Germany Charité Hospital of Berlin is reportedly in the process of repatriating back to Dar-es-salaam, a total twelve ancestral remains looted from the present day, Tanzania, during the colonial times of Tanganyika.
The human remains, mostly skulls and bones will then be repatriated back to their original ancestral land in Iringa region through the representative of the Hehe community, Chief Adam Abdul Mkwawa II.
Skulls that were being housed in the German Charite hospital’s University of Medicine collection for a century were stolen from Africa during the colonial period and have now been genetically matched with living relatives.
DNA from skulls that were stolen a century ago from Tanzania was previously analysed and matched to living relatives in the country.
“The human bones in question were stolen during the colonial period in the former colony of German East Africa and stored in a disgraceful manner in German collections for decades,” Joe Chialo, Berlin’s senator for culture and social cohesion, said in a translated statement.
Many of them were part of a collection assembled by the doctor and anthropologist Felix von Luschan during German colonial rule for some sort of studies that later raised an uproar.
They were taken from the former colonial precinct known as German East Africa, which was made up of the present-day Rwanda and Burundi, the mainland Tanzania (then Tanganyika) and part of Mozambique from 1891 to 1918.
These remains were part of about 7,700 skulls housed at Charité hospital in Berlin collected between 1890 and 1914.
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Museum of Prehistory and Early History, took custody of the skulls in 2011.
Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History has been carrying out research since 2017 on about 1,100 skulls taken from what was then known as German East Africa. The museum announced on Tuesday that DNA analysis had provided a clear link to living descendants in Tanzania, hailing the find as a “small miracle”.
Now as of January 2025, some of the human remains in fact 12, will be dispatched back to Tanzania.
A few years ago, scientists examined 1,135 skulls at Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History, assigning 904 to areas that are now part of Rwanda, 202 to Tanzania and 22 to Kenya.
Now twelve remains from the Wahehe People of Iringa get repatriated to Tanzania.
It is still not known if the relatives will bury the same or decide to keep them in the special Kalenga Historical Museum in Iringa.
This development comes a few weeks after the opening of ‘Histories of Tanzania,’ event at Humboldt Forum in Berlin.
Describing the occasion to journalists there, Chief Adam Abdul Mkwawa II had this to say; “it also helped a little to have people to share and listen to our cries and stories.”
Adam’s great grandfather is the original Chief Mkwawa, a legendary historical figure in the struggles against colonialism in East Africa.
Mkwawa is the Chief of the Wahehe Community in the Iringa Region of the Southern Highlands of Tanzania.
In January 2025 the Hehe Chief later travelled back to Berlin, this time leading a delegation on an emotional mission to retrieve the living history of his Hehe people.
The remains of ancient people taken from Tanganyika (Tanzania) and other parts of Africa, were reportedly being used for Anthropological research study of human remains sampled from various regions by members of colonial forces.
However, the studies were later discovered to be profoundly flawed and inhuman.
The Repatriation of African Ancestral remains
The last few years have seen a dramatic increase of repatriations of human remains from Germany to Indigenous communities. Some of them received wide publicity, like for example, the first handover of 20 skulls of colonial origin to a Namibian delegation in 2011, but others went largely unnoticed.