The University of Strasbourg (Unistra) announced Monday that it had launched a "scientific council" to evaluate its collection of "African human remains" after two requests for "inventory" and "restitution", one of which concerns the Ovaherero genocide by the Germans. One request was made by the province of Moshi, Tanzania, and concerns the Wachagga tribes while the other was addressed by the Namibian "Ovambanderu Genocide Foundation" on possible human remains of the genocide perpetrated by the German imperial troops against the Ovaherero and the Ovambanderu in 1904, Mathieu Schneider said at a press conference. Vice-President of Unistra.
'Restitution process'
The institution has dozens of human remains brought back from Africa during the German imperial period (1871-1918), when Alsace was integrated into the Wilhelmian Reich. The Germans then had several African colonies, including Cameroon, Togo, Tanzania or Namibia, where they were responsible for the massacre of at least 60,000 Herero between 1904 and 1908, which is considered by many historians as the first genocide of the twentieth century. "The University of Strasbourg believes that, politically, it is its duty to initiate this process of restitution", "in full transparency and with the necessary scientific information", insisted Mathieu Schneider.
The task of the scientific council, composed of a dozen specialists from different disciplines (history, sociology, law, ethnology, anatomy, etc.), will be to provide "tangible and scientifically informed" elements as well as to determine "the material, regulatory and diplomatic conditions under which restitution" can take place. The first step will be to carry out "an inventory" to "ensure that the parts that have been identified" so far come from Namibia and Tanzania, said Mathieu Schneider, according to which it is for the moment "difficult" to predict when it will be completed.
See alsoHereros, the memory of a massacred people
According to Aggée Célestin Lomo Myazhiom, sociologist at Unistra and member of the committee, "potentially thirty" human remains (skulls, femurs...) could correspond to the requests. Once this inventory is completed, it will also be necessary to remove a "regulatory" difficulty, said Mathieu Schneider, since in the current French law, the university heritage, which includes these remains, is "inalienable and imprescriptible" and can not be transferred, unless an ad hoc law.