What will become of King Hintsa’s skull? King Hintsa was killed by British soldiers in 1835 in the South African wars and his body mutilated. He was scalped on the battlefield and his skull looted by a soldier in one of the Highland regiments. Now the cranium of the Xhosa monarch, minus a mandible, has been identified by his descendant, Chief Nichola Tilana Gcaleka, on a farm in Easter Ross, in Scotland. The discovery of the skull and its return to South Africa, Chief Gcaleka asserts, will forestall civil war there.

Chief Gcakela’s quest for his great-great uncle’s head, which took him from Heathrow to the Highlands, with attendant reporters and photographers, was sponsored by a South African drinks company and had more than a touch of show-biz about it. Xhosa elders have expressed some doubt about the identification of the skull. Knowing little about Xhosa history or forensic anthropology – or divination – I suppose, if conflict is brewing, it’s worth any ill to forestall the kind of war that threatens to make Africa a continent of skulls.

The chief’s quest is an example of a growing phenomenon: the renewed concern – on the part of formerly colonised or otherwise marginalised peoples – with the fate of their ancestors’ remains and looted artefacts. Maori, Bushmen, indigenous communities everywhere, are reclaiming skulls, skeletons and mummified remains from the museums where they were deposited in colonial times by ethnologists and trophy hunters. How would you feel, they argue, if your own ancestors’ bones were on display in a museum in our country? In deference to such feelings, few museums now display human remains, even if they have not yet returned these relics to the custody of their descendants.

In Cambodia the remains of the dead are displayed to a different end. A month ago I visited the memorial stupa on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, at the killing fields of Cheung Ek, where over a decade ago the Cambodian government assembled the remains of thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge. The stupa is filled not with images of the Buddha, as a temple or an ordinary shrine would be, but with shelves of skulls. Elsewhere in Phnom Penh, a school that acted as a Khmer Rouge torture centre has been converted into a museum. Alongside defaced busts of Pol Pot, there is a map of Cambodia made entirely of skulls. It is an arresting artefact, a disturbing piece of necrokitsch. None of the skulls is identified, although there are photographs alongside them of Cambodians who were detained and killed in the torture centre. At Cheung Ek, we are told, the remains are of ‘peasants, workers, intellectuals, ministers, foreigners’. In the memorial stupa itself, some skulls are labelled forensically: ‘Juvenile Male Kampuchean, 15–20 years old’.

No one would dispute the importance of having a monument to mark the Cambodian genocide – or auto-genocide, as some scholars would have it – but the use of these anonymous skulls seems ghoulish. In Cambodia, as in other Buddhist cultures, the dead are customarily cremated and the ashes carefully preserved. The display of skulls at Cheung Ek and Tuol Sleng demeans the traditional Khmer art of memory, even as it reminds onlookers of the most terrible event of their history.

It may be better to let bones be. In Zimbabwe, some years ago, I witnessed the inauguration of another funerary monument: the Heroes’ Acre in Matabeleland, one of a number of such memorials erected in Zimbabwe. The event was the reburial of fighters who had died in the liberation war in the 1960s and 1970s. Near the chosen site, there was an existing monument from the colonial era: a memorial to the Shangani patrol, a doomed British detachment sent in 1893 in pursuit of Lobengula, the Ndebele king.

A ten-foot-high cement obelisk in a stretch of woodland near the river commemorates Major Allan Wilson and his 33 men, all killed by Lobengula’s followers. The Ndebele warriors who died in the battle are not mentioned on the obelisk. In the Heroes’ Acre white Rhodesians, contrariwise, are unrepresented. It is thought, though, that Lobengula’s men showed respect to the bodies of the British soldiers, treating them as they did their own dead – leaving them where they fell, stripped and covered with branches and stones, all alongside each other in the great bone orchard under the trees. During the dedication of the Heroes’ Acre there was a ritual purification of the site by Ndebele elders. I asked one of them about the dead white soldiers of the Shangani Patrol.

‘The bones and skulls of black and white people are all mixed up here,’ he said. ‘That is our history. History put them together. It is not for us to separate them.’ ★

Afterword

In South Africa, the Xhosa king, Xolilizwe Sigcau, declined to sanction reburial of the skull that Chief Nicholas Gcaleka brought from Scotland. Chief Gcaleka, he said, had acted without authority, and what he had found was not, in fact, the skull of King Hintsa: the skull was intact, with a bullet hole above the right ear, whereas the historical record indicated King Hintsa had been shot at point-blank range behind the left ear and that his head had been shattered.