Mnyaka Sururu Mboro is still driven by the promise he made to his grandmother when he left Tanzania for Germany almost 50 years ago. Mboro told her he would recover the head of Mangi Meli, a king of the Wachaga people in eastern Africa, who was executed by German colonists for opposing their rule, and that he would bring it back to Tanzania to give the chieftain a proper burial. Mboro, now 73, is from the same area near Mount Kilimanjaro that Meli ruled. From 1885-1919, the region was part of German East Africa, a huge colony almost three times the size of present-day Germany.
Some years after he arrived in Germany – Mboro moved to Heidelberg in 1978 to study civil engineering and now lives in Berlin – he learned there was a so-called African Quarter in Berlin, a neighborhood where street names bore the names of German ties to the continent. Mboro said his initial pleasure turned to horror when he heard there was a street called Petersallee honoring Carl Peters, the first imperial commissioner for German East Africa from 1885-88 and arguably the driving force behind the establishment of the colony. “He (Carl Peters) liked to hang people just only most of the time for his joy,” said Mboro. Despite a campaign started in 1984 to have the name changed, it remained Petersallee until Aug. 23 of last year.
Mboro, who co-founded Berlin Postkolonial, a group pushing for a reappraisal of Germany’s colonial past and eradication of surviving colonial structures and racism, led a memorial procession as the long boulevard of Petersallee was split in two and renamed. One part is now called Maji-Maji-Allee to remember the Maji Maji Rebellion against colonial rule in German East Africa. The other part was named after Anna Mungunda, who fought against apartheid in Namibia, another former German colony known as German South West Africa. Germany lost all its colonies by 1918 after its defeat in World War I, but the impact of its colonial legacy lives on.
In 2021, Germany officially recognized its massacre of tens of thousands of Herero and Nama in German South West Africa between 1904 and 1908 as genocide. It stopped short of formal reparations. The authority overseeing Berlin’s state museums, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, or SPK, inherited a collection of some 7,700 human remains from Charité’s medical history museum in 2011. It has been trying to ascertain their origins for their return, but the process is proving difficult. Justice Mvemba founded Decolonial Tours in 2022, which offers tours of neighbourhoods and museums, including the Humboldt Forum.
Mvemba said some teachers may decide to tell students about the colonial era, but it’s often in romanticized ways. “The way these belongings displayed, they are more displayed as trophies and less as really like cultural belongings where people can actually come and learn something about, like the different nations,” she said.
Source: Africanews
