The reburial of 63 Khoi and San ancestors in South Africa’s Northern Cape is more than a ceremony. It is a reckoning with one of colonialism’s most grotesque chapters and a signal to the world that Africa will no longer wait for its dignity to be returned.
In the dry, rugged expanse of the Namaqua in South Africa’s Northern Cape, something happened on March 23, 2026, that should have happened generations ago. Sixty-three Khoi and San ancestors whose remains were illegally dug from their graves, packed into crates, and shipped to European institutions for so-called scientific study were finally laid to rest. On African soil. With African rites. Among their own people.
In the vast, arid land of the Namaqua, curtained only by rugged hills and rocky mountains the ancestral remains of 63 Khoi and San peoples finally came home to rest. It had taken more than a century.
The ceremony at the Kinderlê Monument in Steinkopf was solemn, emotional, and long overdue. President Cyril Ramaphosa officiated the reburial, which followed the repatriation of these remains over successive periods from museums in Europe. Traditional leaders performed spiritual rites. Community elders wept. And in freshly dug graves, wooden coffins were laid side by side each one a name, a story, a violation that colonialism preferred the world forget.
To understand what happened on March 23, you must first understand what was done to these people and why it was allowed to happen for as long as it was.
Between the late 19th century and the early 20th century, thousands of remains of indigenous people were illegally dug from their graves, then traded or donated to newly established museums and universities. The practice was not fringe. It was systematic. It was funded, catalogued, and celebrated in academic circles across Europe, wrapped in the language of racial science a pseudoscientific framework that sought to prove the supposed inferiority of African and indigenous peoples by measuring skulls, cataloguing bones, and placing human beings on display as specimens.
The 63 remains that were reburied at Steinkopf had been removed from their homeland without consent for race-based scientific research by colonial Europeans stripping them of the right to rest with dignity. Some of these individuals were stolen from their graves as far back as 1868. None of them consented. None of their families were asked. Their bodies became property of institutions, of collectors, of a system that had already decided they were less than human.
As President Ramaphosa stated at the ceremony: “They were dug up and turned into commodities and specimens, displayed under the cold gaze of pseudoscience. Human dignity is not dependent on who you are, what language you speak, what colour your skin is, where you were born or how much or how little you have. Human dignity is inherent. We claim it for ourselves. It cannot be deferred. And it cannot be erased.”
Six of the 63 remains were repatriated from the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, while the others had been held at South Africa’s Iziko Museums. The University of Glasgow also returned two plaster face casts and a smoking pipe excavated from a burial ground.
The repatriation of the six from Scotland began in October 2025. The ceremony followed the return of the remains from the University of Glasgow after more than a century abroad. Once in South Africa, the remains were received in a homecoming ceremony before being transferred to the care of Iziko Museums, where they joined the others already held there waiting, all of them, for the day they could go home.
That day finally came through a carefully organised programme. On Sunday, March 22, an official handover ceremony was held between the Western Cape and Northern Cape provincial governments in Garies, including traditional spiritual rites. The formal reburial ceremony took place the following morning at the Kinderlê Monument just outside Steinkopf.
Queen Belinda of the Western Cape, from Royal Drift’s Chaman Songkos, led the ceremonial handover from the Western Cape to the Northern Cape. She described the occasion as sacred, saying it marked a poignant farewell. “We felt like this is a moment where we say goodbye,” she said.
The community voices at Steinkopf carried a grief that no official statement could fully capture. Chairman of the National Griqua Council Barend van Wyk described the pain associated with the “exploitative and humiliating” illegal removals all those years ago. “Emotionally, it’s hard. The fact that they dug up our ancestors’ remains… why did they do that to human beings? Were our people not worthy of being human that they had to be dug up?”
It is a question without a clean answer because the people who sanctioned these removals never truly believed they were dealing with equals. That dehumanisation was the engine of the entire enterprise. And it is precisely why this moment of reburial carries such weight, not only for the Khoi and San communities, but for all of Africa.
One community leader, James Mapanga, put it plainly: “This is not merely a burial. It is a restoration of dignity long denied.”
This reburial does not stand alone in history. It echoes one of the most well-known cases of colonial dehumanisation: that of Sarah Baartman. Baartman was taken to Europe in the early 19th century by a British doctor and paraded as an anatomical freak the “Hottentot Venus,” whom people could see and touch for a fee. Her remains were held in Paris for nearly two centuries before being repatriated to South Africa in 2002.
Historian Professor Siona O’Connell of the University of Pretoria drew a direct parallel between the repatriation of the 63 remains and that of Sarah Baartman, noting that for many Khoi and San communities, the reburial is not a historical footnote it is an act of healing that has been waited for across generations.
But Professor O’Connell also issued a warning that the continent must heed: “The violence of colonialism did not end with independence, and museums and universities in the global north still hold within their walls the evidence of what was taken. Many communities do not yet know what was taken or where it is held. Even where repatriation has begun, the process is often slow, bureaucratic, and shaped by the interests of the holding institution rather than the receiving community.”
The South African Presidency confirmed that the 63 are a small group within thousands of illegally removed remains of indigenous people taken during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The scale of what was stolen is staggering and most of it has not come back. European institutions, despite growing pressure and some notable acts of repatriation, continue to hold vast collections of African human remains, cultural artefacts, and sacred objects removed under the conditions of conquest.
President Ramaphosa addressed this directly, saying: “Even amidst the emergence of serious critiques on the part of these European powers in the late 1970s, many have avoided a deeper reckoning. Some of these countries have apologised for specific atrocities, but in the main, they have fallen short of full, unqualified apologies for colonialism as a whole. As democratic South Africa, we do not linger in the shadow of unspoken apologies or deferred reckonings. We will restore dignity on our own terms.”
The site chosen for the reburial itself carries its own dark history. Kinderlê, the monument just outside Steinkopf, was the site where, in 1867, 32 Nama children were murdered while their parents were away at a church service. The Northern Cape Reburial Task Team chose this site as an act of reconciliation and as a reminder that despite the deep divisions of the past, these communities are one people.
The story of the Khoi and San ancestors is not only South Africa’s story. Across the continent from West Africa to the Great Lakes, from the Horn to the Sahel the bones, masks, crowns, bronzes, and bodies of African peoples remain in foreign institutions, held behind glass or buried in storage rooms. The same ideology that justified digging up Khoi graves in the Northern Cape justified looting Benin City in 1897. The same contempt that turned African bodies into museum exhibits turned African labour into plantation fuel.
The return of these 63 is a beginning, not a conclusion. It is proof that pressure, persistence, and legal frameworks can force open the doors of institutions that would prefer to keep what they hold. But it is also a reminder of how much further there is to go and how much the continent must speak with one voice in demanding full restitution.
As the Chairperson of the South African Heritage Resources Agency expressed at the ceremony: “Today, we are seeing the culmination of a process that sought to restore the human dignity of ancestors that were taken away from this land… exhumed from their graves and taken to foreign lands for scientific and academic research and for display, to be consumed as objects.”
They were not objects. They were not specimens. They were people Khoi, San, African who deserved to rest where they lived, loved, and belonged. On March 23, 2026, sixty-three of them finally did.
