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Sat 04 Apr 2007Poked, prodded and put on display for prurient eyesBiography:On August 9th 2002, a few thousand people gathered on a hilltop in South Africa to listen to their president, Thabo Mbeki, pay homage to an extraordinary woman who had died 187 years previously and whose bones were only then being buried.The woman was Saartjie Baartman, who belonged to the Khoisan people of the Eastern Cape. Born in 1789, she was taken from her ancestral home and put to work as a maid cum wet nurse in Cape Town. Looking back on her short life, this was probably the best part of it.