Address by  Minister Gayton McKenzie  on the occasion of the handover ceremony  of the Zimbabwe Soapstone Bird and Ancestral Human Remains at Iziko South African Museum 

Address by  Minister Gayton McKenzie on the occasion of the handover ceremony  of the Zimbabwe Soapstone Bird and Ancestral Human Remains at Iziko South African Museum 

Acting Chief Executive Officer of Iziko Museums of South Africa, Dr Bongani Ndhlovu 

Chief Executive Officer of the South African Heritage Resources Agency, Advocate Lungisa Malgas 

Director-General of the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, Dr Cynthia Khumalo 

Director-General of the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure, Mr Sifiso Ndakane 

Distinguished representatives of the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe 

Mr Ron Martins and the traditional leadership present 

Senior officials and heritage professionals 

Members of the media 

Distinguished guests 

Good afternoon. 

I want to begin with a name.

The object we are returning today has been referred to, for 137 years, as "the Zimbabwe soapstone bird". In the colonial record, it has an accession number. It has dimensions. It has a provenance note. It has been described, catalogued, photographed, and cited in academic papers. In Cecil Rhodes's study at Groote Schuur, it sat on a cabinet among other items taken from other places, reduced by its placement and by the logic of its collector to a trophy. 

But it has a name. 

Its name is Chapungu. Others argue it is Hungwe, the African fish eagle. We are not here to debate these finer points, other than to acknowledge that these Shona names matter. 

Chapungu is the Shona name for the bateleur eagle – the sacred bird held by the Shona people to be a messenger between the living and the ancestors, between the people and Mwari, the supreme being. Chapungu is not a label or a species designation. It is a spiritual identity. The people who carved this bird, who placed it with its seven companions on the walls and monoliths of Great Zimbabwe, knew exactly what they were making and what it meant. It was never nameless. It was never a curiosity. It was always Chapungu, or Hungwe. 

That is where I want to begin today. Because everything else that I am going to say flows from that simple fact: colonialism did not discover this object. It stole it. And in stealing it, it tried to strip it of its name, its meaning, and its home. Today, we begin to give all three back. 

WHERE CHAPUNGU CAME FROM 

Great Zimbabwe is the largest ancient stone construction in sub-Saharan Africa. It covers 730 hectares. At its height, between the 11th and 15th centuries, it was a city of tens of thousands of people. It was a political capital, a spiritual centre, and the hub of a trading civilisation that connected the Southern African interior to the Indian Ocean coast, and from there to Arabia, Persia, and China. Archaeologists have found Chinese porcelain, Persian glassware, and Arab coins within its walls. Great Zimbabwe was not at the edge of the world. It was connected to the world, on its own terms, centuries before colonialism arrived to claim that Africa needed connecting. 

It was built by the ancestors of the Shona people. That is now established archaeological fact. But for much of the period after European explorers arrived in the second half of the 19th century, this fact was fiercely contested – not on the evidence, but on ideology. Karl Mauch, a German geologist who visited in 1871, sniffed a wooden lintel and concluded from the smell that it must be Lebanese cedar, and therefore the site must have been built by Phoenicians. Theodore Bent, commissioned by Cecil John Rhodes's British South Africa Company to excavate the site in 1891, declared after a careless dig that the ruins could not possibly be the work of any known African people. The official colonial position, maintained for decades and enforced under white minority rule in Rhodesia, was that Great Zimbabwe had been built by ancient Semitic settlers – by anyone except the people whose descendants still lived on the surrounding land and whose oral history had always described their own ancestors building it. 

This was not an innocent scholarly disagreement. It was a political programme. If Great Zimbabwe was African, then Africans had built civilisations: sophisticated, organised, internationally connected civilisations that flourished without European supervision. If Africans had built civilisations, the central moral claim of colonialism, that Africa needed European rule to become fully human, collapsed. 

The denial of African origin at Great Zimbabwe was not an archaeological position. It was a justification for conquest. And it was maintained, in Rhodesia, to the point where researchers who argued that Africans had built the site could lose their jobs. 

Eight soapstone birds were found at Great Zimbabwe. Each was about 40 centimetres tall, mounted on columns more than a metre high. They combine human and avian features: lips rather than a beak, five-toed feet rather than talons. Six were found in the Eastern Enclosure of the Hill Complex, the highest and most sacred part of the site. They are unique to Great Zimbabwe. Nothing like them has been discovered anywhere else in the world. They almost certainly represent Chapungu: placed where they were placed with deliberate spiritual and political intention. They were not decorative. Each one mediated the connection between earthly authority and the divine. They were watched over. They were revered. 

HOW CHAPUNGU LEFT 

In 1889, a European hunter named Willi Posselt arrived at Great Zimbabwe. He spoke to a site custodian named Haruzivishe. He offered blankets and trade goods. He was shown a bird. He decided to take it. Because the bird on its column was too heavy to carry whole, he hacked the two apart – separating what had stood intact for centuries – and took the bird south. The column stayed behind. He later sold the bird to Cecil Rhodes for eighty pounds. 

