Barbara Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus

For this book report, I choose the book written by Barbara Chase-Riboud called Hottentot Venus. This book is about a real female from the KhoeKhoe nation and her tragic life. This Young Khoisan, Ssehura, is an orphan in South Africa around the 1700s. After becoming a slave by a Dutch Afrikaner, her name changed to Saartjie (means Little Sarah in Dutch.) As the story goes on, it explains more of Saartjie’s culture, which includes the grooming to be more desirable for marriage. In Khoisan’s culture, female massage their buttocks with special ointment so they will swell, and their genitalia are also stretched. Because of this, Saartjie becomes a physical curiosity and sexual fetish to her white master. Later on, the white master is persuaded by an Englishman to send her to London to become a sideshow sensation. There, along with other “things-that-never-should-never-have-been-born,” she becomes known as “Hottentot Venus.” The story moved on until the end where Saartjie speaks as a dissected corpse stripped of her womanhood by scientists determined to confirm her as the missing link in the Great Chain of Being.

The book is opened with a Heroine’s Note to tell us more about how the name Hottentot comes to be. It is around 1619, where the Portuguese discovers the KhoeKhoe nation in the Eastern Coast of South Africa. The Portuguese then are followed by the Dutch who named the Khoisan, Hottentot, which means “stutterer” in Dutch because of

the way the Khoisan’s language sounds. Dutch are the ones who introduced the clan to private properties, land theft, and fences. The English succeeds the Dutch, and they organized the Khoisan into categories of Hottentots, Negroes, and Bushmen, while claming themselves and others like them white.

On January 1816, the story is opened on the day of Saartjie’s Birthday which also falls on the day of New Year. Since it is a holiday, the circus in Paris or what Saartjie calls “the freak show” close. In this chapter we learn that Saartjie has serious illness, where she can be burning with fever and her chest would be in pain while she is coughing out blood. She has never heard of this kind of sickness in her clan and only until her white servant, Alice Unicorn, tells her about it that she finally understands. Saartjie then move on to describing the freak show and how she has to stay in an eight-by-twelve-foot bamboo cage, almost naked in the cold, surrounded by white faces showing all looks of pity, horror, and terror.