When most people think about colonialism, they picture stolen gold, enslaved people, rubber plantations, diamonds, and vast territories carved up by European empires. Few realize that one of colonialism’s most disturbing legacies wasn’t buried beneath the ground; it was shipped across the sea in wooden crates. Those crates contained the skulls of Africans, collected by European scientists who believed they could use them to prove racial superiority.
During the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, European scientists, colonial officials, and military officers removed thousands of skulls from graves, battlefields, and the bodies of executed Africans before transporting them to museums and universities across Europe. Their objective was not simply to build collections, but to support a growing body of racial pseudoscience that claimed Africans were biologically inferior and that European domination was therefore natural, even necessary.
One of the methods they embraced was craniometry, the practice of measuring human skulls. Scientists recorded cranial capacity, jaw shape, facial angles, and other physical features, convinced that these measurements could reveal intelligence, morality, and even a person’s capacity for civilization. Today, these theories have been completely discredited, but at the time they were treated as legitimate science and used to justify colonial rule.
Among the pioneers of this movement was the American physician Samuel George Morton, whose collection of more than 1,000 human skulls became one of the largest in the nineteenth century. By measuring their cranial capacity, Morton claimed that white people had the largest average brain size while Africans had the smallest, arguing that these differences reflected intelligence.
Although Morton’s methods were later exposed as deeply flawed and influenced by racial bias, his work became enormously influential, helping to legitimize scientific racism on both sides of the Atlantic and influencing generations of anthropologists and racial theorists
These ideas gave European empires something they desperately needed: a moral excuse for conquest. If Africans could be portrayed as biologically inferior, then colonization could be presented as a civilizing mission instead of what it often was, an enterprise built on violence, exploitation, and theft.
One of the most prominent European figures to embrace these ideas was Rudolf Virchow, the renowned German physician and anthropologist. Although celebrated as the father of cellular pathology, Virchow also amassed one of Europe’s largest collections of human skulls for anthropological research.
Many of these remains were sent to him through Germany’s colonial network, including from present-day Namibia, Tanzania, Cameroon, and Togo. Colonial officials, soldiers, missionaries, and explorers shipped skulls taken from graves, battlefields, and, in some cases, the victims of colonial violence, believing they could be used to classify Africans into racial hierarchies.
One of the most notorious examples of how colonial violence fueled this trade in human remains came during the German genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in present-day Namibia. Between 1904 and 1908, the Herero and Nama rose against German colonial rule after years of land theft, forced labor, and brutal abuse.
In response, Germany dispatched General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order declaring that every Herero found within German territory, whether armed or unarmed, was to be killed or driven into the desert. Tens of thousands of Herero and Nama men, women, and children died from execution, starvation, and thirst, making it one of the first genocides of the twentieth century.
The killings themselves were horrific enough, but what happened afterward revealed how deeply pseudoscience had infected colonial thinking.
German scientists requested skulls from the colony.
Hundreds of human heads were removed and shipped to Germany for racial research. Historical records describe prisoners, many of them women, being forced to scrape flesh from the skulls of murdered relatives using broken glass before the bones were packed into crates and transported to European laboratories.
These remains were studied by anthropologists searching for physical characteristics that supposedly proved African inferiority.
Among those influenced by this work was Eugen Fischer, whose research on race in German South West Africa later became highly influential in Nazi Germany. Fischer’s ideas about racial purity would eventually shape Nazi racial laws decades later.
Germany was not alone
In present-day Tanzania, Mangi Meli, the leader of the Chagga people, resisted German colonial rule until he was captured and publicly executed in 1900. According to historical accounts, his head was removed after his execution, and his skull was sent to Germany for scientific study. More than a century later, descendants and historians have continued searching for his remains.
The Netherlands committed a similar act in present-day Ghana. In 1838, Nana Badu Bonsu II, the king of the Ahanta people in present-day Ghana, was captured after resisting Dutch colonial authority. He was publicly executed, but his punishment did not end there. Dutch officials severed his head, preserved it in a jar of formaldehyde, and transported it to the Netherlands, where it remained in a medical collection for over 170 years.
It wasn’t until 2009 that the Dutch government returned Nana Badu Bonsu II’s head to Ghana. More than a century and a half after his execution, he was finally given the dignity that colonialism had denied him.
The exploitation of African bodies was not limited to skulls alone. Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa, was taken to Europe in the early nineteenth century and exhibited before crowds as a curiosity because of her body.
After her death in 1815, French naturalist Georges Cuvier dissected her remains. Her skeleton, preserved organs, and a plaster cast of her body were displayed in French museums for more than 150 years.
Generations of visitors viewed her not as a woman with a family and a history, but as a specimen supposedly illustrating African difference.
Only in 2002 were her remains finally returned to South Africa for a proper burial after years of campaigning by the South African government.
The Stolen Skulls and the Fight to Bring Them Home
These cases were not isolated incidents. Museums and universities across Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, and other colonial powers built collections containing thousands of human remains taken from Africa. Colonial officials treated skulls as scientific specimens, shipping them alongside archaeological artifacts and botanical samples. Behind every skull was a person with a family, a community, and a history that colonial science chose to ignore.
The greatest irony is that the very science used to justify colonialism has completely rejected the ideas on which it was built. Modern genetics has shown that there is no biological basis for ranking human races by intelligence or worth. The differences that nineteenth-century scientists claimed to find simply do not support the conclusions they reached. What they called science was, in reality, prejudice disguised by measurements and academic language.
Today, African governments continue to demand the return of human remains held in European institutions. Some museums have begun repatriating stolen skulls and skeletons, acknowledging that they were acquired through violence. Many more, however, remain in museum storage rooms, waiting to be identified and returned to their descendants.
Sources:
https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cjssxx/v22y1996i3p387-403.html
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/blog/materials_of_the/
https://www.adomonline.com/badu-bonsu-ii-the-king-whose-head-was-preserved-in-a-jar-in-a-laboratory/
https://shs.cairn.info/revue-mondes-2020-1-page-33?lang=en
https://amp.dw.com/en/skulls-from-german-colonies-offer-dark-lessons-from-the-past/a-66762330
