The display of King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s remains earlier this month and the exhibition of the treasures from his tomb in Europe and the United States are utterly disrespectful to his memory and to the dignity of living Africans who trace their heritage to Ancient Egypt.
We pray for King Tut-Ankh-Amen and moan the sacrilege that has visited the continent that we love and call our homeland.
There is something fundamentally morbid about digging graves in search of dispensable information. It may be significant or interesting to know that King Tut-Ankh-Amen was a child king, but of what use was examining his remains to find out how tall he was, and then showing them to the rest of the world? If information was already available in written records, exposing the remains – of a child, mark you – was uncalled for. The spectacle raises questions about moral decency and calls into doubt the Western world’s over-proclaimed respect for the sanctity of human life.
In many African societies, the places reserved for the departed are generally regarded as sacred. From this worldview, the violation of the sanctity of the dead dangerously stretches the patience of the ancestors who respond by demanding costly reparations from the living. This mythical view of life is crucial to the stability of African societies, and was hence one of the firsts target of attack from missionaries and colonial administrators. African societies are still paying the price for the colonial desecration of their public and cultural spaces in form of the environmental degradation and cultural alienation that they continue to confront. For instance, the imposition of Christian burials on the Gikuyu society in Kenya during the colonial period are among the numerous events that are directly or indirectly related to the reduction of the inherent cultural respect for the natural environment. Forests have been decimated on an alarming scale and the lands on which elders are now buried, in accordance with Christian rites, have sometimes become the source of acrimonious and sometimes deadly family disputes over inheritance. Similar histories of the social instability and conflicts stemming from the colonialist desecration of the spaces reserved for ancestors abound in many parts of Africa, demonstrating that individual sanity and social cohesion depend on the respect that the living have for the dead.
On the other hand, the oppression of Africans by Europeans points to the history of the European disrespect for the departed that manifests itself in the fascination with human remains. An example that has been in the press over the last few years is that of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoi woman from South Africa who was humiliated by public display in Britain and France at the turn of the 19th century. When Baartman died in 1815, George Cuvier, under the patronage of Napoleon, dissected her remains, placed her private parts and her brain in jar and left her skeleton on display in the Museum de l’Homme in Paris, where it would remain until the 1970’s. Baartman was subsequently repatriated for burial at the request of the South African government in 2002, but not before Roger-Gerard Schwartzenberg, the French minister in charge of research and culture, insisted in the French Senate that her remains were the property of the French government and were an important research specimen. A similar fate was met by Ishi, a Native American whose brain was placed in the collection of body remains of Native Americans at the Smithsonian in Washington DC.
The audacity of the French minister to disregard public opinion and plain decency is just one illustration of the fact that Euro-America continues to live under the delusion that these disgusting practices benefit mankind by advancing knowledge. Even the man on the street would recognize the research as inherently immoral, reprehensible, and racist. The same proverbial man would also be astounded by the social myopia and intellectual incompetence behind this so-called research. George Cuvier actually used Baartman’s private parts to prove that Africans had no civilization! It is instructive that Cuvier did not follow the requirements of a credible scientific experiment or argument by carrying out the same experiment on a Frenchwoman to show that Europeans were civilized. Yet despite his obvious incompetence and flawed logic, he still enjoys a reputation as a researcher who made important contributions to knowledge.
While Cuvier is referred to as a palaeontologist, a less educated individual who carried out an identical action would be referred to as a “psychopath” or a “serial killer.” The display of human remains that is sanctified by the walls of a museum would be regarded as revolting if found in the home of an individual. These inconsistencies demonstrate that science and the Western academy in general have acquired a quasi-religious status in the Western dominated world, so that actions deemed as criminal and revolting when carried out by less-educated individuals are presented as groundbreaking research when perpetrated by degree-waving individuals in the name of science. In other words, advanced Western degrees are considered a Midas touch that transforms crimes against humanity into the advancement of knowledge.
Native American activist Susan Shown Harjo aptly captured this hypocrisy when she termed the Supreme court’s endorsement [1] of the scientific study of the Ancient One, a Native American ancestor, as “legal fiction” that “human remains are Native American only after the founding of the United States and older ones are ‘archaeological resources’.” The same logic applies here; King Tut-Ankh-Amen becomes fair game for disrespect and trivialization on the grounds that he lived millennia ago before humanity ostensibly began by the advent of the European and American empires and their holy writs on human rights. Thus, European and Arab archaeologists find no ethical problem in digging the tombs of Africans whose lives are safely identified as fixed in the past, yet their home countries would be mortified if Africans suggested studying the remains sheltered in the guarded shrines at Arlington National Cemetery, Westminster Abbey or the Pathéon in Paris. They would also be hostile to us “fondly” calling British monarchs “Beth,” “Vicky,” “Charlie” or “Eddy,” in the same manner that they refer to King Tut-Ankh-Amen as “King Tut.”
