By Jeanne van der Merwe
Until Friday, the chief significance of the small Eastern Cape town of Hankey was its status as the administrative centre of the Gamtoos Valley.
But on Friday morning the eyes of the nation were on a small hill on the outskirts of the town as one of the valley's most famous children was to be laid to rest by President Thabo Mbeki and other dignitaries.
On Friday, municipal staff in Hankey were still putting the finishing touches to the 3m-deep concrete brick grave on top of Vergaderingskop, which will become the final resting place of Sarah Baartman.
They were levelling the reddish-brown soil where her remains will lie after a journey of almost two centuries.
Sarah's grave is a few hundred metres outside town and will look out over wide green farmlands and the rolling hillsides of the Gamtoos Valley.
She will also have towering television and cellphone masts as neighbours.
Hankey, a town of about 20 000 people, is 45km north of Jeffrey's Bay. The town's population is expected to grow by a few thousand as officials from the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, members of the Eastern Cape provincial government and representatives of the Khoi-San arrive at the town for Baartman's burial.
Professor Jatti Bredenkamp, director of the University of the Western Cape's Institute for Historical Research and patron of the National Khoisan Consultative Conference, said the choice of Hankey as Baartman's burial site was based on sound historical research.
"We know from records in the British Museum in London that she originally came from the banks of the Gamtoos River. So the choice was between the place from where she was lured into exile, Cape Town, or her birthplace.
"We don't know exactly where she was born, but the London Missionary Society had a Khoi missionary station in Hankey, so symbolically that would be the closest we could come to her birthplace."
The past seven years of Baartman's life, and the fate of her remains after her untimely death in 1817, have come to be regarded as a shameful symbol of colonial Europe's disregard for the indigenous people of the countries they colonised.
Born in the late 1700s, she moved to Cape Town during her late teens to work as a servant in the home of farmer Peter Cezar, whose brother Hendrik and friend Alexander Dunlop persuaded her to go to Europe with them in 1810.
They told her she could become rich by displaying her peculiar build to Europeans. Once in London, she became a money-spinner for Cezar as he displayed her across Europe as a freak of nature.
In 1814, scientist Ettiene Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire requested that Baartman be taken to France as a medical and scientific research object.
Then, in 1815, she died, but the humiliation continued. Her body was cast in wax at the Musee de l'Homme, then dissected.
Scientist Georges Cuvier removed her genitals and brain, preserving them in glass jars. Her reassembled skeleton was put on display in various venues around Europe until 1974, when it was placed in a storeroom of the Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle in France.
Bartmann's bones were brought back to Cape Town in May, and after an enrobement ceremony last Sunday they arrived at Port Elizabeth airport on Thursday.
The deputy minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Brigitte Mabandla, and other representatives of the group responsible for bringing Baartman back to South Africa, received her remains there, then they were taken to Hankey.
And while radio talk shows on Friday were debating whether all the fuss over Baartman's burial ceremony was valid or merely a continuation of the indignity and exploitation she had to go through in her life, in Hankey there was either approval or indifference.
One municipal worker readying her grave on top of Vergaderingskop wasn't quite sure what the ceremony was about, even though he was of Khoi descent.
Most of the people who spoke to the Cape Argus in the town centre said they had not been told too much about the nature and reason for the ceremony, but they were happy that Sarah's bones had finally been brought back to the region of her birth.
During today's ceremony, she was due to be interred before stones were placed on her grave, Khoi-style, by Mbeki, Ben Ngubane, the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, and other dignitaries.
Cecil le Fleur, director of the National Khoisan Consultative Conference, said the burial ceremony, enrobement and burning of "Khoi-goed" - a mixture of herbs - and the packing of stones on the grave was a typical mode of burial in the 19th century.
He said Khoi-San groupings still preferred to call Baartman "Saartjie" as a term of endearment, but that her burial "was too significant an event to be diminished by such petty arguments".