A promise to an African grandmother: Shining a light on Germany’s colonial past
BERLIN (AP) — Mnyaka Sururu Mboro is still driven by the promise he gave his grandmother when he left Tanzania for Germany almost 50 years ago: to bring back for a proper burial the head of a local chieftain, killed in 1900 by German colonists for opposing their rule in Africa.
Mboro, now 73, is from the same area near Mount Kilimanjaro that was once ruled by Mangi Meli, king of the Wachaga people. From 1885 to 1919, the region was part of German East Africa, a huge colony almost three times the size of present-day Germany.
Mboro grew up with stories about the king whom the Germans hanged from a tree with 18 other leaders in March 1900. The head is believed to have been cut off by German soldiers and taken to Germany by the colonial administration, though authorities can not confirm that. It was never recovered.
“I am (still) searching for it,” Mboro, who now lives in Berlin, told The Associated Press.
Righting past wrongs
After Mboro moved to the city of Heidelberg in 1978 to study civil engineering, he heard about a so-called African Quarter in Berlin, a neighborhood where streets had names associated with Germany’s colonial era.
One day, he said, he learned there was a street called Petersallee, honoring Carl Peters, the first imperial commissioner for German East Africa, considered a ruthless ruler.
“That night, I couldn’t sleep. I was waking up, sweating,” Mboro said. “I was seeing my grandmother. I said if my grandmother could be here, these people would know, that cannot be tolerated.”
But Berlin did tolerate it. Despite a campaign that started in 1984 to have the street name changed, it remained Petersallee until last August, though some other street names were changed before that.
Mboro co-founded Berlin Postkolonial, a group pushing for a reevaluation of Germany’s colonial past and removal of surviving colonial structures and racism.
Mboro led the memorial procession as Petersallee was split into two streets. One was named Maji-Maji-Allee to remember the Maji Maji Rebellion against colonial rule in German East Africa. The other was named after Anna Mungunda, who fought against apartheid in Namibia, another former German colony known as German South West Africa.
Germany’s colonial past
Compared to other European powers, Germany was late to colonialism. It controlled huge swaths of Africa from 1884 to 1900, through the colonies of German South West Africa, Cameroon, Togoland, and also German East Africa, in what today is Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania.
Germany also established German New Guinea, German Samoa, island protectorates in the Pacific, and leased territory around Jiaozhou Bay in China. All the colonies were lost by 1918, after Germany’s defeat in World War I.
“Germany’s colonial policy was marked by injustice and violence,” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a speech last May. “It was an inhuman and racist policy.”
“We cannot undo the mistakes of the past but we can learn from them and shoulder responsibility for today and the future,” she said.
In 2021, Germany officially recognized as genocide the massacre of tens of thousands of Herero and Nama — in today’s Namibia — between 1904 and 1908, though it stopped short of paying formal reparations.
Finding the origins
Meli’s head may be among many thousands of human remains pilfered and sent to Germany, where even before the Nazis came to power, many of the remains were studied in an attempt to prove pseudoscientific notions of white supremacy.
In 2011, the authority overseeing Berlin’s state museums, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, inherited a collection of some 7,700 human remains from the city’s Charité medical history museum. The foundation has been trying to determine their origins in order to return them but it’s proving difficult.
Hermann Parzinger, the foundation’s president, told the AP that it now has between 5,500 and 6,000 remains from the colonial era.
“Everything has to be given back,” he said.
The foundation in 2023 connected research dots and linked 1,135 human skulls to present-day Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya but is still waiting for the countries to accept their return, Parzinger said.
Germany has successfully returned human remains to Namibia, and colonial loot to elsewhere. In 2022, it agreed to return hundreds of Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, historic bronze sculptures.
Teaching about Germany’s colonial era
As part of the 2022 agreement, the foundation secured a long-term loan of 168 Benin Bronzes. Some are on display in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum museum, with information about how they were plundered from Benin City by British troops, and details about the once-powerful Edo Kingdom of Benin.
The artifacts now have an educational role.
“It’s not mandatory to learn about colonialism in the school system,” said Justice Mvemba, who in 2022 founded Decolonial Tours, which offers guided tours of Berlin’s African Quarter and museums, including the Humboldt Forum.
Mvemba, who came to Germany as a child from Congo, said some teachers may decide to tell students about the colonial era, but it’s often in romanticized ways. Her tours strive for “a more critical lens on the colonial era and to also break those glorified narratives.”
While Mvemba focuses on Germany’s colonial past, she also brings attention to how racist prejudices are still prevalent today.
“Growing up in Germany, I experienced a lot of racism,” said Mvemba. “We have to talk about history.”