Thank you very much Prof. Zimmerer and your teammates for inviting Dr. Masebo from Tanzania to deliver this powerful talk on the aspects of shared legacies in Germany-Tanzania relations. I am deeply touched by your efforts to unveil the long buried topic which would probably never resurface for active and productive discussions and ultimately considerable reconciliations. I am sceptical though if what you have started is something which has real intentions of sharing legacies or just a mere topic to quench an everlasting thirsty of German academics in holding ambivalent discussions about their country’s colonial past. Will there be giving back or returning the cultural objects loot which is stashed in almost all ethnological museums in Germany? I met a German lady working at the national museum in Berlin and she told me that some few years ago the best German lawyers were convened to make sure that they improve the rules, regulations and laws which protect German’s interests in keeping all what was collected during colonialism. It may be considered a mere coffee table talk she was making with me, but is there a political will from the German side to realize the objectives of this project? So far these objects in German museums serve as commercial products through which museums make profits from visitors charges, how are the profits generated in such activities shared to Tanzanians? Is there hope that there will be a day when Tanzania will see some 4000 cultural/archaeological objects are given back to enrich its collection of its pre-colonial generations? Is there any logical explanation from German to justify the need to keep the loot from the small communities they extinguished in Tanzania? Why not give back everything they have taken from these small people after all the suffering which has been caused? I am from the Wangoni group of south-east Tanzania, one of the remnants of the Majimamji war as Dr. Maseba would put it…
21. September 2016 um 16:33 Uhr
Thank you very much Prof. Zimmerer and your teammates for inviting Dr. Masebo from Tanzania to deliver this powerful talk on the aspects of shared legacies in Germany-Tanzania relations. I am deeply touched by your efforts to unveil the long buried topic which would probably never resurface for active and productive discussions and ultimately considerable reconciliations. I am sceptical though if what you have started is something which has real intentions of sharing legacies or just a mere topic to quench an everlasting thirsty of German academics in holding ambivalent discussions about their country’s colonial past. Will there be giving back or returning the cultural objects loot which is stashed in almost all ethnological museums in Germany? I met a German lady working at the national museum in Berlin and she told me that some few years ago the best German lawyers were convened to make sure that they improve the rules, regulations and laws which protect German’s interests in keeping all what was collected during colonialism. It may be considered a mere coffee table talk she was making with me, but is there a political will from the German side to realize the objectives of this project? So far these objects in German museums serve as commercial products through which museums make profits from visitors charges, how are the profits generated in such activities shared to Tanzanians? Is there hope that there will be a day when Tanzania will see some 4000 cultural/archaeological objects are given back to enrich its collection of its pre-colonial generations? Is there any logical explanation from German to justify the need to keep the loot from the small communities they extinguished in Tanzania? Why not give back everything they have taken from these small people after all the suffering which has been caused? I am from the Wangoni group of south-east Tanzania, one of the remnants of the Majimamji war as Dr. Maseba would put it…