After 137 years in exile, Zimbabwe’s most treasured cultural artifact has finally returned home. South Africa on Tuesday repatriated a centuries-old soapstone sculpture of the Zimbabwe Bird to Zimbabwe, bringing with it the remains of eight ancestors and closing one of the longest chapters in Africa’s ongoing battle to reclaim its looted heritage.
The Zimbabwe Bird — known as Chapungu in the Shona language — is far more than a decorative emblem. It appears on the national flag, the coat of arms, and the country’s banknotes, standing as the defining symbol of Zimbabwean national identity. Carved from soapstone and once placed atop monoliths at Great Zimbabwe — the medieval stone city from which the country takes its name — the sculpture represents a civilization that flourished between the 11th and 15th centuries.
A Colonial Theft Decades in the Making
The story of how the bird left Zimbabwe is a textbook case of colonial exploitation. In 1889, a hunter named Willi Posselt discovered the sculptures at Great Zimbabwe and, despite local protests, ripped the finest specimen from its column after exchanging blankets and “other articles” with community members. He sold it to Cecil John Rhodes, the imperialist who led the British South Africa Company and drove the colonization of both modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Rhodes used the bird as décor at his Cape Town estate. When he died in 1902, the bird and his other possessions were vested to South Africa’s governor-general, eventually landing in an iziko South African Museum. Four more birds met a similar fate, transported to South African museums after archaeologist Theodore Bent returned to Great Zimbabwe in 1901. A fragment of yet another bird ended up in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum in 1907.
Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, but recovering the scattered birds proved torturous. In 1981, South Africa’s apartheid government agreed to return the four birds it held — but only in exchange for a collection of 1,000 insects, wasps, and ants belonging to Zimbabwe’s Natural History Museum. Germany returned the pedestal fragment in 2003. But the last bird remained locked behind South Africa’s 1910 Rhodes Will Act, which prohibited the sale or transfer of Rhodes’s possessions.
Breaking the Legal Logjam
South African Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie acknowledged the decades of resistance during a handover ceremony at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town. “Every time Zimbabwe asked, the 1910 Act was cited,” he said. This time, Pretoria found a legal workaround: a two-year loan agreement that will eventually allow for permanent repatriation. McKenzie insisted the bird will never return to South Africa.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa presided over the welcome ceremony in Harare, describing the homecoming as a triumph of Pan-African solidarity. “For far too long, this vital piece of our national soul and dignity resided in a foreign land,” he said. He wore a woollen scarf in Zimbabwe’s national colours as he received the sculpture, noting it had arrived just in time for the country’s independence anniversary on Saturday.
A Spiritual Homecoming
Archaeology professor Plan Shenjere-Nyabezi from the University of Zimbabwe described the moment as deeply significant. “The Zimbabwe Birds stand as powerful and cherished symbols of our national heritage,” she told the BBC. “The arrival of this last piece signifies a spiritual homecoming. One should not have to travel to other countries to enjoy their own heritage.”
Edward Matenga, one of Zimbabwe’s foremost scholars of the sculptures, said the endangered bateleur eagle depicted in the carvings is historically sacred to both the Shona and the minority Venda people. The birds watched over Great Zimbabwe for hundreds of years before being scattered across the world.
The handover also included eight sets of human remains that had been exhumed from Zimbabwe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries by colonial researchers and donated to the South African museum as scientific specimens. McKenzie described them simply: “These are not abstractions, but people — removed from their graves, their communities, and their homeland under the logic that their bodies were data.”
A Wider Movement Gains Momentum
The return from an African neighbour — rather than from a European former colonial power — is what made this repatriation unusual. Most returns of looted African artifacts in recent years have come from France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom. South Africa’s act of returning items taken during its own colonial period signals a growing willingness on the continent to confront its own complicity in the plunder of African heritage.
Zimbabwe still seeks the return of the skulls of late-19th-century anti-colonial heroes, believed to be held in the United Kingdom. The birds that have already been returned will be displayed at Great Zimbabwe itself, in an on-site museum, where scholars and citizens alike can finally encounter them on native soil.