The Skull in the Versailles Treaty

Chief Mkwawa, Human Remains and the Violence of Empire

How the looted skull of Tanzanian Chief Mkwawa became a tool to justify colonial power and silence anticolonial resistance.

How the looted skull of Tanzanian Chief Mkwawa became a tool to justify colonial power and silence anticolonial resistance.

In 1891, Tanzanian Chief Mkwawa began an epic war of resistance against German colonialism. After defeating in battle the largest European force in Africa, he became the single greatest threat to Imperial Germany. When his rebellion eventually collapsed in 1898, his severed head was taken as a bounty. But his story was far from over.

In this fascinating book, Jeremiah Garsha traces Mkwawa’s life, death and afterlife through the strange history of his skull. Collected as a colonial administrator’s personal trophy, it became a German museum specimen, disappearing into the vast collections of body parts taken from across the empire. After Germany lost World War One, Mkwawa’s skull was claimed by the British, becoming the only named human remains in the 1919 Versailles Treaty. But it was never found.

During the decolonisation struggles of the 1950s, Britain resurrected Mkwawa’s story, bringing an anonymous skull from Germany to Tanzania to bolster its own fading empire. Today, that skull remains on display in a Tanzanian museum, a totem of anticolonial resistance. Weaving a broad tapestry of colonial violence and indigenous resistance, ‘scientific’ racism and stolen culture, Garsha’s history reveals how such ‘exhibits’ are intimately tied to legacies of empire.

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