The Negro of Banyoles

It’s one thing to keep the mummified body of a thousand year old pharaoh or a monk in a glass case in a museum, and another to stuff the dead body of an African warrior and display it like a trophy along with wild animals. As recently as eighteen years ago, you could have seen him at the Darder Natural History museum in the city of Banyoles, near Barcelona, Spain. He was about four and a half feet tall, slightly stooped, shoulder raised, with a spear in one hand and a shield on the other. His charcoal-colored body was covered by a small orange loincloth wrapped around his waist. For the better part of a century, generations of Europeans gaped at the half-naked body of this nameless African bushman, who was known only as “El Negro” or “The Black Man", before an international protest forced the Spanish government to send him back to his homeland in Botswana for a proper burial. El Negro is believed to have been a member of the Khoisan ethnic group, who lived and died somewhere in Southern Africa in 1831. His death and burial was witnessed by a French collector and trader of natural history specimens named Jules Verreaux, who returned to the burial site under cover of night along with some grave robbers and dug up the African's body. Verreaux intended to ship the body back to France and so he prepared and preserved the African warrior's corpse by using metal wire as a spine, wooden boards as shoulder blades and newspaper as a stuffing material. Then he shipped the body to Paris along with a batch of stuffed animals in crates. Shortly thereafter, the African’s body appeared in a showroom at No. 3, Rue Saint Fiacre. Verreaux received lots of praise for his effort and for his fearlessness for disregarding the dangers to his own life and stealing the body of a native.