East African families seek to reclaim the remains of their ancestors from German colonial collections.

MARCH 28, 2023

PHOTO: Ngalami, Chief of Shira, with another chief and their entourage. Reproduction from Johannes Schanz/ H. Adolphi, Am Fuße der Bergriesen-Ostafrikas, and published with the permission of the Evangelisch-Lutherisches Missionswerk Leipzig.

Khalid Salewa had never seen a picture of his great-great-grandfather until September 2022, when a mobile museum winding its way through the mountain’s foothills arrived in his hometown of Moshi, at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The exhibit, called “Marejesho” (the Swahili word for returns), displayed information about German colonial crimes in an open-air pavilion. Residents looked at drawings of cultural objects — necklaces, combs, shields — from their ancestors now held by German museums. They found in the exhibit proof of what they had previously only heard about from parents and grandparents. Berlin did not just have their art but also their bones: thousands of human remains.

As a child, Khalid had learned from his mother, Janet, that she was the great-granddaughter of a king who ruled over the Siha area of the Chagga tribe, until he was publicly executed in 1900 for resisting the German occupation, a brutal campaign across East Africa between 1885 and 1919. After his body was left suspended from a tree for public viewing, it disappeared. In Chagga culture, the burial of a body after death is an essential ritual. Without a proper funeral and resting place, the soul cannot find peace. The legacy of not returning an ancestor to his roots meant illness, misfortune and continued suffering for the descendants: For Khalid and Janet, it meant growing up with a permanent absence.

When Khalid learned of “Marejesho,” which was organized by Flinn Works, Berlin Postkolonial and the Old Moshi Cultural Tourism Enterprise, he took his family, including Janet, to view the exhibit. A scrappy delegation of performers, lawyers and activists was present to answer questions including the artist Konradin Kunze and Sarah Imani, a lawyer for the European Center on Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin. As people strolled through the grounds and small bulbul birds clustered in the trees, the Salewas met with Kunze and Imani. They were looking for information about their ancestor, Chief Ngalami, whose kingdom encompassed one of Kilimanjaro’s forested slopes. In the 1890s, the area had some 37 kingdoms, with chiefs elected by different families in a mostly patrilineal system. Ngalami fended off local power struggles over trade routes to the coast and agriculture lands, ruling uninterrupted for over 10 years until his arrest by German officers.

To the family’s surprise, Kunze rifled through files and produced a photo taken by a German Lutheran missionary. In the granular black-and-white image, Ngalami stands with a cane next to another chief in the clearing of a banana grove. Behind them on the ground sit nearly two dozen men. Ngalami appears to be in his early 30s. The picture was taken a few years before his execution.

When the Germans began constructing their colonial rule in Africa in the mid-1880s, they installed a regime that covered a huge swath of territory, eventually encompassing modern-day Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania (excluding Zanzibar), Namibia, and parts of Ghana, Togo, Cameroon and Mozambique. In East Africa, German colonization was preceded by missionaries and businessmen from as early as the late 17th century. In the Kilimanjaro area around Moshi, some chiefs initially cut deals with the Europeans. As German intentions to control the economy and subjugate Africans became clearer, communities actively resisted. Kilimanjaro chiefs attacked missionaries and military installations. In response, the Germans arrested many of the chiefs and conducted show trials: Ngalami was hanged along with 18 other leaders on March 2, 1900. A wife of another well-known chief, Mangi Meli, was forced to watch her husband’s death. She told her grandson that afterward, the Germans severed Meli’s head and had porters carry it to the coast.

A residential road outside the town leads away from the cluster of hiking hostels and cafés, climbing into the purple-blue hills where a small 2019 memorial stands under a weathered acacia tree. Nine names are listed on the plaque of dead men, all former chiefs; the remaining nine names remain unknown. When Khalid was in high school in Moshi in the mid-2000s, little historical record existed to confirm the struggle of local chiefs against the Germans. It was not a part of the curriculum. Khalid was studying abroad as a college student in Eugene, Oregon, when he stumbled across a book called History of the Chagga People of Kilimanjaro by scholar Kathleen M. Stahl, published in 1964. In it he located, for the first time, his mother’s lineage. Khalid ordered two copies of the book and sent one home to his parents. Since then, Khalid had scoured the internet and libraries trying to collect the details of Ngalami’s life. At the “Marejesho” exhibit, he was the last to see the photo as it was passed around. Janet struggled to maintain her composure, but Khalid broke down and cried.

