Stranger than Fiction

The book I read for the 2021 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE in the category Celebrity is The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Sarah Baartman , by Rachel Holmes, 2007. I had heard about this woman many years ago, and her story fascinated me because of how degrading it seemed. She was one of the most famous women in England in the early 19 th century mainly because of her large buttocks and the perceived size of her vulva. Saartjie Baartman (or Sarah in English) was born in 1789 in the region of the Gamtoos River Valley in the Cape Colony of South Africa, a member of the Khoisan people, known in English of the time as Hottentots. She became a servant/slave to a man who eventually smuggled her to England and functioned as her “manager.” England at this time was becoming ever more interested in the exotic animals and people of Africa and Asia that they heard about through the travels of the explorers and anthropologists of the era. Baartman was put on display as an ‘exotic’ curios...