Two mummified bodies, two skulls and a traditional “burial set” had been taken from Australian burial sites and brought to Germany around 1880. They will soon be returned to their country of origin.
Funeral rites were held in Berlin on Thursday for five Australian natives whose remains will be returned to this country, almost 150 years after being looted during the colonial era. Two mummified bodies, two skulls and a traditional “burial set” had been collected from Australian burial sites and brought to Germany around 1880, researchers said at the ceremony at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.
The museum, as well as that of nature and man in Oldenburg (north-west), will send them back to Australia, as part of Berlin’s efforts to repair crimes committed during the colonial era. The coffins were covered with traditional flags, under the songs of representatives of Australian Aboriginal communities, accompanied by drums, rites « deeply important »said the Australian ambassador to Berlin, Natasha Smith.
« Such repatriations are of the highest priority » for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia, as well as for the government, she added. Berlin’s museums and their reserves are filled with millions of objects brought by scientific expeditions that traveled the globe from the mid-19th centurye century. « These ancestral remains should never have been here »said Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), which manages the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.
The remains are those of three women, a man and a person of unidentified gender, bringing the total number of remains returned by Germany to Australia to 162, according to Mr Smith. Over the last twenty years, Germany has gradually begun to remember its colonial past. The German colonial empire, smaller than those of the French or the British, extended over several African countries, including Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon. It ceased to exist after the First World War.
The country has already returned to Namibia bones of members of the Herero and Nama tribes, as well as “Benin bronzes”, originating from what today became Nigeria.
Research was also carried out on 1,100 skulls from former German East Africa, with the aim of returning the remains to the countries concerned. « In recent years, our approach to certain issues has evolved significantly »underlined Mr. Parzinger, while the Nazi period « has long obscured our view of Germany’s role in colonialism ».