Humboldt Lab Tanzania ― Objects from the Colonial Wars in the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin ? Tanzanian-german Perspectives

Numerous objects are kept in the storages of the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin that were plundered from what was then known as German East Africa during the German colonial period of 1886-1918, for instance, during the Maji Maji War. In the project “Humboldt Lab Tanzania” Tanzanian and German academics, curators and artists take a critical look at selected artefacts, among them a large Swahili drum, objects of healing and a talisman.

Lili Reyels is a historian and a curator, and researches in Tanzania among others on German colonialism, anti-colonial resistance and the history of the Evangelical Lutheran church. In Tanzania she has directorship of the intercultural and interdisciplinary project "Humboldt Lab Tanzania" at the behest of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. Paola Ivanov is an ethnologist and since 2012 curator of the collections from East, North East, Central, and South Africa in the Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Her publications, researches, and exhibitions focus on art, aesthetics, and visual/material culture in Africa, museum theory and provenience research, as well as on African history, translocality, and global interconnectedness. Kristin Weber-Sinn is a historian and since 2016 research associate in the provenance research project "Tanzania/Germany: Shared object histories?" at the Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.