After continuous lobbying and campaigning by Algerian historians and intellectuals, the skulls of 24 Algerian resistance fighters have returned to Algeria.
The remains of the Algerian resistance fighters will be buried in a special funeral falling on the 58th anniversary of Algeria’s independence from France’s colonial occupation which was achieved after a long war.
The skulls of approximately 40 Algerian fighters were taken by the French colonial empire as trophies in the 19th Century. These skulls were then put on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
These resistance fighters fought French colonial forces in an 1849 revolt, After a seven-year war, Algeria gained independence from France in 1962.
Algeria’s liberation ended more than a century of a colonial rule.
Among the remains of the 24 resistance fighters were those of the revolution leader Sheikh Bouzian, who was captured, shot, and decapitated by the French.
On the return of the remains of the resistance fighters the Algerian army chief, Said Chengiha, said, “The valiant resistance fighters who refused the colonisation of their country by imperial France were displayed immorally for decades, like vulgar objects of antiquity, without respect for their dignity, their memory. That is the monstrous face of colonisation.”
The French President Emmanuel Macron, in December 2019, commented on the process of the return of the Algerian resistance fighters remains by saying that “colonialism was a grave mistake.”