Why UK museums aren't handing back human remains, despite calls to do so

Independent

19-03-2025

The display of human remains in museums has long been a contentious issue. Last week, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations (APPG-AR) published a report on the African human remains collected by British museums during, and due to, colonialism and the slave trade.
Introduced by the MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy (the APPG-AR's chair), and produced by Afford (The African Foundation for Development), the publication of the report, Laying Ancestors to Rest, is another high-profile and meaningful intervention in an area where developments now seem inevitable.
The report makes a number of recommendations. First, that the sale of human remains should be made illegal in the UK. It also suggests that the Human Tissue Act of 2004 should be amended to make stipulations about remains older than 100 years.
This would include banning their public display without consent from the Human Tissue Authority and ensuring that museums obtain a licence from the authority for their storage. It's further recommended that the UK parliament's culture, media and sport committee should launch an inquiry into restitution.
Laying Ancestors to Rest should be welcomed. It seems likely to be successful in achieving at least one of its recommendations. Calling for a ban on the trade in human remains in Britain, as the report does, is not particularly controversial.
However, the report's blanket approach towards banning the display of human remains without consent is, in the present environment, unlikely to succeed.
The report itself hints at the reasons for this. The success of its recommendations rests on the financial health of the UK's museum landscape. Resources matter, not least in terms of the relationships which those resources allow museums to build.
Instead of a blanket response, developments in this area are likely to be piecemeal – both due to the significant effort required to carry out the task effectively and the limited resources many museums have to do so. In that sense, it is unclear whether calling for a blanket ban now is all that useful, other than as a wake-up call.
This point is not to absolve museums for their historical part in this situation. It is though, to argue that work in understanding the collections of human remains held by British museums – where they come from, who they might belong to – has, at times (and certainly not in all circumstances), been happening. It is also to clarify what the often slow-paced norms of effective understanding and restitution are.
In 2020, for example, the University of Oxford 's Pitt Rivers Museum removed its well-known collection of tsantsa (shrunken heads) from display. The removal happened with a view to working with Shuar and Achuar delegates to decide on the best way forward with regard to the care and display of the human remains. That work continues.
A few years earlier, Laura Peers, then curator of the Americas collections at the museum, wrote about the slow, quiet and bureaucratic process of returning a single femur 'collected by a missionary as a medical curiosity, from an Indigenous nation with whom I have longstanding professional and personal relationships'.
Such work is, when it happens, painstaking and careful. Even with the best of intentions, it is not a fast process.
Funding restitution
The often-halting nature of that work is likely to continue. Museum professionals – particularly newer museum professionals – know that this work has to happen and are, I would argue, in large part invested in doing it.
In a contemporary funding environment marked by almost continuous cuts, even the most dedicated staff will find their actions curtailed. They may, in some cases, be able to remove remains from display, as the report recommends (and as the Pitt Rivers Museum has done).
However, securing consent for the limited display of mummified Egyptian bodies, for instance, will be challenging. Without funding, it is difficult to build the relationships necessary for conversations about consent, ownership and restitution.
In his afterword to the report, Dan Hicks of the University of Oxford writes that 'this is a time of immense hope and optimism for British museums'. The problem is that that hope in part rests on the funding that he also admits has been subject to 'austerity and swingeing cuts'.
The contradiction is not difficult to see – particularly when the report's recommendations are similar to the 2018 one written for French collections by cultural researchers Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy.
The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics, which was commissioned by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has been widely read. It has catalysed thinking beyond current international legal norms when it comes to restitution.
Yet progress on the goal of restitution even in France has been slow, at least in part due to the time involved in building the new relationships that the report calls for. There is also the question of whether attitudes regarding restitution within African countries are consistent. By February 2024, France had returned only 26 objects to Benin and one (a sword) to Senegal.
Worse still, the legislative picture across British collections remains complex. Collections such as the Pitt Rivers Museum have been able to move on restitution because they are university collections. As such, they are subject to different legislation than 'national' collections such as the British Museum or the V&A, which were established by acts of parliament and are funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
As the V&A's director, Tristram Hunt, recently wrote, the UK's national museums remain in 'debilitating stasis' on restitution. Hunt argues that this is the case because these collections are hampered by the proscriptions of the 1983 National Heritage Act. That act – by rule or by choice, dependent on your view – effectively forbids such collections from disposing of objects, including human remains.
As Laying Ancestors to Rest recommends, this situation needs to change. The likelihood is, however, that any change will come more slowly and with more deliberation even than the report itself acknowledges is necessary.
Progress on this issue is by no means impossible. But without real political will and without the money to back it up, a blanket approach to the display and restitution of human remains in British museums remains difficult to enforce.