Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobwilliamroy | Hacker News Reader

The european colonists fucked the place so bad that now the only way to learn about the indigenous people is to desecrate their burial sites, further destroying their culture and identity. Now WE are the experts, and they're just bones in a museum basement. I think it's disgusting.

View on HN

> desecrate their burial sites, further destroying their culture and identity

"Desecration" is not an objective concept. If the local people no longer remember that burial and regard it as sacred – and in the absence of written sources, seven centuries is enough to sunder any living link between a historical population and the population currently inhabiting a place – it is hard to claim that damage is being done here. Also, Africa has seen population movements, such as the Bantu Expansion, by which peoples living in a place today may not be the descendants of those uncovered by archaeologists at all.

This also isn’t something that foreigners are doing uniquely to Africa. Graves from this era regularly get dug up by archaeologists across Europe. How else do you think we know so much about the impact of the Mongol invasion and the Black Death on European settlements?

I don't think such information is worth violating the final wishes of our elders. I doubt any of those people died thinking that someone was going to come to rifle through their belongings and put them in a drawer.

That's valid, it's just a minority view. Most societies aren't willing to interfere with recent graves without good cause, but few have any great concern for exhuming very old graves.

In Africa, Belgium's presence in the Congo was particularly vicious. Then there's the Spanish in Central America, and the Tasmanian genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians

That's not true. Most of the iron smelting cultures in Africa dissolved on their own without European interference.

The site is from the 14th century. Europeans came to central Africa in the 15th century when there were still many well organized kingdoms and societies there. European interference in terms of guns and the slave trade was a major part of these cultures dissolving.

The GP is presumably referring to the Ghana and Mali Empires, which did arise in large part through ironworking, and then declined due to internal strife some time before European colonialism took off in the region (the former empire collapsed centuries before the Europeans arrived).

I was thinking more of the kingdoms of Kongo[0] and Benin[1] that are geographically closer to present day Gabon.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Kongo#First_Kongo-P...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Ashanti_wars

History has a lot to teach us. By not examining burial sites knowledge is lost. The spirits who's bodies are buried have moved on don't get stuck on form or belief that culture is static. Ignoring a culture is probably more disgusting.

Desecrating a burial site, rifling through a person's belongings, exposing their body to the elements and moving them to away from their preferred resting place to a basement. I think that this constitutes ignoring a culture.

why does no-one point out the constant and enduring slaving of central Asia in these discussions.. for centuries ! the Western EUs were hardly the only slavers, they are just more wealthy now..

My guess is that you cannot get hard-currency reparations from poor people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com