Europe: “colonial” human remains cause scandal
Berlin, auditorium of the Charité hospital, September 30, 2011. A member of the Namibian delegation takes a picture of one of the 20 skulls returned by Germany.
© Reuters/Tobias Schwarz
Text by: Sabine Cessou Follow
7 mins
An extensive investigation by the
New York Times
evokes the 18,000 skulls and bones in the possession of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, while a Belgian auction house withdrew three African skulls from sale on November 30, after the publication of an article in
Paris-Match Belgium
.
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“
A museum in Paris holds 18,000 skulls.
He is reluctant to say to whom they belong
”.
It is under this title that an in-depth investigation by the New York Times
on the colonial collections of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris
was published on November 28 .
The article of the American daily denounces a French omerta on a quantity of skulls of Africans, Australians and American Indians who rest in the basement, place du Trocadéro.
He was greeted by a cathedral silence.
What Dorcy Rugamba, a Rwandan playwright living in Brussels, author of a play entitled "
The Supreme Remains
" presented in May in Dakar, explains by "
the persistence of a real taboo: the link between colonialism and Nazism, however highlighted by Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire, which undermines the French national novel
”.
Three skulls for sale in Brussels
Coincidence: on the very day of the publication of the
New York Times
investigation , the Drouot auction house, via the Vanderkindere auction house in Brussels, put three skulls, also colonial, on the market.
Michel Bouffioux, a
Paris-Match
Belgium journalist
who has been investigating
colonial-era human remains since 2018, published
an article
on November 29 that had an immediate impact.
The next day, the three heads offered at prices ranging from 750 to 1,000 euros were withdrawn.
As well as the description which presented them, in these terms: “
Lot of three human skulls: a cannibalistic Bangala skull with pointed incisors, a skull of the Arab chief Muine Mohara killed by Sergeant Cassart at Augoï on January 9, 1893 and decorated with a frontal jewel, a fragment of skull collected (…) in the province of Mongala by Doctor Louis Laurent on May 5, 1894. (…) Provenance: former collection of Doctor Louis Laurent in Namur.
Instead,
a word of apology
was published on the site of the auction house, which decided to buy back the skulls to return them to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - without specifying what would happen from "
Arab leader
.
A “legal” sale according to the auctioneer
Are these regrets sincere?
Faced with the Belgian collective Mémoire coloniale, which will file a complaint for “
concealment of corpses
”, the auctioneer of Vanderkindere, Serge Hutry, questioned by RFI, defends himself of his right.
“
In Belgium, there is no legislation
,” he says.
We are not wrong on this aspect.
We sell 7
500 batches per year for thirty years, and have never had this problem.
After a while, we could no longer sell ivory, and we remained within the legality.
My feeling is that for years skulls have been sold in Paris, London or Brussels in the form of vanities.
They're human skulls transformed with sparkles, and we didn't care more than that.
Here, the reaction of the DRC is legal, correct, that they manage with the Belgian ministry.
We will return these skulls
.”
Questioned by the
RTBF
, Yves-Bernard Debie, lawyer for the Chamber of Antiquaries, recalls that “
all European medieval art is made of relics, and it is not illegal.
However, the human remains must be part of cultural property, which is debatable here
”.
In the Belgian press, Michel Bouffioux is one of the few, if not the only one, to grasp the subject.
“
My first investigation in 2018 on the history of the Lusinga skull led me to take an interest in the collections of the Museum of Natural Sciences and the Free University of Brussels,
testifies the journalist.
It took a lot of banging on the nail for it to become a topic.
My articles were initially greeted with amazement and disbelief, because the idea of having this type of collection in oblivion is very disturbing.
Only scientists knew about them, and they only saw them as collector's items, keeping a distance, knowing that they were people killed in the circumstances of colonial hyper-violence.
My work has served to raise the question of ethics on the conservation of human remains in Belgium and their non-repatriation
”.
Bones and skulls in Belgium and the Netherlands
The outcry aroused by the Brussels sale seems to contradict on one point the
New York Times investigation,
which suggests that the situation is better elsewhere in Europe than in France.
In Belgium, at least 300 African heads are still in the hands of public and private institutions.
The skull of
King Lusinga
, beheaded by Belgian General Emile Storms in 1884 in the Belgian Congo, then brought back as a hunting trophy, still rests in rue Vautier, in the Museum of Natural Sciences.
A group of Congolese academics asks – in vain – for his return to offer him a funeral.
The
Human Remains Origins Multidisciplinary Evaluation
(HOME)
project
bringing together scientists from seven museums and universities, including the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, was launched at the end of 2019 with federal funding, to look into the question.
A report with recommendations is expected by mid-December.
For their part, the Netherlands certainly returned in 2009 the severed head and preserved in formaldehyde of a Ghanaian king, Badu Bonsu II, beheaded in 1838 by colonists.
A writer, Arthur Japin, had discovered the relic by chance in the anatomy collections of the Leiden medical school, and then alerted the Ghanaian embassy.
Other remains nonetheless remain on the soil of this former colonial power, including 40,000 bones brought from Indonesia at the end of the 19th century by the Dutch anatomist and doctor Eugène Dubois.
The
cranial cap of a Javanese
from the prehistoric era, witness to the "missing link" in the evolution from ape to man, is also becoming a subject of controversy.
It is presented as the highlight of the show at the Naturalis Museum in Leiden, in a room dedicated to Eugène Dubois.
However, Indonesia has been asking for its return since last July, along with the entire Eugène Dubois collection and seven other art and natural science collections.
The authorities in The Hague have not reacted for the moment.
A spokeswoman for the Naturalis museum has drawn the wrath of Jakarta, who accused her of "
misplaced superiority
" because she questioned Indonesia's conservation capacities.
Refunds in Great Britain and Germany
In Great Britain, an agreement was reached on November 3, after eight years of talks, between Zimbabwe and the Natural History Museum in London as well as the University of Cambridge.
The two institutions are ready to cooperate to return human remains, including three skulls, which Zimbabwe suspects belong to leaders of the first Chimurenga, an 1890s revolt against English settlers.
The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford began returning some of the 2,000 human remains it holds in 2017, including seven tattooed and mummified Maori heads returned to New Zealand.
The accounts are far from settled however, since the British Museum keeps 6,000 human remains from the vast British colonial empire, the Duckworth Laboratory has 18,000 and the Natural History Museum more than 25,000.
In Germany, breaches seem to have been opened more easily.
Twenty skulls were returned
to Namibia
in 2011, followed by other remains in 2018, taken from southern Africa by settlers after the Herero and Nama massacre.
Two peoples whose genocides Berlin recognized in 2004, and for whom apologies were made in 2021.
A thousand other skulls brought back from the former German colonies have been the subject of an international study since 2017 to determine their precise origin.
The Belgian daily
La Libre Belgique
explains that "
these human remains had been brought mainly from Rwanda, but also from Tanzania and Burundi, in the former German Empire (1871-1918), by the anthropologist Felix von Luschan for purposes ' of scientific studies'
.
The lines move, obviously, but not everywhere at the same speed.
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