'A confidential memo said that the collection included the bones of Mamadou Lamine, a 19th-century West African Muslim leader who led a rebellion against French colonial troops; a family of Canadian Inuits exhibited in a Paris human zoo in 1881; and even five victims of the Armenian genocide in the mid-1910s.
“Sometimes, the supervisors would say, ‘We must hide,’” said Philippe Mennecier, a retired linguist and curator who worked for four decades at the Museum of Mankind. “The museum is afraid of scandal.”