In the past three years, public discussion has focused heavily on stolen art. Yet many in East Africa view the return of human remains as the most pressing form of reparations.

Over the past decade, Germany has tentatively taken steps to address its colonial past, but it has often failed to turn the lofty speeches of politicians into concrete actions. Despite the pride Germany takes in its memory culture for commemorating the Holocaust, its brutality in Africa and other former colonies is conveniently forgotten, misremembered or atoned for through development aid that often conveniently aligns with economic interests. Amid a global movement to repatriate looted artifacts from past centuries, German museums have begun to grapple with their colonial collections. In the past three years, public discussion has focused heavily on stolen art. Yet many in East Africa view the return of human remains as the most pressing form of reparations. “Currently, most live in trauma,” writes Mnyaka Sururu Mboro, a Tanzanian historian and activist in Berlin, “because they have not yet buried their ancestors and believe that this results in climate disasters and diseases.”

During the 1800s, scientists and anthropologists in the U.S. and Germany, along with their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, sought human bones and skulls collected by travelers, missionaries and soldiers. Some of these researchers studied human evolution, while others focused on the pseudoscience of phrenology — the false idea that skull shape and size indicated mental abilities or race — which became a staple of racist ideologies, including Nazism. In the mid-to-late 1800s, as European colonialism accelerated, these empires also sought to display items in capital museums to cultivate support for foreign conflicts.

In 1901, Felix von Luschan, an anthropologist and curator at the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, sent a letter to Moritz Merker, the head of the military station in Moshi, requesting skeletons from Kilimanjaro for his research. The letter is the first known request after the hangings.

Merker dispatched a shipment: two boxes filled with the skulls of Maasai and Chagga people. It is unknown if Ngalami’s remains were included. In Berlin, the museum labeled them the “S collection” for “Schädel,” the German word for skull. Over time, Merker and Germans overseas continued sending hair, heads and skeletons — mainly from men who likely died in war or German prisons.

In East Africa, colonial violence only escalated in the years following the Moshi executions. To wield power, Germany relied on African and Arab mercenaries and conscripted others into their forces, directing them to terrorize civilians. In 1905, when Germany declared that Tanzanians would be forced to harvest cotton for the empire, the chiefs in southern Tanzania from Dar es Salaam to Lake Nyasa united their people and rebelled. The German response, which became known as the Maji Maji War, was a horrific campaign in which, according to scholars Klaus Bachmann and Gerhard Kemp, “war crimes were the rule rather than the exception.” The violence and its ensuing famine killed between 250,000 and 300,000 Africans and some 15 Germans. One German commander paid his mercenaries a larger sum for severed heads.

Many of the remains collected during the colonial period wound up in Berlin at places like the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the Charité Medical Society and the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory. Others went to private collections. In 1902, the whole skeleton of Chief Mangi Lobulu, another leader from Kilimanjaro executed along with Chief Ngalami, was dispatched by Merker from Tanzania to Germany. It eventually made its way to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

At the exhibit, Khalid and Janet talked with Kunze. Kunze has an unlikely background as a researcher. An actor and theater director, he became interested in Germany’s colonial past on a trip to Tanzania in 2009. In 2016, he began conducting archival research on human remains, and was the person who finally located Chief Mangi Lobulu.

The remains of Ngalami may prove harder to trace. During World War II, the Museum of Ethnology that housed the “S collection” hid many artifacts across Germany; the building itself was structurally damaged during WWII and later demolished. The museum now resides within Mitte’s Humboldt Forum, but at least two known boxes of Masaai and Chagga skulls are missing. Kunze and Imani, a lawyer at the ECCHR, a nonprofit that seeks to uphold human rights through legal means, did not know if Ngalami’s remains were in Berlin, but they would try to find out. Kunze offered Khalid's family a DNA cheek swab and took notes about the family. “Are you open to litigation, if it comes to that?” Imani asked. “Absolutely,” Janet replied. “Just be prepared,” Kunze cautioned, “that return may not happen in your lifetime.”