In another entry of her column at Indian Country [2], Harjo makes insightful observations that aptly identify the framework within which we can question the ideology and impact of Western archaeology on Africa. In an article titled “Dancing On Graves Of Missing Native Americans,” [3] she observes: “A bunch of white folks are dancing on the graves of Native Americans these days. The bodies are stashed in laboratories and other surrogate tombs, where adults experiment on them and use them on bizarre rituals.”
Harjo’s invocation of “bizarre rituals” is significant, because when applied to the excavation of sites in Africa by Europeans, it reveals that these excavations have no objective or rational justification but are instead motivated by greed and the thirst for power. King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s remains were first unearthed by a greedy Howard Carter in search of precious metals and jewellery in the 1920’s, a process that partially destroyed the remains. Carter’s greed and disrespect have since been minimized as resulting from his inexperience and his un-trained eye, presumably by sympathizers who recognize the pathology of seeking for wealth in the graves, an action which would otherwise carry legal penalties in the European world.
The West’s fascination for sifting through the bones of non-European peoples is also motivated by its ritualistic claim to supremacy that lacks supporting evidence in reality. Ancient Egypt has been particularly uncooperative in this regard because its location on the African continent nullifies white supremacy which almost exclusively depends on the negation of Africans rather than on the supposedly unique achievements of Europe. But unlike in the early twentieth century when films had white actors take on roles as rulers of ancient Egypt, the Western world can no longer get away with blatant whitening of Africa’s mythical and historical figures, especially after scholars such as Senegalese Cheikh Anta Diop and African-American Ivan van Sertima have asserted that the roots of ancient Egypt were indeed African.
The National Geographic inadvertently exposed Euro-America’s current discomfort with the African foundation of Egypt by clarifying that King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s skin tone was impossible to determine with accuracy, and so it had decided to settle for a “medium skin tone.” Meanwhile, the magazine’s front cover carried the rendering of the King’s face with features that are currently privileged in the Eurocentric world and with an obviously artificial skin tone designed to ward off any associations with Africans. The National Geographic’s treatment of King Tut-Ankh-Amen feigns ignorance of the underlying but well-known politics of the interest in the skin tone.
Nevertheless, the magazine’s efforts have been rendered futile by eminent scholars who have challenged the Europeanization and falsification of King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s history. These individuals include the eminent Dr. Mulenga Karenga who wrote a brilliant statement [4] in 2005, and the King Tut Action Committee [5]. The latter group from Philadelphia have constructed a commendable website that provides information and essays that correct the history of ancient Egypt. It also pays homage and respect to our ancestor in a manner that is fitting and that starkly contrasts the King’s treatment at the hands of the European researchers.
The other ritualistic element of Euro-America’s fascination with African tombs lies in its uneasy conscience following its decimation, dispossession and enslavement of non-European peoples. By sifting through the remains of our forebears, the parties concerned hope to find redemption without having to confront us, the living descendants of the people by whose agony the Western world enriched itself. That is how the Bounty Hunter TV star Duane Chapman could come up with the sick idea of being buried in a historical slave burial ground in Washington DC. By the same token, European pseudo-scientists have been occupied with the disengagement of Africa from human history rather than tell living Africans, in plain words and to our faces, that they do not consider themselves bound to treat us with respect as human dignity demands.
We have seen this obsession with the African dead as a means of cleansing the white conscience before. Gerard Soete, the Belgian police officer involved in the assassination of Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba, retained some souvenirs from Lumumba’s remains, which he admitted many years later after supposedly being haunted by his conscience. Last year, Congolese president Denis Sassou Nguesso, with the endorsement of the Catholic Church, exhumed Savorgan de Brazza’s remains in Algiers and reinterred them in Brazzaville at a mausoleum whose foundation stone had been laid by former French president Jacques Chirac. The bizarre move was heralded by the respective heads of government as a means to recognize Brazza as a “humanitarian,” but it was obvious to the casual observer that the charade was a desperate attempt of Sassou Nguesso to remain in France’s good books and of France to reassert its waning hegemony in the area.
The resort to seeking affirmation from the dead is inadvertent sign of desperation and an admission of an inevitable tragic end. Like the politicians seeking to save their diminishing power and influence, the Western academy’s interest in graves is fuelled by the sub-conscious, and in a few cases overt recognition that rationality and the Enlightenment are overrated, for the human mind will never unlock all mysteries in this world. As they dig in the tombs, researchers ritualistically seek “objective” evidence of improvable and profoundly Eurocentric mythologies about civilization and the origin of man.
