‘Return the bones. Empty the museums’

“A red mud covered the ground and by late afternoon, in the heat of the sun, a thin mist was rising. The blood of five thousand victims, the shadow of the city, was evaporating in the setting sun.” 

That was how Paul Vigne d’Octon described the aftermath of a massacre that unfolded on 30 August 1897 in the village of Ambiky in the Menabe region of western Madagascar.

His book La Gloire du Sabre (The Glory of the Sword), published in 1900, explained how France had declared a protectorate in Madagascar three years earlier, and this attack was part of the ongoing work of what the French colonial service euphemistically referred to as operations of “pacification”. 

The commandant, a 39-year-old man named Augustin Gérard, ordered the slaughter of unarmed civilians in the village in a dawn attack, and while the number of those killed in this brutal attack is disputed, all sources agree that there was certainly not a single casualty among the French and Senegalese soldiers.  

There’s another certainty in this uncertain history, too. In the aftermath, the corpses of three people killed in the atrocity at Ambiky were decapitated.

The skull of King Toera, sovereign of the Sakalava people in the Menabe region, and the skulls of two other Sakalava men who died alongside him on that August morning, were taken to Paris.  

At this point, museums find themselves implicated in this story, of course. Implicated in the sense offered by Michael Rothberg in his 2019 book The Implicated Subject. He points out that the etymological root of the word “implicated” means “folded in”.  

This isn’t, in other words, about the assignation of blame. That’s not to say that it won’t involve questions about outstanding debt – or indeed questions about enduring and shape-shifting structures of what might count as “protection” and “pacification”.  

After all, the Ambiky Massacre was just one incident in an increasingly intense sequence of democidal, ultraviolent corporate-colonial militarism in the closing years of the 19th century, foreshadowing the genocides that the 20th century would bring, indexed in museum collections.  

Provenance research undertaken by the historian Klara Boyer-Rossol has traced how these three Madagascan skulls were first held at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and then transferred to the Musée de l’Homme shortly after its foundation in 1937. Informed by such scholarly work, the first formal request for their return was made by the Sakalava King, Magloire, in 2003. 

Skip forward 22 years. Following a renewed request by Princesses Marie Francia Kamamy and Julia Georgine Kamamy, two great granddaughters of Toera, in April 2025 a decree authorising the transfer of the skulls to the Republic of Madagascar was issued by the French Ministry of Culture.  

The transfer in August represented the first return under France’s new 2023 legal framework for the restitution of ancestral remains taken under colonialism. Some 13 decades on from their slaughter, the hope is that these people will be laid to rest. But this definitely isn’t the end of this story. It is probably somewhere in the middle.  

Back in 1954 when Aimé Césaire wrote about the Ambiky Massacre, he presented it as an unfinished history. “I repeat,” he wrote, “colonialism is not dead. It excels at renewing its forms so as to survive.”  

Shapeshifting colonialism 

If you were to try to study the means through which the ongoing renewal and shapeshifting of colonialism that Césaire described operates, you’d come pretty quickly to the question of the museum.  

Here, where the boundaries of a human being can seem to blur into a war trophy, museum specimen or simply a racist souvenir, a distinctive type of dehumanisation kicks in.  

The shapeshifting involves a switching of position, as if a massacre could be a “pacification”. The punitive expedition of the coloniser relies on the universal logic of the abuser: “Look at what you made me do.”  

A lot has been achieved in the restitution of ancestral remains since Césaire was writing in 1954.  

Browse the back issues of the Art Newspaper, Museums Journal, the Times or Le Monde and you’ll find a timeline punctuated at an increasing rate since the 1970s by returns from museums in Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Oxford, Paris, Berlin, Bremen, Vienna, Göttingen, Geneva and across the US and Canada to, for example, Australia, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Hawaii or Namibia. 

Changing legal provisions for returning Indigenous ancestors, especially since the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Nagpra) of 1990, have placed returns at the heart of curatorial work in museums.  

