Biological anthropology

• They were donated to the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) anatomy department by Carel Gert Coetzee, who had unearthed them and was a medical student at the university.
• The remains belonged to San and Khoekhoe people, two groups indigenous to South Africa.
• Anatomy departments and museums around the world collected human skeletal remains during the colonial era and into the first half of the 20th century.
• My hope is that more curators and custodians of human skeletal remains elsewhere in the world will attempt to redress some of the wrongs of the past.

Beginning the process

• To ensure that we reached the right people in Sutherland, a public participation advisor was chosen to lead a process with the community.
• By then, I had studied the archival records related to the donation; these revealed names and two surnames.
• Read more:
  Why scholars have created global guidelines for ancient DNA research

  We obtained informed consent from the community at every step of the process.

• And if anyone wants to conduct future research they must approach the families to begin a new process.

Hard lives

• Overall, though, we found that life was physically hard and violent for the Sutherland Nine.
• One died as recently as 1913; the remaining seven died in the 1870s or 1880s.
• When the late professor of anatomy MR Drennan took delivery of the remains in the 1920s, he also noted what little the donor knew about the people’s lives.
• He has been named Igue We, meaning “blessing”, to symbolise acceptance and blessing by San ancestors for his reburial.

Painful legacy

The principal message of this collaborative approach is how community-driven research can benefit processes of restitution when grappling with painful legacy collections. The reburial of the remains in Sutherland is likely to take place later this year, though no date has yet been set.