Strategic silence and colonial violence: African skulls in the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum

The University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum holds the skulls of 185 individuals from Africa, removed from the continent by a range of individuals and organisations predominantly in the nineteenth century. The entrance of these ancestral remains into the University’s collection depended in no small part on conditions of acute physical colonial violence, which are nevertheless tactfully obscured by the Museum’s spatial and architectural qualities, and by the database it uses to catalogue the remains. Focusing on the acquisition of a number of ‘trophy’ skulls, removed as a direct result of frontier violence in Southern Africa, it becomes clear that the perpetration of settler violence on the continent, and the development of racist scientific theories by anatomists in Edinburgh, were symbiotic processes, each group providing the materials and prejudices necessary for the other to thrive.