# Sarah Baartman: The Enlightenment’s Museum Kept Her Body for 187 Years

Sarah Baartman, a Khoekhoe woman born around 1789 near the Gamtoos River in what is now the Eastern Cape, was exhibited in London and Paris from 1810 until her death in December 1815, put on stage for paying crowds to examine her body. She was twenty-six. What happened after her death is the less-told half of her story, and it took place not at a fairground but inside one of Europe’s leading scientific institutions.

The dissection

Within days of her death, Georges Cuvier, the era’s foremost comparative anatomist and a professor at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, obtained her body. He made a full plaster cast of it, dissected her, removed her brain and genitals, preserved them in jars, and mounted her skeleton. His published account, appearing in the Muséum’s own Mémoires in 1817, framed her physical features, above all her genitalia, as evidence for a racial hierarchy that placed her nearer to apes than to Europeans. This was not fringe pseudoscience conducted in secret. Cuvier was the establishment; the Muséum was the establishment; the paper appeared in the establishment’s own journal.

What stayed on display, and for how long

Her skeleton, her preserved brain and genitals, and the plaster cast went on public exhibition, first at the Muséum, later at the Musée de l’Homme when that institution opened in 1937. They remained there, viewable by any visitor, for close to a century and a half. Accounts differ slightly on the exact sequence: most sources agree the skeleton, brain and genitals were removed from public view and placed in storage in 1974, while the plaster cast continued to be shown for a further two years, into 1976. One reviewer who saw the exhibit as a visitor in the early 1970s recalled it was positioned as the very first thing encountered in the museum’s foyer, her plaster cast and skeleton in glass cases before a window framing the Eiffel Tower, an arrangement that placed her, quite literally, as the starting point of a visual narrative of human progress toward European civilisation.

Removal from public display in 1974 did not mean return. The remains stayed in the museum’s storage, the property of a French state institution, for a further twenty-eight years.

The gap between rediscovery and return

The case was not forgotten during those decades, and it was not obscure. Sporadic calls for repatriation date back to the 1940s. In 1978 the South African poet Diana Ferrus, herself of Khoisan descent, wrote „I’ve come to take you home,“ a poem that circulated and became central to the later campaign. In 1981 and 1982 the American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould gave the case international scholarly visibility, first in an essay in Natural History magazine, later folded into his books, using Baartman’s treatment as a case study in the racial science he was working to dismantle. The story appeared again in his widely read The Mismeasure of Man. None of this was hidden knowledge confined to French archives. By the early 1980s the case was documented, named, and circulating in English-language scholarship read well beyond France.

Formal diplomatic movement began only after 1994, when Nelson Mandela’s newly elected government requested the remains‘ return. Even then, French officials indicated a change in the law would be required before a national museum collection could be broken up, since Baartman’s remains were classified as part of the national scientific patrimony. It took a French senator, Nicolas About, introducing a specific bill, and the French Senate and National Assembly passing it, before the law authorising her return was adopted on 6 March 2002. Her remains were flown to South Africa in May 2002 and buried, in a Khoisan ceremony, on 9 August 2002, on Vergaderingskop hill above the town of Hankey, close to where she may have been born.

From Gould’s essay putting the case in front of an English-reading public to the actual return: twenty years. From the first sporadic calls for repatriation in the 1940s: over half a century. From her death: 187 years.

What doesn’t add up

**A national scientific institution held a named individual’s remains as legal property for 187 years, and it took an act of parliament, not a museum decision, to end that.** The Muséum and its successor institution knew exactly whose remains these were throughout; unlike countless anonymised human remains in comparable collections, Baartman was never anonymous, Cuvier had published her name and story himself in 1817. The obstacle to return was not identification. French officials stated plainly that existing law classified the remains as part of the national collection, meaning a museum curator or director had no legal authority to simply hand them back, however clear the ethical case; only a specific act of the legislature could do it, and getting that act took eight years from Mandela’s formal request. What would close this gap for future cases: France’s own 2023 law on human remains restitution, passed in the wake of the Baartman precedent, is meant to create a general legal pathway rather than requiring a bespoke bill each time; whether it functions faster than the Baartman case did is still being tested.

**The scientific justification for keeping the remains on display had visibly expired decades before they were removed, and removal was still not repatriation.** By the account of the 1970s museum visitor cited above, the display’s own arrangement, primitive African womanhood in the foreground, the Eiffel Tower’s modern skyline in the background, was already read by at least some observers as ideological staging rather than science, well before 1974. Taking the remains off public view in 1974 acknowledged this much. It did not acknowledge that the remains belonged, legally or morally, anywhere other than a French museum storeroom, where they then sat, unreturned, for another twenty-eight years. What would explain the specific twenty-eight-year gap between removal from display and legal return: a fuller account, from the museum’s own administrative records, of what if anything was done with the remains between 1976 and Mandela’s 1994 request, a period this research could not document in detail.

What stays open

Whether France’s newer general restitution law will move faster for the next comparably documented case, or whether each claim will again require its own dedicated act of parliament, is not yet settled by a second test case. What is settled is that the obstacle in Baartman’s case was never a lack of knowledge, about who she was, what had been done to her body, or where she was from. The knowledge was published, by her own dissector, in 1817.

KardiKassin

Writes about Africa’s history and how it gets told, sourced and checked at every step.

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Sources

• Centre du droit de l’art, University of Geneva (ArThemis case database): Sarah Baartman, France and South Africa. https://plone.unige.ch/art-adr/cases-affaires/sarah-baartman-2013-france-and-south-africa
• Gould, Stephen Jay: The Hottentot Venus. Natural History 91 (10), 1982, pp. 20 to 27; reprinted in The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985
• French Senate and National Assembly, Ordinary Session 2001 to 2002: legislative record on the bill of Senator Nicolas About authorising the restitution of the remains of Saartjie Baartman to South Africa, adopted 6 March 2002. http://www.senat.fr/rap/l01-177/l01-1771.pdf