The New York Times
November 4, 2000

CAPE TOWN JOURNAL
Bones in Museum Cases May Get Decent Burials
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

CAPE TOWN - For decades the ugly secrets slept in the dusty storerooms of South Africa's museums, hidden with the bones of a forgotten people whose bodies were defiled in the name of science.

The bones in Box 144 at the McGregor Museum belonged to a black woman known as Griet, who was dead only three years when her body was stolen for scientific study in 1911. The corpse of a black man named Kouw was boiled and dismembered over the wails of his elderly widow four months after his death in 1909.

When missionaries protested that blacks expected their dead to be treated with respect, scientists ignored them. ''The woman is friendless,''Maria Wilman of the South African Museum wrote in 1906 as she vied for the skeleton of a sickly black woman who was soon to die. ''And the government may do what the missionary dares not.''

Today, more than 2,000 skeletons of the Khoisan people lie in South Africa's museums and universities. Soon the institutions plan to publicize how hundreds of the bones were acquired, offering the first detailed accounting of the role that scientists and museums played in buttressing the ideology of white superiority.

For the museums it is an act of penance, a frank condemnation of their feverish race to collect and classify the bones of so-called ''primitive races'' including the Khoisan - known then as Bushmen and Hottentots - in the early 1900's.

By opening their archives to relatives of the dead and arranging proper burials of the bones, museum curators hope to restore the dignity taken from people who were denigrated in life and in death.

Around the world, museums are taking similar steps as they reassess collections of human remains acquired in an era when indigenous peoples were deemed worthy of scientific study but unworthy of the consideration commonly accorded to whites.

At the South African Museum here, more than 1,000 skeletal remains lie in stacks of cardboard boxes in a locked storeroom. At the McGregor Museum in the city of Kimberley, about 150 rest in dusty wooden boxes under white fluorescent lights. More bones are housed in universities and other museums across the country. Some are thought to be thousands of years old. But hundreds are now believed to belong to people who died at the beginning of the 20th century, people who probably have living relatives.

The lost history surfaced when two historians began digging through museum archives and uncovered the gruesome details of how museums had paid gravediggers to desecrate new graves as they competed for Khoisan skeletons.

''Obviously, the revelations are shocking,'' said David Morris, an archaeologist at the McGregor Museum. ''Museums now have an obligation to go about identifying these remains. We need to try to rebury the bones that were subject to these atrocities. There's a lot of healing to be done.''

But identifying the remains will be exceedingly difficult. The boxes of bones are numbered, but nameless. And the fraying cloth-covered museum ledgers that chronicle each skeletal acquisition since the early 1900's offer only fragments of history.

In 1911, for instance, McGregor Museum officials wrote only the name Gert in neat black script in the entry describing the skeleton in Box 145, which was acquired on a farm that was also named.

Most entries include even fewer details. The contents of Box 164, apparently acquired in 1912 from what is now Namibia, are simply described as ''bush-hottentot.''

At the time, scientists felt little need to bother with the names or histories of the recently dead or to consult with their relatives. The nomadic Khoisan, who hunted and roamed in loincloths, were considered subhuman, and their bones were displayed alongside those of animals.

Museum officials hope the publication of the historians' findings will stir submerged memories and resurrect old stories of plundered graves, prompting some families to come forward to inquire about their dead.

But most scientists fear that the indifference of the early scientists and the subsequent paucity of historical records will mean that most bones will remain anonymous and unclaimed.

''They didn't see them as people,'' said Patricia Davison, the deputy director of the South African Museum, which is publishing the academic study. ''But these are actual human beings who ended up being numbered bones in a box.'' It took decades for the old opinions to fade.

''The most striking sign of the low level of culture of the natives is their frequently receding and also poorly filled foreheads,'' Rudolph Poch, an Austrian scientist who competed with the South Africans for Khoisan skeletons, wrote in 1915.

Ms. Wilman, who ultimately became the director of the McGregor Museum, and Louis Peringuey, who ran the South African Museum, shared those views, as did most scientists who made sweeping racial generalizations based on skull measurements.

And even after those theories were discredited, the Khoisan bones still hung for years in the country's most prominent museums. It was not until 1995 that curators began removing them from the display cases.

In South Africa, it was the end of apartheid that prompted the painful reassessment of how science and scientists had been used to perpetuate racial stereotypes. The soul-searching continues today as museums retire exhibits that reflect the old intellectual baggage.

Next year, for instance, the South African Museum plans to close a diorama that depicts Khoisan people hunting, cooking and relaxing in the African grasslands. Officials there want to end the practice of relegating African history to natural history museums while celebrating European history in museums of art and culture.

And last year, the McGregor Museum renovated its displays to include the views of the Khoisan, as described by 19th-century missionaries, and to acknowledge prominently the racism inherent in the scientific practices of the early 20th century.

''Museums obviously have to cope with the baggage of the past as the rest of the society does,'' said Mr. Morris, who helped design the new exhibit at the McGregor Museum.

Returning the old bones, he says, is yet another way of making amends. Mr. Morris is hoping that the government will finance research to identify the relatives of those who died. And indigenous communities argue that even unidentified bones should be buried in a public and prominent memorial ceremony.

''People feel still that their rights as human beings have been violated,'' said Barend van Stagen, a spokesman for the Griqua, an indigenous community that won the return of family bones from the University of Witwatersrand several years ago. ''If these remains can come back, it will help restore our culture, our identity, our existence.''