PROF MALEMA, Gaborone | Thursday
THE body of an African warrior, preserved, stuffed, boot-blacked, and on show in Spain for close to 100 years, has returned to Botswana for burial.
Known simply as El Negro (the black), the body of the unknown soldier was taken from a grave by two French taxidermists in 1830 and in 1916 was put on display at the Darder museum in the town of Banyoles in the Spanish province of Catalonia, where it became a prime tourist draw.
Pressure for the body to be returned mounted after Haitian doctor Alphonse Arcelin, resident in Spain, complained to the United Nations in 1992 at the undignified treatment of the remains.
”Botswana was angered by the way he was displayed like a stuffed antelope,” said Botswana Foreign Minister Mompati Merafhe. ”The indignity of what they were doing did not concern those men.”
Arcelin’s 1992 complaint was followed by a bitter row in Banyoles between those in favour of repatriating the exhibit and those who wanted to keep it.
Last February the town council agreed that he should return to Botswana for burial, and Banyoles mayor Pedro Bosch acknowledged that ”it was not fitting that in a developed western community a human being of a black race should be exhibited like a museum piece.”
The exact place of origin of El Negro has not been determined, although he was originally referred to as El Bechuana or Motswana (inhabitant of what was then Bechuanaland), and efforts to trace his descendants have been unsuccessful.
Jules and Edouard Verraux, the two French brothers who transported the body to Europe, said it was the body of a Bechuana chief who had died of pneumonia or some other disease.
”More prominent accounts are that El Negro was a Bushman of the Kalahari whose body was stolen from the grave and transported to France in 1830,” Lieutenant General Merafhe said.
The remains are to be buried in Tsholofelo Park, 4km from the centre of Botswana’s soon-to-be revamped capital, Gaborone. – AFP