Remains of San couple return to SA from Austria

THE remains of a San couple, Klaas and Trooi Pienaar, will be returned to South Africa after their bodies were dug up and taken to Austria by anthropologist and ethnographer Rudolph Pöch over 100 years ago.

Today, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where the remains were kept, will hand over the remains of the Pienaar couple over to South African Minister of Arts and Culture Joseph Phaahla. Phaahla is accompanied by his deputy, Walter Sauer, Cecil de Fleur of the National Khoi-San Consultative Conference, and traditional healer Petrus Vaalbooi. Vaalbooi had performed a cleansing ritual at a private function held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on April 17. The Pienaar remains will be flown to Johannesburg, and from there taken in a South African Defence Force helicopter to the Northern Cape where they will be reburied near where they were originally exhumed on a farm near Kuruman in 1909. In a joint press statement by the South African embassy in Vienna, the Austrian Ministries of Science and Research and European and International Affairs, the Natural History Museum and the Southern African Documentation and Co-operation Centre, the exhumation and expatriation of the Pienaar remains ignited protests by their relatives, which were unsurprisingly ignored. The statement points out that the transfer of their bodies to Austria-Hungary were in violation of the South African laws in place at the time, which had led to Police investigations. As a result, Pöch had to abandon plans to take with him about 150 skeletons and 80 skulls of indigenous peoples. His expedition was funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, in whose custody the remains stayed until now. The Pienaar remains are the only ones that could be identified by name. The South African government stated that the ‘re-humanisation’ of the Pienaars through the number of ceremonies leading up to, and including their reburial is of great importance as it forms part of the projects of national reconciliation and nation building there.’The dignity of the Pienaars was violated to the extreme, and they came to be treated as mere objects of study,’ the statement said. The intention is to transform their remains from ‘museum artefacts’ to ‘human remains’ with dignity and respect, as well as to begin with the reconciliation process for all sides affected by the legacy of race science and racial hatred.

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