Among the visitors was Nadia Nsayi. She wrote on her Facebook page:
“I still can’t believe what we saw on Monday at the Institut des Sciences naturelles – Institute of Natural Sciences. Would they also keep the skulls in gray boxes if they were their mothers, fathers, and children?”
Courtesy De Standaard / Leate Babin
Maarten Couttenier, researcher at the AfricaMuseum, in De Standaard:
“Most of the skulls were sent from the Belgian Congo colony by a soldier, Fernand van de Ginste, who was active in southern Congo in the 1930s and 1940s.
He acquired them through grave robbing and sent them to the anthropological department of the AfricaMuseum. Science at the time was concerned with measuring skulls to pseudoscientifically substantiate the superiority of the white race.
Van de Ginste was certainly not the first to do so. Human remains had been sent to Belgium since 1870.”
