Brazil fights Harvard to reclaim African rebel's skull after 190 years

The Guardian

05-03-2025

In January 1835, wearing religious robes and carrying amulets inscribed with prayers and passages from the Qur'an, hundreds of African Muslims staged the most significant urban slave revolt in the more than 350 years of slavery in Brazil.
About 600 Malês – as Muslims of Yoruba origin were known – attempted to seize control of Salvador, the capital of the Bahia state and then the country's second most important city, but were ultimately defeated by the police, who killed 70 rebels.
Shortly afterwards, the skull of one of the fallen rebels was taken to the US, where, after being used in eugenics studies that sought to prove so-called 'scientific' racist theories, it ended up in Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, where it remains to this day.
Now, 190 years later, the skull – believed to be that of an unidentified leader of the uprising – may finally return to Brazil.
'He is our brother and deserves to be buried under Islamic rites,' said Sheikh Abdul Hameed Ahmad, 74, leader and founder of the Bahia Islamic Cultural Centre. 'It doesn't matter if it's a skull, if it's part of a body; he's a Muslim, and we must honour him,' he added.
Ahmad is part of a group called Arakunrin, meaning brother in Yoruba, that has been working on the repatriation for the past two years.
The skull's existence was only revealed in 2022 in a book by historian Christopher DE Willoughby and an article in the Harvard Crimson, which reported that the university holds the human remains of at least 19 individuals who were likely enslaved in the US, the Caribbean and Brazil.
A Harvard committee admitted that 'skeletal remains were utilised to demonstrate spurious and racist differences to confirm existing social hierarchies and structures', and recommended they should be returned to descendant communities or repatriated.
The leading researcher on the Malê revolt, Brazilian historian João José Reis, contacted former colleagues at Harvard, where he had taught as a visiting professor in 2012. 'But over the past two years, the Peabody Museum has systematically delayed the repatriation negotiations,' he said.
Reis, Ahmad and the other researchers in the Arakunrin group then turned to Brazil's ministry of foreign affairs, which joined the negotiations with Harvard at the end of 2024. 'That's when the talks finally started to move forward,' Reis said.
Everything known about the skull comes from the man who removed it from a hospital in Bahia and took it to Boston: Gideon T Snow.
In a brief yet heavily eugenicist text, he wrote that the it belonged to a 'genuine African, of the Nagô tribe [as the Yoruba were also known in Bahia], esteemed above all other blacks for their tall stature, breadth of shoulders, symmetry and strength of limb, united to an intelligence not usually found among the blacks of other tribes. This was the tribe which revolted here last January (1835), and this was one of the chiefs in the affair. He was killed after a most desperate contest, the courage of this tribe being fully equal to their herculean strength.'
According to historian Bruno Veras, also an Arakunrin member, Snow was a US diplomat who was also involved in the Brazilian sugar trade, which depended on enslaved labour. 'From the clues in the documentation, it appears that he stole the man's head from the hospital while it was still 'fresh,'' said Veras.
Once the skull is returned, researchers plan to conduct a DNA test to verify whether he was indeed of Yoruba origin. 'A grave robber is hardly a morally reliable person, right?' said Reis.
The condition of the skull is still unknown – whether it has teeth, for example, which could be helpful for the DNA test – because Harvard has refused to share images with the researchers. A spokesperson for the university said they would not discuss the repatriation and that 'as a matter of policy, we do not share images of any remains'.
The Malê skull is not the only Brazilian one in the university's possession: even less is known about a second one – only that it consists of 'cranial human remains from an individual … exhumed from the 'streets of Rio de Janeiro'', according to the Harvard committee.
In meetings, the university has stated that it intends to send both skulls together under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. For this, Harvard has requested clarification on which legitimate descendant community will receive the remains – something that is clear in the Malê case but not for the other skull. As a result, there is no timeline for when the repatriations might take place.
However, the Arakunrin group members remain optimistic that the skulls will be returned this year, coinciding with the 190th anniversary of the revolt.
'The Malê Revolt is important not only for Muslims or for Brazil, but for the world because it is a story of resistance to slavery,' said Sheikh Ahmad, who is of Yoruba origin, born in Nigeria, and living in Bahia since 1992.
Hannah Romã Bellini Sarno, a researcher of Muslim identity and another Arakunrin member argues that there is a much greater symbolism in giving the Malê skull a religious funeral.
'During the period of slavery, funeral rituals were denied not only to him but to so many other Africans who were in Brazil and died without the spiritual care they deserved,' she said.