In Imani’s view, the German constitution offers a clear path to a possible legal claim. Article 1 articulates a right to human dignity for all, which includes those who are deceased. Descendants have a “derivative right” to bury and also to mourn their ancestors in a dignified manner. “Often restitution is not framed as a question of law,” Imani told me. “That is the first mistake.” ECCHR is preparing to file a report later this year to the United Nations’ International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, on Germany’s failure to swiftly repatriate people. It is leaving the door open for legal action if communities feel there is not adequate progress from the German government. For Khalid and Janet, involvement in a lawsuit rests upon an organization like ECCHR that is willing to navigate the German courts.

In 2018, Germany issued guidelines for museums with colonial collections and also created a “Contact Point for Collections from Colonial Contexts” to provide answers to people seeking information about their stolen heritage. Imani, who also works on the return of artifacts, told me that queries about the highly publicized Benin Bronzes — sculptures looted from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by British soldiers, some of which were sold to German museums — produced a swift response and invitation to dialogue that resulted in Germany beginning to return bronzes to Nigeria in December 2022. Yet replies about human remains moved glacially. “There’s a complete disconnect,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. Berlin Postkolonial, a nonprofit focused on anti-racism, is pushing for a centralized, publicly searchable register of all remains in Germany.

In January, Berlin’s Museum of Pre- and Early History announced it was ready to return 904 skulls to Rwanda, 202 to Tanzania and 22 to Kenya after matching them to specific locations inside these countries through partnerships with African research institutions. Some 6,572 skulls in the museum’s possession wait to be examined.

Museums, for the most part, now recognize the moral imperative to face their brutal past. “Human remains from colonial contexts have no place in our museums and universities,” Claudia Roth, the German government’s commissioner for culture and media, told the state broadcaster Deutsche Welle recently. “Their return must be a priority.” While some museums release data and conduct provenance research, the overall process for returns lacks infrastructure or state funding: Without a systematic national policy, it has fallen to individuals and networks to help organize the cases.

Much of the current problem, Kunze believes, stems from bureaucratic inertia. “Although,” he added, “I’d say when museums deal with descendants, there’s still a lack of empathy.” When we met for coffee in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, Kunze described a painful meeting in the spring of 2022 with descendants and a museum in Berlin where the remains were laid out on a table under a blanket, with no advance warning before people entered the room. Other museums have taken a more conscientious approach. Museums in Leipzig and other neighboring cities, including Dresden and Herrnhut, are part of the Saxon State Ethnographic Museums (SES) network, which has put out a proactive policy on restitution, seeking “to reflect upon and deconstruct the repercussions of colonialism in today’s society and the racism in institutions and relationships.” Over the past few years, reparations of ancestral remains have been sent from German museums to Alaska, Hawaii and Namibia, among other places. In January, Berlin’s Museum of Pre- and Early History announced it was ready to return 904 skulls to Rwanda, 202 to Tanzania and 22 to Kenya after matching them to specific locations inside these countries through partnerships with African research institutions. Some 6,572 skulls in the museum’s possession wait to be examined.

Yet some advocates believe international guidelines are necessary to move away from piecemeal efforts. Germany is already a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which specifies the right to the repatriation of human remains, but repatriation is only the first step. Kunze fears that without formal community engagement, large-scale returns could be initiated but end up without a resting place upon arrival. Germany has returned skulls and skeletons to Namibia, for instance, but a national debate about where they should be buried has left some of the remains in storage in the capital.

Without an enforceable framework, it is up to institutions to act or not. The Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory (Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte — BGAEU), for example, refused in 2022 to provide researchers in Berlin conducting a state-funded survey with the precise number of human remains in its possession, despite the fact that it houses one of Germany’s largest collections. According to the BGAEU website, it has 4,500 “objects,” which includes human skulls, skeletons and bones that it continues to make available to researchers. An email from Elke Kaiser, chair of the BGAEU, stated that, "Since provenance research has not yet been completed, we cannot give a precise number of human remains that originate from colonial contexts, but we assume that about 80 percent come from such contexts.” Kaiser declined to specify when such research would be complete.

