SÃO PAULO (RNS) — After more than two years of struggle, the Muslim community of Salvador, Bahia State, still waits for Harvard University to give back the skull of an enslaved African man who allegedly took part in a major uprising in 19th-century Brazil.
In 2022, historian João José Reis learned of two Brazilian skulls being kept in Harvard museums. One belonged to an unidentified person in Rio de Janeiro, the other supposedly to a leader of the Malê Revolt, an 1835 rebellion of enslaved Yoruba Muslims, or Malês as they were known at the time, in Salvador. Reis, who authored a study on the uprising, along with colleagues in Brazil and the U.S. have since been campaigning for the repatriation of the second skull.
Two of the university’s museums — Peabody and Warren — have faced pressure for several years to return almost 7,000 human remains to their original Native American communities or descendants. The discovery of the Brazilian skulls brought the struggle to the South American region.
Reis and his colleague Hannah Bellini, a scholar who has studied Muslims in Salvador, formed a working group with the local Islamic community to facilitate the return of the skull.
“Islam establishes that the human body must be respected in life and after death,” Nigerian-born Sheikh Abdul Ahmad, who heads the Islamic Cultural Center of Bahia (known by the Portuguese acronym CCIB) in Salvador, told RNS.
Ahmad, who fir …