Meeting with Maji Maji descendants
Steinmeier wants to examine colonial history in Tanzania
October 29, 2023, 12:33 p.m
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The debate about coming to terms with Germany’s colonial past is becoming increasingly louder. The Federal President is now traveling to the former colony of German East Africa in what is now Tanzania to confront the bloody German history on the African continent.
It is a visit to the site of a gruesome crime: On Tuesday, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is expected in Songea, a remote town in southern Tanzania. Here, in the African highlands, one of the bloodiest chapters in German colonial history took place.
With great brutality, the colonial rulers in what was then German East Africa put down an uprising against their rule between 1905 and 1907 – a crime that has largely disappeared from the collective memory of Germans. Historians estimate the number of deaths during the Maji Maji Uprising to be between 200,000 and 300,000. Most of them died as a result of the systematic destruction of fields and villages by the German colonial troops.
More awareness of German colonial crimes
Steinmeier wants to meet with descendants of the Maji Maji victims in Songea and visit a museum. It was built on the site where the Germans publicly executed 67 insurgents.
Little is known to the German public about its own colonial history, which only lasted a few decades and ended in the First World War. The Islamic scholar Johanna Pink from the University of Freiburg points out that at most the systematic killing of the Herero people in German South West Africa in 1904 found its way into public consciousness. The fact that Steinmeier now also wants to meet with descendants of the victims of the Maji Maji uprising indicates “that public awareness should be created that German colonial crimes also took place there,” the professor suspects.
Maji Maji Uprising
The main trigger of the Maji Maji uprising was the high tax burden, which forced African farmers to work in plantations and neglect their own fields. The healer, religious medium and leader Kinjikitile Ngwale then went preaching across the land that was suffering under German servitude. His message: The god Bokero gave him Maji-Maji, water with magical power. Anyone who drinks it becomes invulnerable to bullets from the gun barrels of German colonial soldiers.
Those who have been abused rebel – and are punished mercilessly: expulsion, hunger and mass death come to them. The colonial troops deliberately destroy the population’s livelihood in order to deprive the insurgents of support. The punitive expedition terrorizes, pillages and loots. A scorched earth strategy, the country is bleeding dry. Hunger as a political weapon: The great death begins.
Reports from contemporary witnesses document the misery. The German missionary Father Simon Troßmann wrote in 1907: “No happy life can be observed anymore.” Everything revolves around “njaa”, hunger. He observes: “The children who need so much nourishment have become emaciated to the point of a skeleton. Older children, despite their thinness, have a swollen abdomen.”
The division of the African continent took place in Berlin
German colonial history in East Africa began in 1885, when the German Empire established the colony of German East Africa (today’s Republic of Tanzania) in the vast steppe land between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria as part of the Berlin Conference. Financially, the colony was of course a burden. In order to generate new income, the colonial power promotes cotton cultivation. Locals are forced to work on plantations and have to pay taxes to foreigners.
When Governor Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen sharply increased the “hut tax” for the locals in March 1905, discontent arose. The charismatic leader Kinjikitile rallies the area’s divided ethnic groups behind him. With the help of African Askari soldiers, Götzen quickly puts down the uprising militarily. As a result, the Maji Maji leader was arrested and hanged by German protection troops.
Götzen later defended his actions in a book: “As in all wars against uncivilized peoples, in this case too, the planned damage to the enemy population’s property and property was essential.”
In Berlin there are now approaches to reappraisal. A few years ago a street was renamed Maji-Maji-Allee. Remains that could have come from insurgents from German East Africa have also been identified in Berlin’s museums. Their repatriation is being negotiated.