The effects of the updated Nagpra act of 2024 are being felt in museums across the US, as questions of consent from descendants for the display of cultural objects as well as human remains are catalysing a quiet revolution in the politics of display in American museums.  

There have been numerous iconic and high-profile returns, and the hope of what the South African researcher Ciraj Rassool calls “rehumanisation” that can happen through restitution.  

Most famous is the example of the remains of Sarah Baartman, from Musée de l’Homme in Paris to Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, in 2002. That was eight years after the campaign was backed by former South African president Nelson Mandela in 1994, and two long centuries after Baartman’s death, in 1815.  

Returning ancestors has always been met with broad public support. For example, in July 2003, after a return of Australian Aboriginal skulls by Manchester Museum, the lead column in the Times newspaper argued that “physical remains can have a human and spiritual dimension that transcends the scientific imperative. When a case can be proved, those remains should be laid to rest in their native place.”  

Even the British Museum made two returns in the noughties – two cremation ash bundles to Tasmania Aboriginal Centre in 2006, and Maori bone fragments and worked bones to Te Papa in 2008.  

However, the museum invoked a technicality to refuse to include a group of tattooed heads in the same return, arguing that they had “been modified for a purpose other than mortuary disposal” – and there’s been zero further progress in the intervening 17 years.  

Another landmark came with the return to New Caledonia in 2014 of the skull of a Kanak chief named Atai from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle.  

And in the same year, 60 years on from the return of the skull of Hehe chief Mkwawa, who led a campaign of resistance against the militarist expansionism of the German East Africa Company in the 1890s, Mkwawa’s tooth was returned to descendants in Madagascar by the great granddaughter of Captain Tom von Prince.  

The Schutztruppe captain had kept it as an informal trophy and had it made into a pendant. His great granddaughter inherited it as a family heirloom then made the return – a reminder of how restitution can happen from descendant to descendant, without nation states’ direct involvement.  

There was less international attention when in 2022 the Belgian government arranged a ceremony for the return of a tooth of the first president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Emery Lumumba, to his descendants.  

It had been taken by the policeman responsible for the destruction of his body following his assassination in January 1961. Dehumanising practices carried on far beyond 1954. 

Meanwhile, in the summer of 2020 the heads of 24 Algerian resistance fighters decapitated in the 19th century were returned from the Musée de l’Homme to Algeria, including Muhammad Al-Amjad bin Abd Almalik (Sherif Boubaghla) and Sheikh Bouziane.  

Some pointed out that hundreds more Algerian skulls are in Parisian museums, and how this issue is multiplied when the scale of unnamed, de-named, un-recorded ancestral remains are taken into account.  

This is where this story goes next, led by community demands for transparency as well as action, and specifically for attention and openness about what – or more precisely who – is being warehoused at taxpayers’ expense in museum storage facilities.  

So, while many welcomed the news of 19 skulls of African Americans taken in the 1870s from a New Orleans hospital for the purposes of “racial science” being returned by the University of Leipzig to Louisiana in May 2025, such stories beg the question of how much more there is in the storeroom.  

When will there be transparency, communities are asking? Because transparency is surely the first step towards accountability, and restorative justice. 

This open secret surprises nobody in the museums world, but shocks every museum-goer and museum-lover who visits the collection when they hear it. Whisper it or say it as loud as you can: most museums simply don’t understand what they hold in their collections.  

This is more than a guilty secret, or some “backlog” issue for curators when it comes to ancestral remains, or indeed to cultural items that are understood by descendant communities as part of ancestors’ ongoing presence.  

Enough time has passed for it to be clear that more is at stake than just underfunded institutions not yet getting around to putting collections on a public database. This is about priorities, about choices, about knowledge. And about the reproduction of violence that involved the redaction of names, knowledge and human lives themselves. 

Take, for example, the decades-long struggle by Zimbabweans for the return of the Chimurenga heroes’ remains. And then consider the fact that almost half of the British Museum’s collection is still not on a public database.  

Time’s up – the stakeholders, communities, publics and all who care for our museums are now demanding a radical shift in the priorities of our richest and most powerful institutions, and for all other museums to act according to their ability to contribute. Our museums need to put documentation and openness before the next blockbuster exhibition.  

