SA is actively seeking the return of the human remains of its citizens in foreign countries, including those held by museums and universities, says sports, arts and culture minister Gayton McKenzie.
This aligns with the bid by several other African countries to secure the return of human remains and valuable cultural artefacts plundered during the period of colonisation.
The most famous repatriation back to SA was that of Saartjie Baartman — dubbed the “Hottentot Venus” — who was displayed in Europe. After she died in 1815, her body was dissected and put on display in a French museum.
After eight years of negotiations with the French authorities and a vote by the French Senate, Baartman’s remains were repatriated to SA in 2002 and buried in her native village of Hankey.
EFF MP Eugene Mthethwa posed several written parliamentary questions to McKenzie about the return of the remains of SA citizens.
In one of the questions, Mthethwa asked about the repatriation of the five skeletal remains of the so-called Port Alfred five that were stolen from the graves “for pseudoscientific race purposes around 1910, taken to the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, and then shipped out of the country under what was called a skull-for-a-skull exchange between the Albany Museum and Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC”.
Mthethwa also wanted to know whether McKenzie’s department had a list of all “unethically acquired skeletal remains of our ancestors” held by museums in Europe and North America.
McKenzie replied that the Albany Museum and the SA Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) had met the Smithsonian Institution to discuss the repatriation of the five human remains removed from Port Alfred and taken to the Smithsonian Institution.
“What is being referred to as a reverse-exchange will be managed in two phases. Phase one is the return of the human remains of the five persons whose remains were removed from Port Alfred, back to SA,” McKenzie said.
“In terms of phase two, which is the repatriation of the heads of the Peruvian individuals that were illegally donated to the Albany Museum from the Smithsonian Institution, a decision will need to be made whether the remains will be repatriated to Peru or become part of the larger South American collection that has been identified for repatriation by the Smithsonian Institution.”
McKenzie said his department and SAHRA’s repatriation and restitution office were compiling a list of unethically acquired human remains now in the care of museums and universities/medical schools in Europe and North America.
He said it had been established that the Australian Museum had four sets of partial skeletal remains; the Hunterian Museum at the Glasgow Museum, Scotland, had San humans in its collection; Harvard University in the US was known to have the human remains of Yanghis Stuurman; the Göttingen University, and Charite Berlin, a university hospital in Berlin, Germany, had ancestral mortal remains; and the Horniman Museum, London, UK had San human remains.
In December 2023 The Washington Post published an article about Stuurman, a 17-year-old South African brought by ship to the US in 1860 with four other young men billed in the press as “wild African savages”, who had “never before been brought into contact with civilisation”.
“For seven months, the young men were paraded on stages in Boston and New York, alternately applauded by audiences and ridiculed by showmen and reporters. At a time when racial science, premised on the belief that people of colour were inferior to white people, was a hot topic at many of the nation’s universities, the troupe’s performances drew large audiences eager to pay the 25c required to view the dark-skinned human specimens wearing porcupine quills,” the newspaper reported.
It added that Stuurman hanged himself and that his corpse was donated to a Harvard anatomy professor, who dissected his body and compared it to those of a gorilla, a chimpanzee and two Europeans. Multiple plaster casts were made of his head, one of which was displayed in a Harvard museum, and were still in Harvard’s collections. Stuurman’s remains were then transferred to the Boston Society of Natural History (BSNH), but somewhere along the way his brain was either lost or destroyed. “Today, neither Harvard nor the BSNH knows where the teenager’s skeleton is,” The Washington Post report said.
McKenzie gave the assurance to Mthethwa that the human remains of writer William Bloke Modisane would be repatriated from Germany and that the department and its entities had a database of all graves of South Africans who died on foreign soil during the anti-apartheid struggle.
McKenzie also revealed that his department had allocated R10m for the 2024/25 financial year for the repatriation, restitution and reburial of ancestral human remains now in museums and tertiary institutions in SA and abroad.
This included the remains of SA combatants buried outside SA. An amount of R10m had been allocated for 2025/26 for the Iziko Museums of SA, part of which would be for the restitution of illegally donated human remains now in its care.
The minister noted that the national policy on repatriation and restitution of human remains and heritage objects was endorsed by cabinet in March 2023.
A phased implementation plan followed a country-to-country approach, initially focusing on Sadc countries with a high concentration of graves, particularly Angola, Tanzania and Zambia. Among those successfully recovered from Zimbabwe were the remains of Basil February, killed in combat in August 1967, and writer Todd Matshikiza from Zambia.
SAHRA’s repatriation and restitution office and the National Prosecuting Authority’s missing persons task team were developing implementation plans to roll out the exhumation and repatriation of mortal remains.
“They are now devising a strategy of negotiating with countries with minimal numbers of graves, particularly in Europe, including Russia, the UK, the former Yugoslavia, France, Poland and Germany, for exhumations and repatriations, within the next five years,” the minister said.
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