PARIS: 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.

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 specialized 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, the latter in a bottle of formaldehyde.

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 that Saartjie’s remains be 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, which include her skeleton, will be handed over to the two South African representatives by French Minister of Research Roger-Gerard Schwartzenberg and the man who was the last museum director to have her as a celebrated lodger, Bernard Chevassus-au-Louis, president of the Museum national d’histoire naturelle, where Saartjie, renamed the Venus Hottentot, spent the past 187 years of her life.

Says Jeremy Nathan, a South African filmmaker who is turning her life into a feature film, “Saartjie Baartman was a victim of colonialism and racism 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 posterior end.”