W Skeletal tell-it-alls
Nobody knows bones better than crime queen Kathy Reichs. She visited a revered Cape Town ossuary with Mike Nicol
‘I would want my ancestors’ studied, as long as the bones
were treated respectfully’
HAT is it with women crime writers from the US? The moment they arrive in Cape Town there are dead bodies. Well, there are always dead bodies in Cape Town — but how about this? Last week Kathy Reichs — probably best known for her character Temperance Brennan — pitched up and the first thing she saw on the drive from the airport into the city was a dead body beside the road.
Two years ago when Tess Gerritsen popped in, the gangster Cyril Beeka was gunned down in a drive-by.
As it happens, neither crime writer is a stranger to the dead. Gerritsen is a doctor; Reichs is a forensic anthropologist working in the US, where she lives, and Canada.
During her career she has extended her forensic reach into the field of human rights. She testified in the defence of a man accused of killing 28 people during the Rwandan genocide and burying them on his property. Her reading of the bones told a different story: that they belonged to people who had died before the genocide.
She also helped forensic anthropologists in Guatemala as they excavated sites of massacres. And she has picked through the rubble of Ground Zero for human shards. Many of her cases have found their way in one form or another into her 16 novels.
Reichs is a diffident woman with an occasional smile that strips away her age — she’s 64 — to reveal a teenager.
Given her fascination with our white internal architecture — her crime novels are all about reading skeletal remains — it seemed that a good place to meet her would be Cape Town’s Prestwich Memorial. Here, in the ossuary, are boxes and boxes of the bones of slaves and freed blacks who lived and died in the town centuries ago. They were buried in what was then District One, outside the official graveyard. When their bones were uncovered during the construction of apartment blocks in the Prestwich Street area in 1998, a political firestorm was sparked.
Such was the feeling that these remains should be respected, the memorial was built to house them, and it was stipulated that the bones would not be subjected to scientific analysis for many decades. The question that hovers over these bones is: are they artefacts or ancestors?
It is the sort of question Reichs has often faced. She found the memorial intriguing, unlike anything she had encountered else- where. It is both memorial, ossuary, a place of pilgrimage and prayer, and a coffee shop where business people meet, where travellers log into wifi to read their emails. It is the city now and then.
After the memorial’s manager, Fagmee Jacobs, had shown her around we sat in the coffee shop to chat. “There is an incredible research database here,” she said. “I can also understand why the remains are sensitive.” She sipped her coffee, a white Americano.
“For me, bones are both artefacts and the physical evidence of past populations and individuals. When I say they’re artefacts I don’t mean in the sense of objects. They need to be treated with respect but they are a source of information. They tell us what people ate, what diseases they suffered from, how they dealt with those diseases, what the demographics were, what the population gender split was, how long they lived. Did women live longer than men?” That smile flashed briefly. “I would want my ancestors studied,” she added. Her forebears were Irish. “As long as the remains were treated respectfully, I don’t have an issue. In general this is the attitude we should take.
“In the US, the remains of native Americans and slave populations are no longer on display. According to law we have had to catalogue our collections and native American remains were deposited with the state archaeologists or an agreement was reached with the respective tribal elders to retain them. In most cases they have allowed study, provided it is done with respect.”
As Reichs is about to leave, a thought struck her and that smile flashed, catching in her eyes. “You know the question I hate most? People say to me, ‘You work with the dead all the time. What are your thoughts on the afterlife?’ I hate it.”
Clearly the dead do talk to Kathy Reichs. They tell her about their lives, if not the afterlife. As we parted I wondered what the Prestwich dead would have said to her. LS