PARIS, April 27: When she arrived in Paris in 1814, Saartjie Baartman, was a minute South African woman of 24 who had been turned by her British captors into a freak show exhibit that attracted thousands to Bartholomew Fair at London’s Piccadilly Circus.

Later known by the title, Venus Hottentot, Saartjie had been taken to the UK in 1810, at the age of 20, and after having been exhibited as a freak in London, was brought over by her promoters to Paris in 1814 where she was handed over to a showman who specialised in wild animals. It was in the French capital that Saartjie died poor and alone in 1815 after having been obliged to seek her living as a prostitute.

Having been observed by three celebrated French naturalists of the day, Geoffrey St Hillaire, Henri de Blainville, and Georges Cuvier, the founder of comparative anatomy, a plaster cast was made of her body, while her skeleton was preserved separately.

She was immediately put on public display at the Museum national d’histoire naturelle. where she became, in death, just as much an attraction as she had been in life, and was retired from public view only in 1976, at which time she was moved to a storage room in the museum.

It is from that very same storage room on Monday (April 29) that Saartjie’s remains were removed and handed over to Brigitte Mabandla, the South African vice minister of culture, as well as to Thuthukile Edy Skweyiya, South Africa’s ambassador to France, who will then arrange for their return to South Africa where they are to be buried with full national honours.

The remains will be handed over to the two South African representatives by a French minister and the man who was the last museum director to have her as a celebrated lodger, Bernard Chevassus-au-Louis, president of the Museum.

“This restitution,” says a French foreign ministry spokesman, “signals France’s willingness to render to Saartjie Baartman her dignity and arrange for her remains to rest in peace in South Africa.”

Says Jeremy Nathan, a South African filmmaker who is turning her life into a feature film, “Saartjie Baartman was a victim of colonialism, racism and sexism of her day. She was exhibited before the aristocrats, sages and painters in private showings, because, in large part, of the ‘unusual appearance’ of her buttocks.”

Nathan notes that her appearance even inspired the creation of a French comic opera Le Venus Hottentot, a drama which today serves as an interesting demonstration of the sexual and racial prejudices that Europe had in the 19th century and which, some would say, it still has today.

Says Deputy About, “I ask who in the end is more of a monster - Saartjie Baartman herself, or all those people in the United Kingdom and France who transformed her into a freak, later an alcoholic and a prostitute, indeed those otherwise celebrated scientists who took her decrepit body at her death and turned her into a near-permanent freakshow located in one of France’s most prominent museums, and this for the next 161 years?”