Human remains in society

Curation and exhibition in the aftermath of genocide and mass-violence

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Élisabeth Anstett

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526108197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publicly displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding social, legal and ethical uses by communities, public institutions and civil society organisations. This book presents a ground-breaking account of the treatment and commemoration of dead bodies resulting from incidents of genocide and mass violence. Through a range of international case studies across multiple continents, it explores the effect of dead bodies or body parts on various political, cultural and religious practices. Multidisciplinary in scope, it will appeal to readers interested in this crucial phase of post-conflict reconciliation, including students and researchers of history, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, law, politics and modern warfare.

1

The unburied victims of Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion: where and when does the violence end?

David M. Anderson and Paul J. Lane

All over central Kenya, the bones are coming up. Travelling around the countryside of the Kikuyu-speaking areas of these intensely farmed and closely settled fertile highlands, there are strange patches of uncultivated land to be seen: places where local farmers have found the remains of their kith and kin, those who were killed during Kenya’s bloody rebellion against colonialism in the 1950s. At Othaya, where the bitter war raged worst of all, the corpses thrown into a shallow pit after a rebel raid on the local police station in 1953 began to emerge from the earth some thirty years later.¹ A local committee was formed to address the problem, and they decided to build a memorial hall in front of the site, with the burial ground at the rear. Move on some thirty years more and the project remains unfinished; work began on a building and some ‘peace trees’ were planted, but even the uncompleted building we saw in the mid-2000s no longer exists,² and there is now little to show after the group’s treasurer absconded with their meagre funds. Though a local politician subsequently took the bones away – no one knows why, or where to – a few local residents still cherish the sanctity of the place and have created a commemorative ‘peace garden’ on the site. It is a place of peace, now, and a site of reconciliation, but it is no longer a cemetery.³

The bones at Othaya were heroic. And they were politically potent. They belonged to ancestors renowned as Kenya’s brave nationalist fighters – the young men among the Kikuyu who joined the Mau Mau Land and Freedom Army and took up arms to overthrow British oppression. Though they lost their war, Kenya’s national history declares that they won their country’s freedom, precipitating the British flight from Kenya in December 1963.⁴ Now, after many years of official silence, these nationalist heroes are venerated: a statue of their leader, Dedan Kimathi, is proudly erected at a busy traffic junction in downtown Nairobi close to the parliament buildings; a new memorial to the victims of torture by British security services personnel during the emergency was unveiled on 12 September 2015 in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park;⁵ and roads and streets throughout the country are named after the generals and captains of Mau Mau’s rag-tag army.⁶ But there are other memories of rebellion that are not so easily assimilated into the political life of Kenya. Among those who opposed the rebels were many of their fellow Kikuyu. Driven by a wide range of motives and incentives,⁷ the so-called ‘loyalist’ Kikuyu who refused to take Mau Mau’s oath of allegiance, who opposed violence, who retained their Christian convictions and their employment in the colonial economy, or who joined the Home Guard militia to fight Mau Mau, became what Daniel Branch has termed ‘the enemy within’.⁸ As the war developed, the struggle increasingly focused on intra-Kikuyu violence as Mau Mau fighters tried to purge their communities of the scourge of the ‘loyalists’. In this intimate, local violence, loyalists were frequently the victims of Mau Mau assassinations, seized from their homes or workplaces and murdered, their bodies left in shallow graves in the forests or by rural streams or stuffed unceremoniously into urban sewers.⁹

These loyalist bones, too, have been coming up: but they are not heroic. And in central Kenya their acknowledgement presents considerable difficulties, for these bones are politically toxic. This chapter examines the fate of a collection of these ‘loyalist’ bones, using the case to consider the wider issues that surround the treatment of human remains from conflicts of this kind and looking also at the institutional and ethical dilemmas that the dead bring to life for the museums that come to house them. We will ask how Kenya should deal with the human remains from its troubled past, whether potent or toxic, but we will frame our analysis with the recognition that Kenya’s problems with human remains of this kind are far from unique. We begin, therefore, with a wide-ranging discussion of the politics of the dead in the context of museum collections generally, which we describe as a classic example of what is termed a ‘wicked problem’. We then move on to contextualise the Kenya case, giving a detailed account of the human remains currently housed in the Osteology Department of the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi, dealing with the technical challenges confronting the museum, but also with the specific ‘readings’ of the ethical and political conundrum these human remains create within Kenya. The conclusion then makes a plea to Kenya for a resolution of particular difficulties with its human remains from the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, offering suggestions as to how this might be accomplished.

