IN most African cultures and customs, the spirit of a dead person does not rest until the person is properly laid to rest among his or her own kinsmen.
Failure to do so, it is believed, the deceased’s spirit will be restless and roaming the wilderness.
However, many Africans, especially those who resisted colonial rule, are still to be united (in spirit) with their own kith and kin.
For example, the Germans took the skulls of some Nama and Herero people of Namibia (who resisted German rule) to some German laboratories to dissect and study their brains in order to justify their white superiority over black people.
Their heads were decapitated and taken to German laboratories where “scientists tried to prove the ‘racial superiority’ of white Europeans over black Africans by analysing the facial features of the heads, according to Thomas Schnalke, head of Berlin Medical Historical Museum,” (Belfast Telegraph).
Most people who resisted German occupation were starved to death in concentration camps, between 1904 and 1915.
But in October 2011, the Germans were forced by the Namibians to return 20 skulls belonging to some Nama and Herero people that they had killed.
The Germans are thought to have killed about 60 000 Hereros and an unknown number of Nama people between 1904 and 1915.
“About 80 000 Hereros lived in Namibia when the uprising began, but only 15 000 were left after the slaughter.
“Many of the Nama people also died.” (Voice of America October 2011).
The Germans, especially under the Nazis, carried many human experiments to advance their racial ideology of the superiority of the Arian race.
The Africans were viewed as an inferior race; a view still held today by many white people.
In June this year, an American white supremacist, Dylann Roof, killed nine African-American people in a church congregation.
He shared the same racial ideology perpetuated by the German Nazis and furthered by the apartheid South African Boers and some racist Rhodesians.
And the taking away of the skulls of 20 Namibians to Germany was not an isolated case meant to humiliate Africans.
In the early 1900, a Scottish doctor, Alexander Dunlop took a Khoisan woman now famously known as Saartjieor Sarah Baartman, from her native South Africa to Britain where she was exhibited in a zoo for her protruding buttocks and extended labia minora.
Because of her distinctive feminine features, she was viewed as abnormal, a ‘wild or savage female’, again, demeaning black people because she looked different from Caucasian women.
She was later sold to France where she was also put on display much to the amusement of European men and women.
Sarah died in France in 1915 and denying her respect, her body was dissected, brains put on display in a French museum until 1974.
To justify the ideology of racial superiority over black people, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, described her remains as evidence that she had ape-like traits; stating that her “small ears were similar to those of an orangutan and also compared her vivacity, when alive, to the quickness of a monkey.”
Her remains were later repatriated to South Africa (after President Nelson Mandela’s request) in 2002 where she was later given a decent burial, 200 years after her death.
So the return of the 20 skulls of Nama people to Namibia, was not the first and last that African people who had been denied dignity in death, would be repatriated back to Africa to get decent burial.
During the early years of colonisation, Europeans also looted many African artefacts, most which are still on display in European museums.
For example, the Sainsbury African Galleries in the British Museum in London, has a permanent display of African artefacts some looted and brought to the UK as war booty.
According to historians Schildkroutand Keim (1998) “art of the Benin Kingdom came to public and scholarly attention in the West in 1897 when members of a British Punitive Expedition brought out thousands of objects as war booty.”
On August 3 2008, The Independent (UK) published an article: ‘Kenya tells museums: give our history back’ in which the Kenyans were said to be demanding “the return of more than 2 000 historical artefacts currently on display in the British Museum, claiming they were taken during the country’s colonial period. Skulls, spears and fossils are among the items that it wants back.”
Europe is not the only continent displaying many artefacts belonging to Africa that were looted during early years of colonisation.
America too, has a collection of African artefacts.
“Apart from those at the British Museum, they are tracking down thousands of other items held by US museums and in private collections around the world. “As many as 10 000 could be earmarked for repatriation, according to Kenyan museum officials,” (The Independent August 3 2008).
There are lots of colonial injustices that still need to be rectified; the return of looted stuff to Africa is one of them. And then we have the hysterical cries from the West over the killing of Cecil the lion when they are refusing with the decapitated skulls of our heroes in their museums! In America, they have begun fund-raising campaigns to pay the legal fees for white police officers who kill blacks!