Sarah Bartmann was an enslaved Khoi woman, transported to Europe by a Dutchman, Hendrik Cezar, and displayed, to great controversy, in Picadilly Circus in London and later in Paris. The simplicity of the above sentence belies the convoluted manner in which she was exhibited, became known pejoratively as ‘the Hottentot Venus’, died under mysterious circumstances – owned, at that stage, by an animal trainer – and had volumes of scientific and anthropological works written ‘about her’. It leaves out the fact that Cezar was forced to sell her to an unnamed ‘Englishman’ because, as the former would write in the Morning Chronicle of 23 October 1810, the controversy in England over Bartmann as slave, and the subsequent decision by The African Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa to sue Cezar on behalf of Bartmann, made it untenable for him to keep her in his ownership (Y. Abrahams 2000; Magubane 2001; Walvin 1982). The deceptive straightforwardness of the outline above also occludes the fact that George Cuvier, fêted anatomist and one of the pre-eminent European scientists of all time, had her genitalia and brain pickled in formaldehyde and kept at a museum in Paris. It speaks nothing of the self-satisfaction which saw him write, ‘I had the honour of presenting to the Academy, the genitals of this woman, prepared in such a way, that leaves no doubt on the nature of her “apron”’ (Cuvier 1817: 266).