Pretoria | Tuesday
BEFORE Saartje, the Khoi woman exploited as the ”Hottentot Venus”, returns to her land of birth on Friday, her compatriots might want to learn how to spell her name correctly.
Her birth certificate states her name as Sarah Bartmann, according to Professor Jatti Bredenkamp of the University of the Western Cape’s Institute for Historical Research.
As for the diminutive form of Saartje, he says that at the time when she lived, the Dutch spelling was still in use. Therefore the name would end only with a -tje, and not -tjie, as is the practice in Afrikaans.
A representative for the National Cultural History Museum in Cape Town agreed with the use of Saartje, rather than Saartjie.
Bredenkamp is part of a delegation led by Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Bridgitte Mabandla to France on Monday to receive Bartmann’s remains from the French government.
Born at the Cape in 1789, Bartmann was taken to Europe in 1810 and exhibited as an ethnological and sexual curiosity. After her death at the age of 25, Napoleon Bonaparte’s surgeon made a plaster cast of her corpse, which he dissected. Certain body parts, including the brain and genitalia, were preserved in bottles and displayed at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris until 1974.
Mabandla earlier said the remains would be stored at a military mortuary in Cape Town for at least three or four months while a consultative forum decided on how best to inter Bartmann with the appropriate dignity. – Sapa