CAPE TOWN - South Africa on Tuesday handed back to Zimbabwe ancestral human remains and a centuries-old stone carving of its sacred national emblem, the Zimbabwe bird, taken more than 100 years ago during the colonial era.
The restitution was part of a worldwide push for artefacts looted from African countries during the colonial era to be repatriated.
Eight coffins draped in the Zimbabwean flag stood at an event for the handover in a Cape Town museum and attended by officials from both countries.
Little was known about the human remains except that they had been unethically exhumed for research, officials said.
Once back in Zimbabwe, they would be further studied and returned to "where they belong", Zimbabwean government representative Reverend Paul Damasane said.
The soapstone carving of a Zimbabwe bird was the first of several looted from the stone ruins of the ancient complex of Great Zimbabwe, built in the 11th to 13th centuries, officials said.
A British explorer had ripped it from its pedestal in the late 19th-century and sold it to British mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes, 1890-1896, prime minister of the Cape Colony.
Nearly "140 years since the first one was taken and sold to Cecil John Rhodes, that very same statue ... is finally making its journey home," South Africa's culture ministry said.
The others that had been in South Africa were returned the year following the former British colony's independence in 1980, officials said.
The original birds are around 33 centimetres in height and most were perched on stone columns more than a metre high.
They are the national emblem of Zimbabwe, depicted on banknotes, coins and the national flag.
They are also sacred because of a belief that they carry a protective spirit.