Peter Dickson
Eastern Cape sangoma and self-styled direct royal descendant and chief Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka, who hit world headlines four years ago with his British hunt for the head of 19th-century Xhosa King Hintsa, has taken legal action to retrieve the skull from the University of Cape Town (UCT).
But the UCT forensic medicine department’s chief specialist, Professor Deon Knobel, who said this week the matter was “driving me nuts with their persistance in calling it Hintsa’s head when it is the skull of an old white woman”, has handed the whole case over to lawyers.
Gcaleka claimed a skull unearthed in a Scottish garden 60 years ago, to which he had been led in February 1996 through an ancestral vision, was the skull of Hintsa, who was slain and decapitated by British colonial troops in May 1835. But while his triumphant return home was fted by traditionalists, Gcaleka was carpeted by an “embarrassed” Xhosa royal house as an “impostor” and the skull was confiscated and held by Transkei police before being sent for forensic tests
There were more red faces after renowned anthropologists Philip Tobias and Alan Morris finally declared the skull as “looking like a woman, most consistent with native variations of the Hibernian peninsula … and it doesn’t fit the African spectrum”.
Since then, governed by the Human Tissue Act preventing the private possession of human body parts or skeletal remains, the skull has remained in the safekeeping of UCT’s forensic medicine department for use in teaching and research and can legally only be removed to another academic institution.
But Gcaleka, now saying Hintsa’s spirit is still in the skull no matter whose it was, is adamant he wants it back for proper burial. He has engaged the services of attorneys who wrote to Knobel in December that “the fact that the skull was fetched by Chief Gcaleka cannot be in dispute and it can therefore not be disputed that he is the party entitled to possession thereof”.
Knobel says he has repeatedly failed to fathom the reasons behind the latest demand and its threat of legal action against UCT’s forensic medical department, but suspects old-fashioned publicity that he will not give in to “on principle”. He has refused to comment further.
Hintsa is revered in Xhosa history like no other king of the colonial era for the stubborn resistance of British rule that eventually cost him his life in battle with Sir Harry Smith’s forces. The millennium’s first anniversary of his death, May 12, has been chosen especially by the Xhosa Royal Council for the official installation of paramount chief Xolilizwe Sigcawu as the first real king of the Xhosa since the 19th century in a formal break with the colonial and apartheid eras, and to mark the council’s African revival programme.
But the council distanced itself from Gcaleka’s legal action this week, with chief executive officer Zolani Mkiva saying : “We are … not engaged in that battle. The council feels the skull must be taken back to London, but the whole thing is a joke. People fighting over a skull – that’s crazy.”