THERE was global outcry when Cecil the lion was recently killed as a hunting trophy in Zimbabwe, yet to this day, Britain and Europe continue to parade in their museums African human remains as ‘war trophies’.
To the international community, the killing of Cecil outside Hwange National Park was barbaric and calls for justice continue to ring loud.
Filled with fury they ‘castigate’ animal trophies yet they (the British) take pride in displaying African human trophies in their museums.
Such is the extent of their deep rooted hypocrisy and racism, to think blacks are worse than animals.
A team of local experts from Zimbabwe will soon visit London to engage the British authorities on the repatriation of skulls of heroes and heroines of the First Chimurenga that are still displayed in the Natural History Museum of London as symbols of colonial conquest.
Just recently, the British Government acknowledged holding the remains of the heroes and heroines of First Chimurenga.
The British Museum has around 20 000 items in its human remains section mainly taken from Africa as ‘war trophies’ after massacres and suppression of indigenous populations.
Several skulls at the London Museum have been positively identified as having originated from Zimbabwe.
The human remains include skulls of Chief Mashayamombe Chinengundu of Mhondoro, Chief Makoni Chingaira of Rusape, Chief Kadungure Mapondera and Mutekedza Chiwashira, Mashonganyika among others.
The remains are also believed to include those of Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi who were hanged by British invading forces at the height of the country’s first war of resistance against white settlers in the 1890s.
These exhibitions of our heroes and heroines tell the tragic story of how locals were dispossessed of their land to make way for white settlement.
They are evidence of how chiefs and their people were killed trying to protect their land from the colonisers.
In 1890 when the British South Africa Company moved into the eastern and western part of Zimbabwe along with European settlers, they lay claim to all the land.
Many indigenous Zimbabweans driven off their lands were pushed onto ‘native reserves’ set up by the colonial regime.
Most of the land in these native reserves was not suitable for agriculture.
By 1914, about 23 730 white settlers owned 21 million acres of the most fertile land, only six percent of which they cultivated while an estimated 800 000 Africans, with ownership rights stripped, occupied less than 19 million acres of the poorest land.
The landless and impoverished black population was subjected to a system of racist laws regulating land, cheap labour (chibharo) as well as a poll tax and a hut tax.
Those who failed to pay the taxes suffered confiscation of cattle, loss of land and imprisonment.
Chiefs who protested against these demands were arrested, and spirit mediums who served as guardians of the African people, were killed.
The ferocious oppression by the British became so appalling that between 1890 and 1910, about 18 000 black miners died victims of hard labour, hunger and diseases.
And when local leaders such as Chief Makoni, Chief Mashayamombe, Sekuru Kaguvi and Mbuya Nehanda resisted the oppression, they were slaughtered and their heads collected as trophies.
Chief Chinengundu Mashayamombe was killed in action in 1897 and his head was decapitated to be presented to the Queen, it is believed.
His body was paraded at impromptu victory parties that were thrown by Rhodesians.
Another gallant son of the soil Chief Chingaira Makoni was killed by a firing squad and his head was also decapitated and taken to Westminster Abbey in London.
His family travelled to Britain in 1988 in an attempt to repatriate his remains, but they were told to look for it in South Africa.
Another painful history about colonial racial discrimination is the grim history of human zoos.
Blacks were captured in Africa and put in these human zoos.
Men, women and children were locked up in cages and exhibited to entertainment starved Europeans. A classic example is that of Sarah “Saarjie” Baartman, a Koisan woman from the Cape.
Another classic case is that of a little black girl who was kept in a zoo in Belgium as recent as 1958, attracting an estimated one million white spectators who fed her with bananas as one would feed a petty monkey.
Sarah ‘Saartjie’ Baartman, was torn from her home in 1810, and made an object of the most obscene racial, sexual, psychological and physical abuse.
In London and Paris, she was exhibited as an object of sexual curiosity with the main attractions being her genitalia and pronounced buttocks that fascinated Europeans.
Over and above the shame of exhibition, white males paid two shillings per pervert to abuse her.
For an extra sum, they were allowed to poke her genitalia with fingers or sticks.
And for a further sum, they could sleep with her until she died from syphilis in 1815 at the tender age of 25.
However, even in death, they would not leave her alone.
Cuvier made a plaster cast of her body, then removed her skeleton and, after removing her brain and genitals, pickled them and displayed them in bottles at a museum in Paris.
She was finally repatriated back home after South Africa attained ‘independence’ in 2000.
Ironically, the same so-called world-leading democratic countries mourn Cecil, with thousands signing a petition to ‘Demand Justice for Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe’.
Yet all we ask them is to give us the remains of our dead heroes for a decent burial. Is that asking for too much?