Eddie Koch
Griqua leaders have sent a letter to President Nelson Mandela to back demands for the bones of a 19th-century chief to be returned and reburied after they were dug up by researchers from Wits University more than 30 years ago. The Griqua National Conference this week sent a statement to M&G saying it had asked Mandela to support its calls for the remains of Chief Cornelius Kok I to be returned from the Wits Medical School where they are now being stored. Griqua representative Kate Cloete says the chief’s bones, exhumed in 1961 for academic purposes, had not been returned even though an agreement was made at the time that the remains would be reburied after the completion of the scientific studies. Professor Phillip Tobias, the paleo-anthropologist who led the team from Wits that exhumed the body, says the skeleton had been removed with the `full blessing’ of Captain Adam Kok IV — then chief of the Griqua community at Campbell in the Northern Cape — and the university was willing to return the bones to the Griqua community at Campbell. Tobias says the skeleton of Chief Cornelius Kok II — not Cornelius Kok I as reported by the Griqua organisation — was exhumed and removed to the university’s anatomy department after he had given an undertaking to Abraham Kok that `when the studies were completed the skeleton would, in due course, be returned to him and his people’. The bones have been studied by Tobias’s post-graduate student, Alan Morris. The findings were recently published in the book entitled Skeletons of Contact. `Steps are now being taken to send the skeleton back to the Campbell Griqua community,’ says Tobias.