Baartman and the Private (forthcoming in Natasha Gordon‐Chipembere, Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, Palgrave, July 2011) By Gabeba Baderoon How can we look at a figure who has been looked at too much? The burial of Sara Baartman’s remains on 9 August 2002 in Hankey in the Eastern Cape, near where she was born, was a signal event in South African and world history. The story of Baartman’s life has often been recounted, yet below I consider a little‐discussed aspect of the negotiations over the return of her remains from France and propose a theory of the private based on an analysis of Baartman’s life and her contemporary meanings. For over a century after her death, Baartman was simultaneously an excessively visible and nearly‐forgotten historical figure, visible because for most of that time her remains were on public display and little‐known because she had slipped from public view. As the essays in this collection show, Baartman was taken from South Africa to Europe in 1810 and exhibited publicly in London and Paris as the “Hottentot Venus” in shows that drew large audiences and even wider notoriety. Between 1810 and 1815, Baartman’s public visibility was heightened by the circulation in London and Paris of popular caricatures, paintings and songs that focused compulsively on her body. After her death in Paris in 1815, Baartman’s body was dissected by the renowned scientists Henri de Blainville and Georges Cuvier and a plaster cast was made of her body. Their reports became the basis of a now‐discredited science of race that placed European men at its apex and Black women at its nadir and asserted the racial inferiority and sexual deviancy of Black people. Baartman’s skeleton, brain and genitals were subsequently exhibited in the Musee de’ L Homme in Paris, and it was only in 1974, 159 years after her death, that these were removed from public view.