In 2001, the press devoted several articles (such as this article in De Standaard) on two mummified individuals that are still in conservation at the AfricaMuseum to this day.
The AfricaMuseum conducted extensive research in 2003 but this provided little information.
In 2011, art historian and researcher Agnès Lacaille and Isabel Garcia Gomez drew up a scientific and descriptive inventory of objects containing human remains in the museum’s ethnographic collection (Lacaille & Garcia Gomez 2011: 41).
This led to a parliamentary question five years later on the collection of human remains in 2016.
In 2022, as part of the HOME project on human remains in Belgian collections, Lies Busselen, an AfricaMuseum researchers, was able to determine the exact origin of the two mummified individuals. They were found by a Belgian military officer on Rwanda’s Mount Cyanzarwe in 1915.
The case inevitably points to the prospect of collaborating with Rwandan researchers. A future Belgo-Rwandan network could reflect on a realistic and desirable final destination for these mummified individuals.
