‘It is perfectly true that Mr. Jameson did procure the head and neck of a native, which he sent to England to be embalmed. I have myself seen this head in a glass case at the house of Mrs Jameson in London. It is not a mere skull, but a preserved head, with the skin and hair upon it.53 The facts in connexion with this incident are these: A native with whom we were all well acquainted was shot and killed by an Arab. Mr. Jameson sent some soldiers to get the body and bring it into camp. This was done, and Mr. Jameson then had the head cut off, packed in salt, boxed, and shipped to London. When it arrived here it was handed over to Messrs. Rowland Ward and Co., of Piccadilly, who dressed the head for Mr. Jameson’s representatives. While at the house of Mrs. Jameson upon one occasion she showed me the curiosity, asking me as she did so “Do you know this gentleman?” I replied “Yes, I know him well. I have shaken hands with him many times.” […] It will thus be seen that Mr. Jameson was inclined to carry his scientific researches to an unusual point, and this fact will to a great extent explain the cannibal incident.’54
Considering how common the collecting of heads from Africa was, it is evident that it was the ‘cannibal incident’ that sowed doubts about the unhealthy and obsessive nature of Jameson’s so-called ‘scientific researches’. The involvement of Ward’s taxidermist business is also noteworthy and may very well have served to further undermine any pretence that Jameson had been acting under a genuine impulse of rational inquiry. Jameson’s fully-preserved head was not, however, as unusual as might be assumed and similar specimens were until recently held in both Dutch and Portuguese collections. The skeleton and body cast of Sarah Baartman, the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’, who was exhibited both before and after her death as a sort of ethnographic freak show, was also on display in a museum in France right up the 1970s. It is not known what eventually happened with the head Jameson sent his wife, but given that she complained about its smell it is quite possible she did not keep it for long.
A few years after the Jameson scandal, a somewhat similar case occurred in South Africa, following the suppression of the Bechuana War of 1897. Luka Jantje, a Tswana chief and one of the leaders of the rebellion, was killed and when his body was later disinterred so that his wives could identify him, a British officer present supposedly said ‘I’d like that fellow’s skull’, and offered a private soldier money to retrieve it.55 Soon after local newspapers reported on the story:
‘Early next morning some Volunteers were out for a stroll, when they discovered that the grave had been opened afresh, and a private in one of the Cape town corps was engaged in severing Luka’s head from the trunk. He had no proper scientific appliance, and the reader may be spared the details of how he devoted himself to the task. Suffice it to say that the Volunteers saw him dislocate the head and carry it away. They expressed to him their disgust, and he replied that he was acting “under orders,” and would receive £5 from an officer for the trophy.’56
With its unwholesome element of grave-robbing, in addition to trophy-taking, the incident caused a scandal in Cape Town where ‘people remembered the shudder with which the white people of South Africa heard of the mutilation of bodies of men, women and children by the Mashones and Matabele.’57 Rather than the act itself, it was accordingly the way that a white man’s actions reminded people of atrocities ascribed to the enemy in the recently-concluded rebellion that gave cause for concern. An official inquiry, however, failed to identify the officer responsible for the theft of the head and the case was eventually dropped. The commentary in the newspapers of the time is nevertheless noteworthy, as it gives some indication of a more qualified acceptance of the collecting of body parts within the Empire:
‘The only gleam of satisfaction to be derived from this unhappy business is that there has been very little disposition in any quarter to treat it lightly. A few years ago it might have been different. During the first Matabele war the jawbone of a native chief who was shot while attempting to escape from custody was exhibited at a large drapery establishment here without exciting the slightest protest. I fancy the public failed to realise what this gruesome relic really implied, and certainly the idea that it could only have been obtained by the mutilation of the dead did not readily suggest itself to them, or more might have been heard of it. The practice of collecting heads for scientific purposes has, of course, been very common in Africa. Stanley relates that Schweinfurth boiled the heads of the slain at Mombuttu to prepare skulls for the British Museum. Emin Pasha proposed once to do the same on the coastward march with Stanley, and when the latter protested, he smilingly retorted, “All for science.” In the case of Luka Jantje’s head no such excuse can be pleaded; and the effect of this incident is from every point of view to be deplored.’58
