Mnyaka Sururu Mboro is still driven by the promise that he gave his grandmother when he left Tanzania to Germany almost 50 years ago: to bring back for a proper funeral of a local captain, who was killed by the German colonists in 1900 for opposing their rule in Africa.
Mboro, now 73, is from the same area near Mount Kilimanjaro, who was once ruled by Mangi Meli, king of the Wachaga people. From 1885 to 1919, the region was part of German East Africa, a large colony that is almost three times as large as the contemporary Germany.
Mboro grew up with stories about the king who hung the Germans on 18 other leaders on a tree in March 1900. The chief is presumably cut off by the German soldiers and taken to Germany by the colonial administration, although the authorities cannot confirm it. It has never been restored.
“I’m still searching for it,” Mboro, who now lives in Berlin, told The Associated Press.
Right -wing wrong things right
After Mboro moved to the city of Heidelberg in 1978 to study civil engineering, he heard of a so-called African quarter in Berlin, a neighborhood where streets had names related to the colonial era of Germany.
One day, he said, he learned that there was a street named Petersallee, who regarded Carl Peters, the first imperial commissioner for German East Africa, as a merciless ruler.
“That night I couldn’t sleep. I woke up, sweat, ‘Mboro said. “I saw my grandmother. I said if my grandmother could be here, these people would know, it couldn’t be tolerated. ‘
But Berlin patience it. Despite a campaign that started in 1984 to change the street name, it remained Petersallee until August last year, although some other street names were changed before it was changed.
Mboro founded Berlin post -colonial, a group that showed up for a re -evaluation of the colonial past of Germany and the removal of the surviving colonial structures and racism.
Mboro led the commemorative march when Petersallee was divided into two streets. One is the name Maji-Maji-Allee to remember the Maji Maji uprising against colonial rule in German East Africa. The other is named after Anna Mungunda, who fought against apartheid in Namibia, another former German colony known as German Southwest Africa.
Germany’s colonial past
Compared to other European powers, Germany was late to colonialism. It controlled large parts of Africa from 1884 to 1900 by the colonies of the German Southwest Africa, Cameroon, Togoland and also German East Africa, in what is today Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania.
Germany also established German New Guinea, German Samoa, Island Protectorates in the Pacific, and rented the territory around Jiaozhou Bay in China. All the colonies were lost by 1918, following Germany’s defeat in the First World War.
“Germany’s colonial policy was characterized by injustice and violence,” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a speech in May last year. “It was an inhuman and racist policy.”
“We can’t undo the mistakes of the past, but we can learn from them and the shoulder responsibility for today and the future,” she said.
In 2021, Germany was officially recognized as genocide the slaughter of tens of thousands of Herero and Nama – in today’s Namibia – between 1904 and 1908, although it no longer paid formal compensation.
Find the origin
Meli’s head is perhaps among thousands of human remains sent to Germany, where many of the remains were studied, even before the Nazis came to power, many of the remains were studied in an attempt to prove pseudo -scientific ideas of white supremacy.
In 2011, the government that supervised the State Museums of Berlin, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, inherited a collection of about 7,700 human remains from the city’s Charité Medical History Museum. The foundation tried to determine their origin to return it, but it is difficult.
Hermann Parzinger, the president of the foundation, told the AP that it now has between 5.500 and 6,000 remains from the colonial era.
“Everything has to be returned,” he said.
The foundation in 2023 linked research points and linked 1.135 human skulls to the current Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, but still wait for the countries to accept their return, Parzinger said.
Germany successfully returned human remains to Namibia and colonial spoils to elsewhere. In 2022 he agreed to return hundreds of Benin bronze to Nigeria, historic bronze sculptures.
Teaching about Germany’s colonial era
As part of the 2022 agreement, the foundation obtained a long-term loan of 168 Benin Bronzes. Some can be seen in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum Museum, with information on how they were looted by British troops from Benin City, and details of the once mighty Edo Kingdom of Benin.
The artifacts now play an educational role.
“It is not mandatory to learn about colonialism in the school system,” says Justice Mvemba, who founded decolonial tours in 2022, which offers guided tours to the African quarter and museums of Berlin, including the Humboldt Forum.
Mvemba, who came to Germany as a child as a child, said some teachers may decide to tell students about the colonial era, but it is often in romanticized ways. Her tours strive for “a more critical lens in the colonial era and to also break the glorified narratives.”
While Mvemba is focusing on Germany’s colonial past, she also addresses how racist prejudices are still common today.
“When I grew up in Germany, I experienced a lot of racism,” Mvemba said. “We have to talk about history.”
