by Barbara Chase-Riboud

Based on the true story of Sarah Baartman, a South African herdswoman exhibited as a "scientific curiosity" in the capitals of nineteenth-century Europe. Born in the colony of Good Hope, South Africa, in 1789, Sarah Baartman was taken to London at the age of twenty by an English surgeon, who promised her fame and fortune. Dubbed the "Hottentot Venus," she was paraded naked in Piccadilly in a freak-show exhibition and subjected to the unabashed stares and crude comments of the British public, which resulted in a sensational trial for her custody by British abolitionists.