President Thabo Mbeki slammed 19th century Europeans as "barbarians" on Friday at the long-delayed funeral of Sarah Baartman, who was paraded naked as a sexual freak in Britain and France in the 1800s.
"Sarah Baartman should never have been stripped of her native Khoisan and African identity and paraded in Europe as a savage monstrosity", Mbeki told about 7 000 mourners at a school in the remote Gamtoos valley in the Eastern Cape.
"It was not the lonely African woman in Europe, alienated from her identity and her motherland, who was the barbarian, but those who treated her with barbaric brutality", Mbeki said.
He added that by the time Baartman died, as a consumptive prostitute in France in 1816, she had "been enlightened about the ways and barbarism" of Europeans.
She was born in the valley on August 9, 1789 - exactly 213 years ago - but had been living in Cape Town in 1810 when a British ship's doctor offered to take her to London, promising that she could earn a fortune by allowing foreigners to look at her body.
In Britain, she was paraded as a savage around circus sideshows, museums, bars and universities. There, she was forced to show off her protruding posterior, an anatomical feature of her native Khoisan people (formerly called the Hottentots), and her outsized genitalia.
Her notoriety made Baartman the source of grotesque stereotypes about race and African sexuality, many of which were perpetuated by the leading European scientific minds of the day.
Mbeki quoted Baron Georges Couvier, a French scientist who dissected Baartman's body after her death, as saying: "Her moves had something that reminded one of the monkey and her external genitalia recalled those of the orang-utang".
Baartman's remains - her skeleton and bottles containing her brain and genitialia in preserving fluid - were on display in the Museum of Mankind in Paris until 1974.
They were flown back to South Africa in March 2002 after seven years of negotiations with the French government.
"On behalf of the government, the parliament and the people of South Africa, I am privileged to convey our heartfelt and profound thanks to the government, the parliament and the people of France for agreeing to return our Sarah to us and for living up to the noble objectives of the French revolution of liberty, equality and fraternity," Mbeki said.
"The changing times tell us that she did not suffer and die in vain. Our presence at her gravesite demands that we act to ensure that what happened should never be repeated", Mbeki said.
The ceremony started with the burning of "boegoe", a traditional herb of the Khoisan, the original inhabitants of the southern tip of Africa, to purify her spirit.
"We are burning this traditional herb as part of our culture. We have to unite with the earth and the spirits of Sarah Baartman," said Piet Booysen, a Khoisan traditional leader.
Her remains were due to be buried on a thorny hill overlooking the small town of Hankey.
A monument will also be erected in her honour in Cape Town. - Sapa-AFP