By Princess Eugene Majuru
At the heart of Britain’s museums lie stories no one really wants to tell. Locked in storerooms behind closed doors are not just objects — but the remains of ancestors, full people reduced by colonial power into catalogued specimens. For Prof Dan Hicks, the way forward demands more than apology. It demands reckoning: transparency, truth-telling, and return.
From Bronzes to Bones: The Turn in Hicks’s Work
Dan Hicks first became widely known for his rigorous critique of museum colonialism via looted art — most famously with the Benin Bronzes. But over recent years, his focus has sharpened in a more uncomfortable direction: human remains. In his 2021 piece “Necrography: Death-Writing in the Colonial Museum”, he argues that museums should treat ancestral remains not as inert objects, but as human subjects, acknowledging how they were collected, why, and what it means to still hold them.
He coined the term necrography to describe this process of documenting death within colonial museums — a forensic “death writing” that surfaces histories of violence, dispossession, and ongoing power.
Why It’s More Than a Moral Ask — It’s Structural
According to Hicks, many museums simply don’t know the full provenance of the human remains in their collections — who they belonged to, how they were acquired, or under what conditions. This is not merely a gap in record-keeping: it reflects how intimate violence was normalized in colonial collecting — turning the dead into “objects of knowledge.”
Hicks calls for three major shifts:
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Full, public disclosure — museums must open their inventories, make transparent what human remains they hold, and alongside that, publish provenance data.
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Collaborative investigation — descendant communities must be invited in, not just as petitioners, but as co-researchers, with their oral histories, spiritual concerns, and local knowledge taken seriously.
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Mechanisms for return — that means true repatriation when possible, but also other models (loans, joint curatorship, shared research) when immediate return is not feasible.
The Stakes Are High — and the Obstacles Real
Hicks’s vision is powerful, but delivering it is not easy. There are legal, financial, and institutional hurdles — and not all museums are willing or able to act.
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Funding and capacity: Provenance research is slow, delicate, and requires resources. Even well-meaning museums struggle: recent reporting suggests that UK institutions lack the funds to dig into their human remains collections the way Hicks proposes.
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Legal constraints: In the UK, some of the biggest national museums face statutory limits on disposal. For example, the British Museum Act restricts what can be deaccessioned.
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Ethical concerns: Not all return is straightforward. Some critics worry about the loss to science, or about what happens to remains repatriated to communities with limited capacity for storage, reinterpretation, or memorialization.
Yet, Hicks is uncompromising — these barriers are not reasons to delay, but exactly the places where institutional change must happen.
Momentum Is Building — Political, Public, Ethical
Hicks’s arguments are gaining traction in public and political spheres:
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In March 2025, British MPs called for an end to the public display of ancestral remains in UK museums, and urged repatriation wherever possible.
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The All-Party Parliamentary Group on African Reparations recommended creating a national advisory body to make return claims.
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Against this backdrop, smaller repatriation successes are already happening: for instance, the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum has agreed to return ancestral human remains — including Khoi and San remains — to South Africa in a formal ceremony.
These developments show that Hicks’s call is not just academic — it’s shaping policy, activism, and institutional reform.
Beyond Return: Reimagining Museums
One of the most radical aspects of Hicks’s work is how he redefines what a museum is. He argues that museums should not be neutral repositories. Instead, they should become sites of conscience — places that actively reckon with colonial violence and make space for grief, restoration, and relationship.
For descendant communities, that could mean co-curated exhibitions, funerary rituals, or even burial. For the public, it invites a deeper reckoning: understanding empire not just as historical theft of objects, but as ongoing harm to the dignity of ancestors.
In his paper, Hicks warns that necrography must not become a mere bureaucratic inventory exercise. He cautions against it becoming “yet another form of self-serving inventory … something at which museums are so skilled.” For him, the goal is not just documentation — it’s transformation.
The Human Afterlife of Empire
At its core, Dan Hicks’s intervention is a moral challenge. What does it mean to hold someone’s skull, their bones, halfway across the world? What responsibility do museums have not just to the dead, but to the living — to their descendants, their communities, their memories?
By naming the problem as necrography, Hicks forces us to confront not just history, but the “afterlives” of imperial violence. And by demanding transparency, collaboration, and return, he points toward a future where museums do more than collect — they repair.
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