Re-storing the Skeletons of Empire: Return, Reburial and Rehumanisation in Southern Africa

Abstract

This article argues that empire should be understood not only as geography or network, but also as extractive, hierarchical and stratified relations of knowledge, where the modern museum emerged as one of its key institutions and primary sites. The focus of this examination of empire as epistemology is the process of the return of the remains of Klaas and Trooi Pienaar to South Africa for reburial in 2012, seen in relation to other return processes under way from South African museums to the Northern Cape and Namibia. These are analysed through a wider understanding of South Africa's multiple colonialisms, as colonised and coloniser, and in relation to the history of the Trans-/Garieb transfrontier region, which, by the early 20th century, had been marked by colonial violence and the dispersal of its people across colonial borders. The plunder of graves in this region conducted in the name of scientific collecting formed the basis of the South Africanisation of science, through which the flows of human remains and artefacts began to be directed to South African museums in the service of a special South African concentration on ‘living fossils’, as they competed with their European counterparts. Through an insatiable and competitive collecting history at this time, the remains of so-called primitive people and their artefacts and records ended up in museums and archives in Vienna. They also became the founding collections of at least two museums in South Africa, the newly formed McGregor Museum in Kimberley and the modernising South African Museum in Cape Town. This article tracks the experience, debates and challenges of the repatriation of the remains of the Pienaars as a process of ‘rehumanisation’, disinterred, transported and stored as artefacts, and returned as the remains of citizens and subjects of history. It asks what implications this repatriation holds for the future for the modern museum itself, marked as it has been by a ‘denial of coevalness’.