Dynastic History | Great Zimbabwe Site Museum — What Each Bird's Return Cost, and Who Still Owns One

The museum at the foot of the hill holds the soapstone birds, and each of them came back on different terms.

Four were returned by South Africa in 1981, the year after independence, as an exchange: the carvings for about a thousand insect specimens from Zimbabwe's natural history collection. The lower shaft that Willi Posselt left behind in 1889 travelled further. Sold to a Berlin missionary museum around 1907 and held by the Museum für Völkerkunde, it was taken to Leningrad as Soviet war booty, moved to Leipzig in a 1978 transfer arranged between the USSR and East Germany, and returned to Berlin after 1990. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation agreed in February 2000 to send it to Zimbabwe as a permanent loan: possession to Zimbabwe, legal ownership retained in Berlin. The fragment travelled in 2003 and the reassembled bird was installed here in May 2004.

The last one stayed at Rhodes's Cape Town estate, and then in the collection of Iziko Museums, until 2026. On 14 April that year, in Cape Town, South Africa handed it over along with eight sets of ancestral human remains, and it reached Zimbabwe the following day. Iziko's chief executive, Bongani Ndlovu, said the museum had "played an important role in the act of unethical collecting, grave robbing, and looting". Paul Mpira, for Zimbabwe's museums authority, dated the journey at 137 years, from the first bird taken in 1889.

All eight known birds are now at the site. One of them remains, on paper, the property of a foundation in Berlin.

📸 Cover: Three of the soapstone birds, photographed for Theodore Bent's 1892 excavation account, public domain via Wikimedia Commons — an 1890s plate, not the birds as displayed today