Rhodes placed the Bird in the library of his Cape Town estate, Groote Schuur. He incorporated its image into the wooden staircase of the house. He had stone replicas made, three times the size of the original, to decorate the gates of his English estate near Cambridge. He used it to persuade business associates that the territory he planned to colonise – the territory he would name after himself – was worth the investment. By all accounts, Rhodes regarded the Bird as his personal totem. He kept it near him when making major decisions. 

The man who stole Zimbabwe's most sacred cultural symbol used it as a totem for his own colonial ambitions. The man who denied that Africans were civilised used an artefact of African civilisation as an instrument of further conquest. To Rhodes, it could never be Chapungu or Hungwe – it was only "the Zimbabwe bird", a symbol of his dominion over that land. 

Rhodes's will, when he died in 1902, vested Groote Schuur and all its contents in the Governor-General of the Union of South Africa – which became in time the President of the Republic. Clause 13 of the will, given statutory force by the Rhodes Will (Groote Schuur Devolution) Act of 1910, prohibited any sale, letting, or alienation of the estate's contents. For 124 years after his death, that clause kept the Bird at Groote Schuur. South African law enforced a dead coloniser's wish to keep what he had taken. 

Seven of the eight birds were eventually returned to Zimbabwe. Four came back in 1981, one year after independence – exchanged, in one of the strangest transactions in heritage history, by the Apartheid government for a collection of bees, wasps, and ants. Others followed in subsequent years. This Bird – the first carving taken, the one Rhodes personally purchased, the one that spent over a century in his study – stayed behind. Every time Zimbabwe asked, the 1910 Act was cited. 

HOW WE GOT TO TODAY 

Earlier this year, the Government of Zimbabwe made a formal request through proper diplomatic channels. A Note Verbale was received through Minister Lamola's Department of International Relations and Cooperation. Legal opinions were obtained. They confirmed that under the current statutory framework, permanent repatriation was not lawful without Parliamentary amendment. 

However, his Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa, in whom the ownership of the artefact was now vested, called us directly, telling me that he was sitting with a delegation of senior Zimbabwean leaders and that South Africa’s continued retention of the Bird was utterly unconscionable. 

I have never agreed with anything more in my life. 

On the 5th of March, having done our research, I placed the legal challenge, along with our intention to solve the legal problem however necessary, before President Ramaphosa. On the 9th of March, he responded. His instruction was direct: conclude a fixed-term temporary loan agreement, with due regard to the evil old legislation, with immediate effect. Simultaneously, we would initiate a review of the law to enable permanent repatriation. The President did not hesitate. He did not commission further studies. He read the moral situation correctly, and he acted. 

What followed was a genuine demonstration of what the Government of National Unity can do when it chooses to treat something as urgent. An Inter-Departmental Committee was constituted within days, comprising DSAC, the DPWI, DIRCO, SAHRA, Iziko Museums, and the Groote Schuur Estate. That committee was joined by an Inter-Governmental Team that included Zimbabwean officials. They worked across legal frameworks, institutional mandates, and international borders. By the 27th of March, a loan agreement had been signed between Iziko Museums and the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. By the 2nd of April, the formal transfer instruments under the Cultural Institutions Act had been executed. 

So – just 18 days after that Presidential directive, a loan agreement was signed between Iziko Museums and the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. And here we are today, wishing Chapungu, or Hungwe, a safe flight home after 137 long, lonely years trapped in this foreign land. 

I want to name and thank the people who made this possible: Director-General Dr Cynthia Khumalo and the DSAC team who coordinated the inter-departmental process under significant time pressure. The conservation professionals at Iziko – Dr Ndhlovu and his colleagues – who handled the Bird and the plinth with the care and the reverence they deserve. SAHRA, and in particular Advocate Malgas and the legal counsel that found a navigable path through a piece of legislation that was never designed to accommodate justice. The Advocate personally pushed every day to give effect to our task, and provided the regulatory and permitting work. The DPWI team at Groote Schuur, for the custodial cooperation. 

DIRCO, for the diplomatic instruments. And the officials of the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe – Dr Paul Mupira and his colleagues – for their patience and their trust. 

This was not achieved by one department, one entity or one minister. This was a government moving as one, in service of something that matters. 

CHAPUNGU’S HOMECOMING 

We are sending the Bird home on a 24-month fixed-term temporary loan – which is the legal framework the current legislation permits. On paper, South Africa retains legal ownership. But this is a bridge, not a destination. The legislative amendment that will enable permanent repatriation is being prepared. It will stay home. President Ramaphosa made that commitment, and this government will honour it. 

We are also sending home the plinth – the column from which the Bird was hacked in 1889 for the convenience of transport. Separated for 137 years, travelling together today, and arriving together tomorrow, the reunion of the artefact with the column on which it previously stood for centuries requires no Act of Parliament. It requires only the decision that the wound should be healed. 

We are also sending home eight sets of human remains. 

I want to spend a moment on this, because these individuals deserve more than a line in a speech. 

These remains were collected from Zimbabwe – then Southern Rhodesia – during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were acquired by colonial officials, medical practitioners and researchers, and donated to what became Iziko as scientific specimens. They were assigned accession numbers, catalogued and stored. 

