'Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus' by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully

So was this an unusual opportunity for a slave to escape drudgery and profit financially or a degradation and victimization?

Possibly both.

Humiliating as the process seems to us, it tapped into a sentimental cult of the so-called noble savage popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Condescending as such a notion now seems, it was in its time thought to be a broad-minded, humanistic way of thinking, a salutary reminder of how political correctness changes over time.

The name "Hottentot Venus" is problematic today -- the name Hottentot derives from the Dutch/Afrikaans word for "stuttering," a derogatory reference to the clicks characteristic of the tribe's spoken language -- but lingers in the name Hottentot Fig for the succulent known more commonly as ice plant, seen throughout Southern California.

Genetic traits

And as for "Venus," there was also an unmistakable prurience involved in showing Baartman off to European audiences. She exhibited the common genetic traits of the Khoikhoi: a marked steatopygia and also the condition known as sinus pudoris. This latter, sometimes called the apron, involved a natural elongation of the labia, which female family members often stretched to accentuate -- a process now regarded as a type of genital mutilation.

Baartman never allowed this feature of hers to be shown to audiences while she was alive, giving credence to her active participation in the exhibition process. But after her death from pneumonia or possibly from smallpox in Paris in 1815, a grotesque autopsy shone a spotlight on this, amounting to a posthumous violation even more unsavory than anything visited upon poor Sara in her short life.

It is not surprising that this victim should have cried out for some measure of redress in the 21st century. The post-apartheid government of South Africa brought her body back from its French burial place in 2002 to be buried in her native soil with all the trappings of a state funeral, duly televised, a symbol of global as well as national victimization.

Baartman's story has been the subject of works by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and biologist Stephen Jay Gould as well as by poets as diverse as Edith Sitwell and Elizabeth Alexander, recently famous for her poem at President Obama's inauguration but whose first published book hearkened back to Sara.

No one, however, has succeeded as well as Crais and Scully in illuminating not only her important role as icon and symbol but, so important, the human being behind them.

Because of their diligent research and their deep understanding of the era in which she lived -- along with their sensitivity to our own time and concerns -- they have truly given us the "living breathing person" that was "Sara Baartman, the human being who was ultimately destroyed by an illusion."