Saartjie Baartman was a Khoisan slave who at the age of 20 was taken from Cape Town to London and Paris, to be displayed naked in streets and at circuses!
George Cuvier, a distinguished Social Anthropologists, believed she was the missing link!
Sara Baartman died in Paris in 1816. Cuvier made a plaster cast of her body, dissected it and conserved the skeleton and organs in bottles of formaldehyde at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.
Her remains were displayed there until 1976!
In 1994, President Nelson Mandela formally requested that France return the remains; they were repatriated in 2002 and buried at her birthplace in the Gamtoos Valley (Eastern Cape, S. Africa).