These efforts are doomed to fail, for there is no way that human beings can isolate the origin of their existence, regardless of what Darwin and his disciples say. The logic for this argument is simple: a petrol-fuelled engine cannot identify when it originated because it did not build itself. It requires a non-machine being, in this case a human one, to accurately identify when it was first built. Following the same logic, we can argue that it takes a non-human to prove where human beings came from. In other words, for human beings to provide “independent” evidence of their origins, they would have to step outside their humanity. The truth inherent in myths of origin lies less in the factual details and more in the acceptance that humanity cannot decipher its own origin, and seeking to do so ultimately results in self-destruction.
But rather than confront the inability to step outside humanity, European scholars and explorers have chosen the easy, albeit brutal, escape route: degrade Africans’ humanity so as to deem Europeans sufficiently “objective” and superior to judge it. The futility of these academic pursuits explains why archaeological studies inevitably end up being racist, for racism is inherently a negation of humanity.
It is no wonder that each “advance” in archaeological knowledge usually leaves Africans feeling short-changed, if not downright insulted. The recovery by Mary and Louis Leakey of evidence of early humanity in Olduvai Gorge did not liberate Africa from the racist image already imposed on it. Instead, it furnished credible evidence for the Western myth that the humanity of Africans is stuck in the past unlike that of Europeans. The Leakey family subsequently derived international fame and political capital from these “discoveries.” A more recent reappearance of the Leakey ghost has been discussed by Steve Sharra [5] in one of his contributions to this website, in which he details the Western media’s attribution of important research by Kenyan Dr Kyalo Manthi to another Leakey descendant.
Harjo is indeed correct to identify studies of human remains as a ritualistic exercise, especially because the scholars concerned still have nothing to show for it. She opens a piece aptly titled “This Isn’t Rocket Science” [6] with the following observation: “White people in the soft sciences have studied Native people to death – and beyond – and what they’re trying to prove is still a mystery. One thing they’ve learned is how to use ‘studies’ to diminish Native people. Another thing they've learned is how to hold on to their collections of Native people for future ‘studies.’” Harjo adds that one of the lamest responses to her scepticism is the “predictable question” as to whether the studies wouldn’t be justified if they led to a cure for diabetes. She then remarks that “in the 27 years since I was first asked that question, there have been no anthropological or archaeological ‘studies’ that have contributed to treating or curing diabetes among Native people.”
If archaeological studies have little scientific or social merit, the question arises as to why the Western elite continues to endorse them. A tentative answer could be found in the fact that white supremacy’s most formidable enemy is death itself. All the theories and institutions that credit European civilization as being superior to every other have not been able to suppress the reality identified by Pius Adesanmi on this website [6] that “Death is the most democratic of human experiences, the great uniter, and the faultless leveler. Distinctions of race, class, creed, nationality, gender, and age are mute in the province of death.” The Western world’s fear of the truth exposed by death explains what Adesanmi describes as the panic of the Euro-American media when faced with hypothetical death, as opposed to real deaths that are being incurred by other people at the hands of American imperialism.
Death's nullification of white supremacy indicates why European societies engage in rituals that equate death with black human beings and comfort with staring in the face of the African dead. The most morbid of these rituals occurred in North America where frenzied white mobs savagely killed solitary or a handful of African Americans. The mobs were not content with the mere stifling of the life of the victims whom they grossly outnumbered. They wrecked such havoc and devastation on the remains as if to ensure that the victims would not be eligible for resurrection at the second coming of Christ, and took pictures for further evidence.
Today, the Western media and charity organizations still paint death as an essentially African phenomenon when they describe it in terms of horrifying statistics that suggest its inexplicable ubiquity on our continent. The French humanitarian organization L’Arche de Zoe, already saddled with kidnapping debacle in Chad, still carries on its website the inflammatory statement that a child in Darfur dies every 5 minutes. It is instructive that the organization has not computed the number of people killed or rendered without food and shelter over time in order to produce a similar statistic about how many Darfurians the militias, with the complacency and support of the Sudanese government, directly or indirectly kill every number of minutes. This framework is similar to describing how many Iraqis die every week rather than how many Iraqis the American-led occupation force kills every week. The reason for this discrepancy is obvious: focus on the killer evokes demands for justice and retribution, while focus on the dead alone suggests that the loss of lives is existential rather than politically and criminally instigated. Focus on the dead substitutes justice for pity and exonerates the killer.
Consequently, the indignity inherent in the treatment of what remains of King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s life says less about him and more about what the Western-oriented academy is trying to hide. It exposes Western epistemology as profoundly flawed and deeply ritualistic despite claims of having superseded the human need for rituals that is expressed in every society. It also calls into question the morality of the institutions making millions of dollars from the spectacle.
But the ancestors are just and have sought retribution. For the breach of human decency, Euro-America is now burdened with an insatiable thirst for power that leads it to not only use science and technology to kill millions of people in increasingly shorter amounts of time, but to also seek illusive redemption in the silence of the dead.
We pray for King Tut-Ankh-Amen and moan the sacrilege that has visited the continent that we love and call our homeland.