Human bones in museums: a ‘wicked problem’

Over the last quarter-century, the treatment of human remains encountered during archaeological excavations, their subsequent disposal and their display in museums and research institutions have become matters of widespread and frequently heated debate across a range of academic disciplines and in a growing number of public contexts.¹⁰ As these cases have highlighted, human remains, whether studied in an archaeological, anthropological or biological context, are invariably enmeshed in a complex web of sociocultural practices. Legal, ethical and theological concerns all impact upon how such remains are treated, as do human emotional responses and also, increasingly, scientific, technical and even political or religious sectarian interests. Whether the exhumation is ethically appropriate, whether it is legally constituted, when, where and in what circumstances remains should be reburied, and how human remains should be curated and by whom, are all questions that now excite public as well as professional debates.

These issues represent a classic example of a ‘wicked problem’ – a term commonly used in public policy and planning circles to refer to problems that are especially resistant to resolution – at least at a macro scale – because of the multiple positions involved.¹¹ Such problems invoke a complex web of issues that typically challenge pre-existing systems of organisation and governance, epistemological truth claims and the ontological frames of reference on which these are based. ‘Wicked problems’, as Coyne notes, persist over time, are only ever loosely formulated as they depend very much ‘on the viewpoint of those presenting them’ and are regularly ‘subject to redefinition’.¹² As a consequence, there is never a simple right or wrong way forward; instead solutions have either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ tendencies with the result of making the previous situation either better or worse. Resolving ‘wicked problems’, as identified by Rittel and Webber,¹³ requires attention to context, historical specificity, the authority of interpretations, inter-connectedness, sociality, different value judgements and the mechanisms by which values are defined and determined.¹⁴ All of these intractable issues commonly come into play in the treatment of human remains.

Broadly speaking, three key areas of concern and debate have emerged around the treatment of human remains:

•the treatment of human remains encountered during archaeological fieldwork;

•the treatment of human skeletal remains held by medical schools, surgeons’ colleges, museums, universities and other comparable research institutes, for the purposes of providing comparative reference material;

•the public display of human remains, whether skeletons, skeletal parts, mummified bodies or parts thereof in museums and similar settings.

Often cross-cutting these debates are arguments concerning the rights of Indigenous or First Peoples. Many comparative collections held by Western museums and similar institutions were collected from among groups subject to European conquest and colonisation, and who now claim Indigenous or First Peoples/Nations status.¹⁵ In some countries, especially those where First Nation/Indigenous communities are formally recognised and accorded particular rights, legislation has been introduced that extends these concerns to include the treatment and disposal of human remains recovered from archaeological contexts.

The best-known example, and probably the most widely discussed, is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (PL 101–601). This federal legislation entered into US law in 1990, after two decades of lobbying by Native American groups and the earlier enactment of various state-level pieces of associated legislation.¹⁶ NAGPRA’s passage resulted in the compilation of a national inventory of Native American skeletons held in museums and related institutions around the United States, and led to a process of review being initiated preparatory to systematic repatriation. Critically, NAGRPA extended to the graves of Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, regardless of their age, the general principles of American common law, namely ‘that human remains do not belong to individuals or to governmental or institutional organizations and that artefacts placed in human graves as funerary offerings belong to the deceased’.¹⁷ The effect of this clause was to invest the deceased with both agency and ownership, so it is not surprising that this generated considerable concern among archaeologists, osteo-archaeologists and biological anthropologists in the negotiation and passage of the Act. While the issues can still generate concern, anger, heated debate, disagreement and considerable litigation (including between different Native American peoples), there is now greater consensus that NAGPRA’s enactment has been of benefit to all of the various stakeholders involved.¹⁸ The outcomes of the Act have not always been as intended, however: numerous individual cases remain unresolved, and critics allege that NAGPRA has failed to accomplish the ultimate objective of restoring dignity to Native Americans and Native Hawaiians.¹⁹

The passage of NAGPRA and the experience gained in handling the cases has combined with greatly increased lobbying efforts by groups of Indigenous Peoples around the world to encourage greater reflection within the academy on the ethics of holding and exhibiting human remains and has stimulated considerable research on the history of individual collections. Numerous professional bodies serving the anthropological, medical and heritage sectors have issued revised ethical codes and have developed procedural guidelines aimed at facilitating decision makin...