A Story of Bones: absorbing documentary unearths colonial crimes in Saint Helena

“It’s everyone’s responsibility, because we are all linked to this story.” Saint Helena, an isolated island a thousand miles from the coast of west Africa, a British colony since 1659 and Napoleon’s place of death, was for centuries accessible only by ship. When the UK government commissioned its first airport there in 2008, planning to re-position the island as a tourist destination, building work uncovered a mass burial site containing what Annina van Neel, the Namibian-born Chief Environmental Officer for the airport project, describes as “the most significant trace of the transatlantic slave trade”: the remains of an estimated 9,000 formerly enslaved Africans. When archaeologists excavated 325 individuals to clear the way for construction of a new airport-servicing road, their remains were put in a “pipe store” adjacent to the island’s prison complex and left there for 14 years.  

Curran and Aubrey de Vere’s sober, moving documentary follows Annina’s frustrating years-long battle to have the mass grave and the thousands within it recognised and the 325 given a proper burial. It’s a journey which brings her up against the false friendship and passive aggressive inaction of a Conservative government and a colonialist attitude which continues to diminish colonial crimes, to diminish Blackness, and which hangs over and above everything that happens in A Story of Bones. 

Annina’s principal companions on this journey are her infant son Noah, who we see ageing as the battle drags on, and renowned preservationist Peggy King Jorde, a force of pride and compassion who vows to bear witness to Annina’s struggle and to the struggle of the multi-ethnic island community. At times the film lacks the cinematic style of a comparable project like Margaret Brown’s Descendant (2022), but as the narrative develops it gathers power and paints an absorbing portrait of community resistance and, particularly, of Annina as a genuinely heroic individual battling against tectonic-scale forces of inequity like a lone soul howling into a storm.   

Perhaps the most striking moment occurs when Annina and Peggy view an exhumed hair braid from one of the buried individuals and the horrific past is brought into sudden intimate proximity. If it seems though that their quest for some semblance of reparative justice is nearing triumph, think again – as Annina says, “these motherfuckers are gonna be dragging us along for another hundred years, because Black lives don’t matter [to them].” The downbeat ending feels close to radical, highlighting how much work is still to be done to untangle white supremacy from our power structures. 

 ► A Story of Bones is in UK cinemas now.