But let me tell you who some of them actually are. 

One of them is believed to have been a MaKalanga chief. His skull and jaw were collected in 1910 by a man named Arthur Edwards and donated to this institution. He was somebody's leader and ancestor. He has been sitting in a museum drawer for 116 years. 

Two of them – accession numbers 1866 and 1867 – are Shona individuals whose remains were taken from graves in the Salisbury and Goromonzi areas by a Dr J.G.M. Melle. They were removed from graves; not found, not donated, but taken from the very ground where their families had laid them to rest. 

One of them – accession 1884 – is described in the colonial record as a Mashona male who was murdered over accusations of witchcraft near the Zambezi River. His skull was collected and sent here. Somebody recorded his cause of death as a curiosity. Nobody recorded his name. 

Two more – accession 1883a and 1883b – were found together at the bottom of an ancient mining shaft in Mazoe District in 1917. Buried together at the bottom of a shaft, they were disturbed 700 years or more after their deaths and sent to Cape Town. 

These are not abstractions, but people. They are Shona people, MaKalanga people, Zimbabwean people, removed from their graves, their communities, and their homeland under the logic that their bodies were data. They were treated merely as specimens for a misguided colonial pseudoscience that never asked their families for permission and never intended to give them back. 

South Africa's National Policy on the Repatriation and Restitution of Human Remains and Heritage Objects, adopted by Cabinet in 2021, provides the framework for correcting this. It is grounded in the principle that ancestral remains are not scientific property. They belong to their communities, their descendants, and the land from which they came. Returning them is not a gesture of generosity. It is an obligation. And it is long overdue. 

Zimbabwe did this for us. In September 2024, the Government of Zimbabwe facilitated the return of liberation heroes who died in exile on Zimbabwean soil, along with others from Zambia. They were returned with ceremony, dignity, and care. President Ramaphosa acknowledged that debt at Freedom Park. Today, South Africa reciprocates, not only for the fighters of the liberation era, but for people taken from graves all over Africa generations before any of us were born. 

WHAT THIS MOMENT SIGNALS 

I want to say something about the broader significance of today, because I think we owe it to this occasion to be clear about what we are actually doing and what we hope it signals beyond these walls. 

South Africa has held, and continues to hold, objects and remains it should not. So do institutions across Europe and North America: the Benin Bronzes, the Maqdala treasures of Ethiopia, the Nok terracottas, the ancestral remains of the Khoi and San peoples held in European museums. Hundreds of thousands of objects and bodies were taken during the colonial era, separated from their communities, and placed in institutions that called themselves universal while serving only a very particular purpose: the celebration and legitimation of European civilisation at the expense of everyone else's. 

The debate about repatriation has for too long been conducted on terms set by the institutions that hold the objects. Those institutions speak about universal access, about their capacity to preserve, about the complexity of legal title, about the risk of precedent. What they speak about less is the fundamental moral fact: the objects were not collected. They were taken. The bodies were not donated. They were removed. And the question is not whether returning them creates a difficult precedent. The question is whether keeping them perpetuates an injustice. 

The answer is always a resounding yes. 

South Africa is not a perfect actor in this story. We held the Bird for 137 years. We cited the 1910 Act when Zimbabwe asked. We were slow. But today we are acting, not because we were legally compelled to, but because it is right. And in acting, we are choosing to say something to every institution and every government still holding what should not be retained: the era of colonial collection is over. The time for return has come. And African governments can and should lead that process, government to government, without waiting for former colonial powers to locate their conscience. 

The world shall see what happens in Harare tomorrow when we place this priceless carving into the hands of President Mnangagwa. They shall see African solidarity in action. 

A WORD ABOUT IZIKO MUSEUMS 

Before I conclude, I want to say something about Iziko Museums of South Africa – because we are standing in this institution today for a reason. 

Iziko, like all South African museums, carries the marks of its history. Collections were built during the colonial and apartheid eras in ways that were not always just or consensual. That history is real and it is not fully resolved. But today, Iziko is the institution leading the return of a national treasure to the country it rightfully belongs to, and for the return of eight individuals to the land and the ancestors that claim them. Today, this institution is on the right side of history. 

I commend Dr Ndhlovu, the Council, and the professional staff of Iziko for the manner in which they have engaged this process – with integrity, technical expertise, and an understanding of what is at stake. This is what a South African museum looks like when it chooses justice over inertia. 

Distinguished guests, tomorrow, the centuries-old carving goes home. 

It will not be "the Zimbabwe soapstone bird" anymore, not an object in the library at Groote Schuur. There will be no accession number this or that, dimensions such and such, provenance Colonial Cape. 16 

It will be Chapungu – the messenger, the sacred bird, the one who has found its way back home. It will also be Hungwe, depending on who you ask. 

May its journey be safe. May its arrival in Harare tomorrow be celebrated as it deserves. May the reunion of this special artefact with its plinth be the beginning of a wholeness that 137 years of separation could not destroy. And may the eight individuals who travel with it find rest, at last, in the soil that is their home. 

South Africa chose justice today. 

Siyabonga. Tatenda. Ke a leboha