African woman going home after 200 years

An awful chapter in the history of colonialism came to a dignified end yesterday when the remains of an African woman who had been taken to Europe and exhibited as a circus freak was finally handed back to South African officials at a ceremony in Paris.

To the beat of marimbas and the melody of gospel songs, the skeleton and bottled organs of Saartjie Baartman were returned in a white wooden box draped in an African cloth.

On Thursday Baartman's remains will be flown back to South Africa almost 200 years after she was taken in 1810 by a British ship's doctor, William Dunlop, who hoped to make money by exhibiting her as a freak.

She became known as the "Hottentot Venus", a crude reference to her roots and her large buttocks and sexual organs, and appeared in freak shows in London, Paris and Ireland. In London, the act consisted of her emerging from a cage like a wild animal. In Paris she was sold to an animal trainer and paraded at high society balls.

She fell into alcoholism and prostitution and is thought to have died in poverty in 1815.

Baartman's humiliation continued after her death, when she was dissected by a surgeon, who conserved her brain and genitalia in bottles of formaldehyde.

The painted plaster cast of Baartman's body was displayed in Paris' main ethnographic museum, Musée de l'Homme, until the mid 1970s.

Two decades later the French president, François Mitterrand, made a personal promise to Nelson Mandela to return her remains. But it was only this year that the French parliament overcame objections about the precedent it would set for countries seeking the return of artefacts, by voting to return Baartman's remains as a "duty of memory".

Thuthukile Skweyiya, South Africa's ambassador to France, said that in her native country Baartman had become "the symbol of a nation's need to confront and acknowledge its past, and of a nation's overwhelming desire to restore and reaffirm dignity and honour to all its people".

Baartman's remains will be stored in a military hangar before a funeral in August or September.

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