Curated by Philip Maligisu and the Pan-African Centre for Heritage and Provenance Research
Review by Anna Zoë Klos (19 May 2026)
The year 2026, specifically the 27th of February 2026, marked the 120th anniversary of one of the most important events of the so-called Majimaji war, the execution of 67 Ngoni chiefs for their participation in this anti-colonial resistance movement. The southern Tanzanian town of Songea takes its name from one of them: Nduna Songea Mbano. Since the founding of the Maji Maji Museum in 1980, the town has been the center of the national commemoration of the war.
Philip Maligisu in collaboration with Paola Ivanov
To commemorate this year’s anniversary, the National Museum of Tanzania has commissioned an exhibition, curated by the former director of the Maji Maji Museum, Philip Maligisu in collaboration with Paola Ivanov from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, on the cultural violence and on cultural belongings looted during the war throughout the affected areas. Over the course of three years, researchers investigated belongings situated in several German museums and traced their origins and functionalities back to their regions of origin.
Paradoxical narratives of Majimaji Festival
Amongst the context in which the exhibition took place, namely the paradoxical narratives that aim to combine a push for tourism with a mixture of state-centered, military, and tribal remembrance rites that the Majimaji Festival contains these days, the exhibition provided a breath of fresh air. It being grounded firmly in rigid historical research set it apart from the political performances that governed the program of the festival, like the established choreography of Ngoni chiefs, as well as the government’s role that amounted to not much more than an elaborate tour of hasty photo-ops.
Decentering Songea
The exhibition also challenged the narrative that permeates the choice of Songea as the center of the remembrance culture of Majimaji. While the overall nationalist story of Majimaji emphasizes its multiethnic character, in Songea it is only one group, the Ngoni, whose resistance is put front and center and continues to be centered by the politics of the festival. The stories uncovered by Maligisu and his colleagues however decentered Songea and Ungoni and instead focused on cultural belongings looted by German troops from the modern-day coastal regions of Pwani and Lindi, as well as in Mtwara along the Ruvuma River in the south of modern-day Tanzania.
Looted heritage
In particular, the exhibition showed four cases of cultural heritage, all of which were not represented by the belongings themselves or photographs due to the sensitivity of some of the belongings’ functions, but instead by paintings produced by two members of the research team, Amani Abeid and Patrick Hege. Front and center of the exhibition, which was housed in a one-room building to the side of the main building of the Maji Maji Museum, were short films recorded by the exhibition team that showed off the research process and centered the expertise of the interviewed locals of Pwani, Lindi and Mtwara.
Interviews with elders
The interviews with community elders clearly showed the wounds left by the forced removal of their belongings from their communities and functions. The first of four total stations of the exhibition told the history of women’s heritage in Uzaramo (modern-day Pwani) in the form of mwanahiti/nyakiti, which are deeply personal belongings made of wood that Zaramo girls receive during their initiation and pass down for generations. After being looted from their context and exhibited in German museums, these sensitive family belongings were erroneously labeled as toys or dolls by colonial ethnographers and museum curators.
Kinyago in Uzaramo
The second station again brought us to Uzaramo and told the story of one sacred kinyago, a statue that represents the founder of a family and was placed on his grave under a roof. It too was mislabled a child (mtoto) and had its original context erased. The film on the process of research on vinyago in particular showed the research team engaging in community archaeology as they, together with the descendants of the victims of this case of colonial looting, located the graveyard and the remains of the original structure that had once housed vinyago. Again, the knowledge of these important community sites remains a carefully guarded secret, exposing the wounds left by colonial warfare, and the trust the community placed in the research team.
German colonial violence
Station three, similarly to station two, concerned another story of a belonging in historical Uzaramo in form of a figure, a kwahome, which has since come to drape the new logo of the Pan-African Centre for Heritage and Provenance Research. It too was located in a community shrine and was from there kidnapped by German troops who sought it “unattended”. Lastly, station four showcased midimu, or masks from the Mozambique borderlands and the Makonde Plateau in southern Tanzania. Here the exhibition showed itself at its most vulnerable, not giving clear results but exhibiting the uncertainty that in some cases remains in such a process. The team, again through the accompanying film, made visible the disagreements within and among communities about belongings’ origins and ownership. The team however did highlight the function of midimu as “sacred and inalienable”, despite the remaining uncertainty about their specific provenance.
Sensitivity of subjects
Next to the plethora of information about the origins of these looted belongings, the exhibition shows clear strengths in its sensitive portrayal of not just gendered, but all sorts of cultural belongings with diverse functions. The lengths that the team went to, in the form of the four exhibited films as well as the numerous painted illustrations, show extraordinary dedication to the subject matter throughout three years of research. The experts located in communities and centered in the films (which rarely show the researchers themselves) brilliantly convey the sensitivity of the subjects and succeed in passing on their great knowledge onto the visitor.
Perpetrators absent
The only weakness in my opinion, but certainly deliberate curatorial choice, was the scarce portrayals of those historical sources that jumpstarted the investigation into the origins of the belongings. Insight into the perpetrators and into the operations that enabled the theft was absent, apart from a few colonial era maps. Having both spheres of perpetrators and descendants of the impacted communities’ side by side would have further enhanced the exhibition’s impact and emphasized the historicity of contemporary wounds.
More attention deserved
Regardless, it must be considered too bad that this exhibition only ended up being open for one day of the Maji Maji Festival (27 February 2026) and was unfortunately ignored in the itinerary of the guest of honour, the vice president of Tanzania, who could have given the work of the research team much more deserved attention. Part of this lack of attention was fortunately rectified a week later (6 March 2026), when a supercut of the short films produced by Gertrude Malizeni was screened at Nafasi Art Space in Dar es Salaam under the title “Inalienable – Mizizi”, together with parts of the exhibition.
Tanzania’s restitution policy
The audience here enthusiastically engaged in discussion with four team members, Maligisu, Malizeni, Abeid and Hege, about the future of Tanzanian restitution policy that might hopefully one day enable the return of the belongings from the basements of German museums to their communities of origin. The juxtaposition of these two events in Songea and Dar es Salaam makes it clear that only continuous efforts by activists that challenge the Tanzanian government on its passivity concerning the matter of restitution will eventually show results, even though an outright call to challenge the government sounds reckless and unlikely in post-election Tanzania.
Note on author
Anna Zoë Klos is a student in the Global History M.A. program at Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.