which she always danced and sang for her audience, or later to French scientists. The enlarged buttocks, for which the scientific term is 'steatopygia', is a normal evolutionary feature of certain Africans and other races, who in seasons of plenty thus store energy in the form of fat against leaner times. Abolitionists in London made legal attempts to 'liberate' Baartman from her masters, but these failed on the basis that she was not a slave, had come to England willingly and had no wish to return to South Africa. She was none the less trapped by the need to earn her living as a spectacle but was not happy, soon ill and overworked, and becoming an alcoholic from increased dependence on brandy. In September 1814 she was exhibited in Paris and when she died there in late 1815/early 1816 Georges Cuvier, the father of palaeontology, bought her corpse, made a cast of it and also preserved her skeleton in his 'Cabinet d'Anatomie Comparee' and her brain and genitals in bell jars in his private apartments. In his first year as President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela asked the French authorities for restitution of her remains, which were returned and buried near Port Elizabeth in an emotional national ceremony in 2002. Baartman's story is a sad but important paradigm of European racial attitudes of her time. The most modern (but also polemical) study of it is by Rachel Holmes, 'The Hottentot Venus: The life and death of Saartjie Baartman born 1789 - buried 2002' (Bloomsbury: London, 2007). Part of the Michael Graham-Stewart slavery collection.[PvdM 5/07]