Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has demanded that London’s Natural History Museum return the skulls of freedom fighters killed by British colonisers. The skulls serve as “war trophies”, and keeping them “must rank among the highest forms of racist moral decadence, sadism, and human insensitivity”, President Robert Mugabe, 91, said in a speech this week, per the Guardian.
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Mugabe also said that as soon as remains arrive in Zimbabwe, state authorities would ensure they’re buried at sacred shrines across the country.
Moreover, some experts say that Zimbabwe officials’ accusations are unreasonable, as that country’s museums hold a few foreign heads of their own.
What happened to their bodies has always remained a mystery.
“We await the appointment of the required Zimbabwean experts in order to take this forward”. That sentiment was echoed in a statement from the Natural History Museum, which said that the museum “cares for 20,000 human remains in its collection” and that there is “a thorough process that involves establishing the correct provenance of remains based on complex historical sources”.
Godfrey Mahachi, executive director of National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, said the heads’ repatriation was already being discussed.
“We will only be able to get the full details after those discussions about how many are the remains, when and under what circumstances they were taken to the UK”, he told Thursday’s edition of the state-controlled Herald newspaper.
Mugabe said the missing skulls belonged to leaders of “the first chimurenga”, an uprising against white settlers in the late 19th century, including those of spirit mediums Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi, who were hanged from a tree in 1898. “The process that is now taking place is about how we are going to handle the repatriation”.
Zimbabwe won its independence from Britain in 1980.
Zimbabwe’s National Heroes Day commemorates the lives of those who died opposing British colonial rule.
“The First Chimurenga leaders, whose heads were decapitated by the colonial occupying force, were then dispatched to England, to signify British victory over, and subjugation of, the local population”, Mugabe said Monday during Heroes Day celebrations in Harare, according to the Herald.
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But the BBC’s Africa correspondent Alastair Leithead says it is not clear if the remains are of the rebellion leaders. These people who displayed trophies are mourning Cecil.
