Beyoncé Sets Her Sights on Playing Saartjie Baartman in Movie
The singer Beyoncé wants to make a movie playing Saartjie Baartman, the Khoi woman who was sent to Europe in the 19th century and spent the rest of her short life as an oddity gawked at by Europeans, according to news reports. The Grammy winner who has acted in movies like “Dreamgirls” has apparently requested countless books on […]
The singer Beyoncé wants to make a movie playing Saartjie Baartman, the Khoi woman who was sent to Europe in the 19th century and spent the rest of her short life as an oddity gawked at by Europeans, according to news reports.
The Grammy winner who has acted in movies like “Dreamgirls” has apparently requested countless books on Baartman’s life to ensure she does her story justice. Baartman, who was nicknamed Hottentot Venus and displayed in freak shows, died in 1815 when she was still in her twenties.
Baartman was born in about 1789 in the Eastern Cape, to a clan that was part of the Khoikhoi. According to South African History Online, her large buttocks and unusual colouring made her the object of fascination for colonial Europeans.
In London she was displayed in a building in Piccadilly, where people paid to see her half-naked body displayed in a cage. In 1814, she was sold to a man who took her to France and was exhibited in a cage alongside a baby rhino.
Her body was returned to South Africa in 2002 and buried in Hankey in the Eastern Cape.
Beyoncé has apparently pulled together a team to write a script of Baartman’s life and put a movie together, reports said.