'Weight of history' as Glasgow museum buries stolen human remains in South Africa

Steph Scholten, director of the Hunterian Museum, and his colleague Dr Andy Mills , curator of archaeology & world cultures, travelled to South Africa last week for a highly charged ceremony of remembrance and repatriation and helped to carry the coffins to a mass burial site recently dug near Kinderlê in the Northern Cape.

It was the final act in a four-year piece of work carried out by the Hunterian, the South African Department of Sports, Arts and Culture , its heritage experts and leaders of the Khoi and San community to return the remains to their ancestral lands.

There, under beating afternoon sun, up 1,500 people gathered .including the South African president President Cyril Ramaphosa, who spoke of the repatriation and burials as the “restoration of dignity” following the sale of Indigenous peoples for study in Europe, a practice that was “rooted in racism and used to advance theories of European racial superiority”.

“They were dug up and turned into commodities and specimens, displayed under the cold gaze of pseudoscience.,” the president said.

The human remains once stored in boxes, studied and sometimes displayed as objects in Glasgow were brought to the city by university alumni and donors between 1868 and 1924.

The remains travelled last week in a convoy of some 63 coffins placed in three hearses and 12 vans. The convoy was led by police some 600km north of Cape Town.

The majority of the remains had been held by the Iziko Museums of South Africa.

The convoy travelled from Cape Town into a red semi-arid landscape dotted with “tough little shrubs”. As temperatures reached 35 degrees, the air con in the packed taxi bus which Mr Scholten and Dr Mills travelled broke down.

Ahead of burial, all coffins were laid out overnight in a community centre at the nearby settlement of Steinkopf - once dominated by German missionaries - where they were greeted by locals in a deeply religious atmosphere lit by bible readings, song and prayer.

The next day, Mr Scholten and Dr Mills joined community members in carrying the coffins to the memorial site, a barren spot from “which you could see for miles and miles”.

“It was beautiful and it was brutal,” Dr Scholten said.

“The scale of it - 63 graves and coffins - was quite overwhelming.

“The coffins were heavy, heavier than I expected, and I thought to myself that this was the weight of history.

“ And it was hot, the sun was beating down. It was a formal occasion, I was wearing a jacket and tie, I forgot to put my hat on.

“Carrying and helping to carry, as with any funeral and bringing someone to their final resting place, felt completely apporpriate.

“On the botom left was a tiny older local woman and we had a bit of a struggle to keep the coffin even. You can think about this as being something about inequality and trying to balance things to the best of our ability.

“It was profound.”

As community gave way to ceremony, there was a sense that politics took over in a year of municipal elections.

Mr Scholten and Dr Mills were the only two white people in the vast gathered crowd.

“We were the only two white people in that massive crowd of people who were extremely friendly to us. We stood out like a sore thumb and you become very recognisable.

He added: “Throughout this whole process we have always been treated with kindness from local people and all parties, which always makes me feel slightly uncomfortable.

“On the one hand I am quite proud that we have been able to achieve this and the other hand there is a sense of sadness that we have had to do this and that we should never have had to do this. It should never have happened.

“The president mentioned us three times, the Hunterian and us personally. First in the context of thanking us for taking part in the process and then he said ‘I have another message for you’.

“He spoke about this repatriation can only be the first step in a larger process of repatriation and acknowledgement of what colonial powers have done to countries in Africa.

“Because we were there, he directly addresssed us, that this was a message for the people of Scotland, for the Scottish Government, for museums in the UK, to think about what redress can look like.

“I could speak to him later, so we stood by the graveside and had a brief five-minute conversation. He said what we had done is highly symbolic, that it was highly important and it is powerful, but there are many other bigger issues for the people and the countries that exist. I think that point is absolutely valid.”

The ceremony took place against the backdrop of a vote at The United Nations General Assembly, which overwhelmingly backed a resolution from Ghana, declaring the transatlantic slave trade as "the gravest crime against humanity".

Welcoming the vote, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the wealth of many Western nations was "built on stolen lives and stolen labour".

Mr Scholten added: “This is a very high stakes political conversation between European countries and former colonised countries. But this was very much in the mix.”

Mr Scholten recalled a conversation with Gayton McKenzie, the current South African Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, who attended a ceremony at the chapel at Glasgow University last October, as part of a South African delegation, where legal documents to secure the repatriation were signed.

“He said ‘ if you come to the end of your life and you think ‘have I done anything meaningful’, you should think about this day’.”

Mr Scholten added: “You are proud and sad and in a way embarassed about some of the history that our countries and institutions have contributed to, even though of course we didn’t do it.

“The message is ‘you didn’t do it, but if you don’t do something now, you are guilty. That is the message for museums.”

The Hunterian is one of a number of museums across Scotland working to decolonise their collections and repatriate human remains and items, where appropriate.