In early 2022, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan announced at a cultural festival in Moshi that her government would begin laying the groundwork for the repatriation of human remains. At the National Museum of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam, a committee has also formed on restitution and repatriation, but progress is slow. Families like the Salewas have not been approached to join any kind of governmental dialogue. Joseph Mselle of the Kilimanjaro Chiefs Union told me that Tanzania now needs to send an official letter to Germany requesting the return of sacred objects and ancestral remains. While these negotiations are underway, two potential resting places have been identified near Moshi. Both sites have patches of open land and abandoned government buildings that could be converted into museums. Mselle envisions a field of bronze statues of the ancestors, similar to a sweeping memorial near Pretoria, South Africa, that honors its freedom fighters. Meanwhile, artists, historians and activists are exploring other ways to dismantle colonial collections and honor the dead.

“Marejesho,” the traveling exhibition, represents a rethinking of the imperial museum project, a transcontinental collaboration in which communities can glimpse the ancestral objects they cannot travel to view in German institutes. An earlier project by Kunze’s collective Flinn Works, “Mangi Meli Remains,” focuses on the story of Chief Meli, who was hanged and decapitated alongside Ngalami. A video installation that includes historical photos and material about his life was exhibited in Berlin and then in Dar es Salaam before its permanent installation in Old Moshi’s courthouse and as an interactive memorial online. Mboro, a member of Berlin Postkolonial who is also from the Kilimanjaro area, and was instructed by his grandmother to find Meli’s skull when he came to Germany to study, writes that the work of remembrance includes “bringing custodians and source communities together in ceremony, where epistemologies and forms of engaging with the dead might clash, but where greater knowledge on different histories and narratives of the past will emerge, where friendships might even develop.” Similar artistic ventures have blossomed between and across diasporas, such as “The Ghosts Are Returning,” a music and performance piece by German, Swiss and Congolese artists that enacts a funeral ritual for seven skeletons taken from the nomadic Mbuti people in the Congo by a Swiss doctor in the 1950s.

In Moshi, where Khalid teaches history and geography to middle and high schoolers, some of his students learn about their missing ancestors for the first time on TikTok. “They’ll ask me, ‘What are these skulls? Like, what do you mean that there are human remains in Germany?’” he told me. “At least they’re being exposed. When I was going to school, you couldn’t even bring that up, because everyone just didn’t want to talk about it.” In the coming weeks, Janet plans to visit her paternal aunt and uncle, who, at 96 and 92, may remember valuable details about their family’s past. Kunze has sent the Salewa DNA samples, along with the samples of three other families in Moshi, for processing at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, where they will be compared against eight skulls that traveled from Kilimanjaro to Berlin after 1900 — though Kunze fears that the chances of a match for Ngalami’s remains are low.

In Afterlives, Zanzibar-born and UK based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s meditation on the generations shaped by colonial violence in East Africa, a boy named Ilyas begins to wander, hear whispers and speak in strange voices. He is haunted by the absence of his namesake, an uncle who disappeared in the early 1900s after leaving to voluntarily join the German army. When a shekiya visits to perform a healing ceremony, she tells the family that only finding the elder Ilyas will allow the spirit to let go.

After Ngalami’s murder, his son and successor Barnabus, Janet’s grandfather, had to leave Moshi at night to avoid arrest and probable death. He fled some 60 kilometers to Arusha, likely on foot, remaking a life there, a displacement that they will never be compensated for. If Ngalami’s remains are found and sent back, Janet told me, in accordance with custom, his killers — representatives of the German government — should come with 28 cows and a sheep. A feast would be prepared with banana, milk and yams. A typical funeral in the area has some 1,000 attendees; for someone of Ngalami’s stature, thousands would come from Moshi and Arushi and Dar es Salaam, some of them descendants who are scattered all over the country, who now call other places home.