The living cannot heal while the dead remain imprisoned.
Who decides which bodies are “objects of study” and which are humans deserving dignity?
The museum does not only hold objects; it holds remains. Beneath its polished floors and quiet galleries lie the bones of the colonised—skulls, skeletons, fragments of bodies carried across seas. Colonialism extended its reach into the realm of the dead, extracting our ancestors, our cosmologies, and our futures.
To imprison the dead in glass cases is to violate the pathways of return. Ancestors who once belonged to cycles of burial, mourning, and ritual renewal, are instead trapped in institutions of empire.
The theft of bones is the theft of afterlives.
Maasai representatives from Tanzania visiting the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK. (Credit: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)
The dead, who should move between realms as mediators and guides, are held in suspension—unable to return to the soil, unable to re-join the cosmologies from which they were torn. Our ancestors became wanderers, dislocated from their communities, their bodies severed from ritual care.
The violence of empire continues.
The museum stands as an archive of domination. In the so-called halls of science and culture, our people were made into exhibits—reduced to curiosities, data points, and trophies for the imperial gaze. What appears as preservation is in truth a form of captivity-the confinement of spirits held under imperial custody. The dead are denied rest, the ancestors are denied return, and the living are denied dignity.
Chief Jamopoty and six other representatives of the Tupinambá de Olivença people from Brazil at Denmark’s National Museum Photograph: Tiago Rogero/The Guardian