Without the justification of scientific inquiry, however perfunctory, the furtive theft of a head was clearly beyond the pale, especially in a settler colony where such acts would recoil on the European population. The officer who took the head was never formally identified, but rumours had it that when he was later recommended for a Victoria Cross, following his service in the South African War, the story of the head came back to haunt him, and the medal was never conferred. Years later, when the officer had been forced to find work as a shift boss in a mine, the skull of Luka Jantje was allegedly still adorning the wall of his room.59
In 1898, the Sudan Campaign reached its bloody climax with Lord Kitchener’s crushing victory over the Dervishes at the Battle of Omdurman. Afterwards, the tomb of the Mahdi was deliberately destroyed and the body of the Muslim religious leader thrown into the Nile. In 1885, the Mahdi had killed and beheaded Charles Gordon, the Victorian imperial hero par excellence, and Kitchener’s victory was thus regarded as a righteous act of retribution. The campaign had been covered extensively by embedded journalists, including a young Winston Churchill, and for the first time since Russell’s reportage from the ‘Mutiny’, the conduct of the British military came under close and critical scrutiny. In one particularly devastating article, the journalist Ernest N. Bennett claimed that the wounded Dervishes on the battlefield of Omdurman had either been killed or left to die, while civilians in the vicinity had been indiscriminately fired on by artillery. The most striking accusation, however, was Bennett’s description of Kitchener’s destruction of the Mahdi’s tomb:
‘Yet at the close of the nineteenth century a British commander, not content with desecrating a tomb, actually orders a dead man’s body to be torn out of its grave! The embalmed body of the Mahdi was dug up, the head wrenched off, and the trunk cast into the Nile. It is almost incredible that the disinterment and mutilation of a dead body which had lain in the grave for more than ten years should have been possible under a General whom “Christian” England is now delighting to honour! The act is nothing more or less than a return to the barbarism of the Middle Ages.’60
There had earlier been rumours that the skull of the Mahdi was on its way to the Royal College of Surgeons, and George Bernard Shaw had even decried this as an example of ‘Tartar-like savagery’.61 The skull, however, never materialised and the British press was occupied by celebrating Kitchener’s victory and commenting on the inter-imperial rivalry that manifested itself in the Fashoda Incident soon thereafter in 1898. Bennett’s claims nevertheless re-ignited public interest in the actions of Kitchener and the accusations caused a sensation in Britain in early 1899. For months discussions of Kitchener’s conduct permeated both the press and the Government. The liberal politician John Morley made the memorable comment: ‘You send your soldiers to civilise savages. Take care the savages do not barbarise your soldiers.’62 The Manchester Guardian newspaper made a very similar point:
‘It is, we believe, quite “exceptional” for a British general to insult a dead body. These things are done by savages, but they hardly form a suitable beginning for the lessons in civilisation which we are to teach the Soudanese. Indeed it may be doubted whether, after all that has been said about our civilising mission, public opinion in this co
untry has yet been educated up to calm acquiescence in such a measure.’63
Kitchener eventually ended up having to explain himself personally to Queen Victoria in a highly contrite letter in March 1899. ‘When I returned to Fashoda’, he claimed, ‘the Mahdi’s skull, in a box, was brought to me, and I did not know what to do with it. I had thought of sending it to the College of Surgeons where, I believe, such things are kept. It has now been buried in a Moslem cemetery.’64 The Queen accepted Kitchener’s profuse apologies and even concurred with the decision to destroy the Mahdi’s tomb, lest it should become a pilgrimage site and inspire another outburst of ‘fanaticism’. As for the treatment of his body, however, it ‘savours in the Queen’s opinion, too much of the Middle Ages.’65
For all intents and purposes, the Queen’s reply should have signalled the end of the matter. Some two decades later, however, the British poet and writer, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, published his diaries in which a very different version of events emerged. Blunt noted in his diary entry for April 1899 that he had met an officer, referred to only as D—, who provided the details:
‘The mutilation of the body seems all to have come of a mere bit of rowdy nonsense on the part of certain young English officers. [D—] says it has long been a custom with the members of White’s Club who are in the army to bring back trophies from any wars they may be engaged in and present them to the club. He, D—, had jokingly proposed to E—W—to bring back the Mahdi’s toenails from the coming campaign. Kitchener, on this hint, seems to have fancied having the Mahdi’s head for himself to make an inkstand of, and gave Gordon the order to dig the body up and keep the head for him. This accordingly was done, and at the same time fingernails were taken by some of the young officers, but they got to talking about it at Cairo and hence the trouble.’66
This was, in Blunt’s opinion, ‘revolting—a piece of military revenge for the death of Gordon,’ and the poet even questioned whether the skull had in fact been buried at Wadi Halfa, as Kitchener claimed. A newspaper report from February 1899 actually asserted that the Mahdi’s skull had been exhibited at a gathering in London of the conservative Primrose League, ‘amid the frantic applause of the knights and dames of the Tory organisation.’67 Considering this, it is quite difficult to say with any certitude where the Mahdi’s skull actually ended up.
For all the controversy and royal involvement, Kitchener’s purloining of the Mahdi’s skull would not have become an issue purely on its own merits. It came, however, right on the tail of extensive accusations of various atrocities, including the killing of wounded enemies and civilians, in addition to the destruction of the Mahdi’s tomb, all of which Kitchener’s numerous political enemies were only too happy to exploit. In the debacle concerning the Mahdi’s skull, the intimate relationship between the racialised logic of colonial warfare and the treatment of the enemy’s body nevertheless became particularly explicit. At a time when the rules of war were being codified for conflict between ‘civilised’ nations, ‘uncivilised’ people were explicitly excluded from the protection provided by law. As a wartime correspondent, Winston Churchill participated in the Battle of Omdurman, and he later confirmed the reports that British soldiers had indeed killed many of the enemy wounded afterwards. Churchill was neither sentimental nor particularly critical of the Empire, and his explanation for the atrocities is noteworthy—namely the way British troops perceived their enemies:
‘The unmeasured terms in which the Dervishes had been described in the newspapers, and the idea which had been laborious circulated, of “avenging Gordon,” had inflamed their passions, and had led them to believe that it was quite correct to regard their enemy as vermin—unfit to live. The result was that there were many wounded Dervishes killed.’68
The matter of the Mahdi’s skull was raised again following the final battle of the 1906 uprising in South Africa, when it was rumoured that not only had wounded Zulus been killed, but the body of their leader, Bambhata, had also been decapitated by colonial forces. Much as had been the case at Omdurman, any atrocities were blamed on local auxiliaries rather than regular British soldiers. The military authorities, however, did confirm that the head of Bambhata had indeed been cut off:
‘It was intimated to the officer commanding the troops that the dead body of Bambaata was lying at the bottom of a gorge about 2000 feet below the camp, and as it was most essential that it should be ascertained definitely whether Bambaata was really killed or not, Major Platt, Native Medical Corps, with a number of natives, was sent down to bring up the body for the purpose of identification. On reaching the spot where the body lay it was found to be in an advanced stage of decomposition., and as the natives refused to carry it to camp decapitation was absolutely necessary to ensure definite identification by responsible persons acquainted with Bambaata. The head was not exhibited, but was kept covered and in privacy under an armed guard, and was only shown to persons who stated that they knew Bambaata intimately and would be able to recognise him.’69
