The women were exhibited for their steatopygic body type uncommon in Western Europe that was perceived as a curiosity at that time, and became subject of scientific interest as well as of erotic projection. Although it is still unclear how much she was a willing participant, the Sarah Baartman story is often portrayed as the epitome of racist colonial exploitation , and of the commodification and dehumanization of black people.
Baartman was born to a [Xhosa and Khoekhoe] family in the vicinity of the Camdeboo Dutch Cape Colony ; a British colony by the time she was an adult. Her birth name is unknown, [ 4 ] but is thought by some to have been Ssehura , [ 1 ] supposedly the closest to her given name. Saartjie is the diminutive form of Sarah; in Cape Dutch the use of the diminutive form commonly indicated familiarity, endearment or contempt.
Her surname has also been spelt Bartman and Bartmann. Baartman spent her childhood and teenage years on Dutch European farms. She went through puberty rites, and kept a small tortoise shell necklace, most likely her mother's, until her death in France.
In the s, a free black a designation for people of enslaved descent trader named Peter Cesars also recorded as Caesar [ 6 ] met her and encouraged her to move to Cape Town.
She lived in Cape Town for at least two years working in households as a washerwoman and a nursemaid, first for Peter Cesars, then in the house of a Dutch man in Cape Town. She finally moved to be a wet-nurse in the household of Peter Cesars' brother, Hendrik Cesars, outside Cape Town in present day Woodstock.