Being transparent 

In my view, one step forward would be an amnesty on ancestral remains for those institutions that haven’t got the resources for basic documentation and care. These are human beings, people whose humanity was denied, in part, through their placement in museums.  

If the British Library can maintain a public database of the 170 million items in its collections, then surely British national and non-national museums can manage the same basic transparency for the countless artefacts and human remains in their care at taxpayers’ expense?  

That’s not about re-inscribing the violence by making access a free-for-all – but rather about making public the basic facts of what and who is in the collections so that research, reconciliation and restitution can be undertaken outside the direct sphere of influence of the curators. 

So, a story that begins with colonial violence ends with questions of silencing and redaction, curatorial priorities and professional ethics. And of how little is understood about the people whose fate it is to be retained in posterity in cardboard boxes, wrapped in acid-free tissue, in storage facilities. Why? And for how much longer?  

“Collections are like libraries without a catalogue – filled with the remains of the dead from an imperialist past”

These are the questions increasingly asked by descendant communities of formerly colonised countries. They are being posed by museum workers, too. After all, how can we say we are caring for collections when there is such limited understanding of what – or rather who – is being warehoused in posterity at taxpayers’ expense, these literal skeletons in the closet.  

The most urgent task for museums in the 2020s is surely the tedious, but necessary, work of cataloguing collections and making the information about what is held public.

Yes, that requires investment and valuing the work of collections managers in new ways. But right now, our museums are like libraries without a catalogue – filled with the remains of the dead from the imperial past. And that’s unsustainable.  

After the French returns to Madagascar, which were so overdue and so welcome, there will be perhaps 20,000 skulls and skeletons remaining in the Parisian national collections, including maybe hundreds from Madagascar alone. Multiply that across every Euro-American museum and it could be a million, two million, or five million, nobody knows. 

In this context, March saw the publication of the All Party Parliamentary Group’s Policy Brief Laying the Ancestors to Rest in the UK, which included a series of proposals. With all that has been outlined here, let’s highlight five ideas from it that are uncontentious to the public, but will require radical action by the sector to advance basic professional and curatorial standards: 

1. Ban the sale of human remains 
2. Research and publish full databases and catalogues of the ancestors in the collections 
3. Return proactively where possible 
4. Find new standards for dignity where returns are impossible 
5. Start new conversations about what circumstances, if any, are appropriate for the public display of ancestral remains (including archaeological remains) 

It doesn’t matter how many ceremonies you put on for the return of 10, 20, or 30 ancestors because the hundreds of thousands of other people in museum collections still need your attention.  

As a curator, I have some sympathy. Much more can be done on research to inform restitution. Anyone reading this is doubtless among those who could in some way make that basic transparency materialise.  

Meanwhile, as with tombs of the unknown soldier, there will be a need for the dignified and respectful treatment of the remains of unknown museum exhibits. Sometimes the violence will have taken the form of a redaction so violent and vast that it requires another kind of reconciliation, truth-telling and remembrance. 

In my recent book, Every Monument Will Fall, I describe how, for seven decades, until relatively recently, people at an Oxford college drank wine from the skull of a de-named, unnamed human being. The story is another instance of what Césaire taught us back in 1954, in the year of that first restitution, that colonialism still isn’t over.  

Where provenance research is impossible then a dialogue about what dignity would look like – perhaps reburial or cremation – is urgent. But the first step will be openness so that informed collective decisions can be made in the future.  

When it comes to the non-consensual presence of human remains in the collections, we might take a cue from what American academic Christina Sharpe says in her 2023 book Ordinary Notes: “The answer to these obscene questions? Return the bones…Empty the museums.” 

Europe after Empire | Dan Hicks 

Dan Hicks is professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford, curator of world archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.

His books include The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Press 2020) and Every Monument Will Fall: a Story of Remembering and Forgetting, published with Penguin (Hutchinson Heinemann 2025).

Instagram/Bluesky: @ProfDanHicks