When the report was read out in the House of Commons, the Irish MP William Redmond posed the obvious question: namely whether it was ‘conceivable for a single moment that if it had been a white foe his body would have been so treated?’ Churchill, who had since become a politician after his days as a wartime correspondent, caused a slight shock with his pugnacious contribution to the debate: ‘Mr. Churchill said he was afraid that the British Government were not in the best position with regard to the decapitation. Hon. members would remember that under the late Administration after the battle of Omdurman the body of the Mahdi was treated most shamefully.’70 The political agenda behind Churchill’s intervention was an obvious jab at his political opponents, and the affair of the Mahdi’s skull had evidently not been forgotten and could still be used to great effect in debates in Parliament. Churchill’s final salvo was received with cheers: ‘I do not consider the steps taken by the officer in Natal were half so discreditable to civilisation as the steps taken in regard to the Mahdi.’71 The political debates nevertheless obscured the fact that there was little real concern about the fate of Bambatha’s head. Later photographic evidence suggests that the head was, in fact, kept as a trophy, and there are also indications that British officers had also taken cuttings of the chief’s hair as souvenirs.72
* * *
Almost a century after Europeans first began hunting for skulls in South Africa, little had changed within the British Empire. Duane Spencer Hatch, who later became secretary of the YMCA, described his experience during the Waziristan Campaign on the Northwest Frontier in 1917, with his friend Sherman:
‘We passed the remains of the twenty-seven stalwart Mahsuds who had been killed by the Londoners in the first skirmish. We camped about eight miles beyond there that night. Sherman was all excited. Besides being a clergyman, he had one year of medical school and it was his desire to go back to college and finish his medical course. Every doctor, he told me, always wanted to have a mounted skull in his office. Now these giant Mahsuds had the finest heads anyone had ever seen in all the world. He wanted one of those skulls, as I suppose every medical officer who passes them did. But not one of the others would entertain the indiscretion of touching one.’73
Sherman asked for permission from his superiors and when this was denied, he secretly left the camp on a bicycle early next morning, as Hatch recounted it:
‘About ten o’clock he returned sweating like a horse, a sizable gunnysack bundle tied on the handle bars. He went straight to his bed-roll and wrapped the bundle in it. He could hardly wait to tell me, “I had great luck; but I’m going to be a bit selfish with you as one of the two heads has the skull cracked in a bit, but you’re not a medic and won’t mind. I cut off some other rare bones, too, very important for medical demonstration.”’74
The racialisation of non-white people was accordingly not invariably negative and the warlike tribesmen of India’s frontier regions, for instance, were positively constructed as ‘martial races’ and considered well-su
ited for military service, much as high-caste Brahmins had been prior to 1857. The valorisation of some indigenous people, however, did not prevent their bodies from being mutilated in the name of ‘science’ or simply as souvenirs. As long as those who resisted imperialism were not white, and were not recognised as ‘civilised’, their bodies were not protected by the conventional observances regarding the respect and treatment of enemy dead.
During the numerous military campaigns within the British Empire that lasted well into the 1960s, the mutilation of the bodies of the enemy also continued unabated. During the 1931 Saya San Rebellion in Burma, the heads of rebels were cut off so that they could be identified—much as had been the case with Bambhata in 1906.75 This procedure, either improvised or formalised, was repeated during the bloody conflicts of decolonisation, including the Malaya Emergency 1948–60 and the suppression of the Mau Mau in Kenya 1952–60.76 Such practices were by no means limited to British colonial forces: Soldiers from the Spanish Foreign Legion, for instance, collected both heads and ears as trophies during the Rif War in Morocco in the early 1920s, and as late as the 1970s, the Portuguese routinely decapitated the bodies of insurgents.77 During the war in the Pacific War, American soldiers collected skulls and other trophies from Japanese bodies on an unprecedented scale, and skulls taken during that conflict, as well as the Korean War and the Vietnam War, are to this day kept in private homes and various institutions in the US.78 As events in places like Iraq and Afghanistan within recent decades have shown, the humiliation and desecration of the body of the enemy, whether dead or alive, is hardly a thing of the past—even though trophies today are more likely to be taken in the form of digital photos or video footage rather than physical souvenirs.79 In the twenty-first century, we would nevertheless do well to question self-righteous assertions of cultural superiority when the savagery we ascribe to others so often serves simply as a pretext for a savagery of our own.
The Skull of Alum Bheg Page 27
