Memory, Restitution, and the Unfinished Journey Home
By Bernard Laulian Ntahondi (Dar es Salaam, 16 August 2026)
<Editorial Note: In this text, the Tanzanian heritage scholar Bernard Laulian Ntahondi describes the thoughts and feelings inspired by his participation as a panellist at an event organised by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin in June 2026. The discussion centred on the film “Listening Across Oceans”, which documents a Berlin school group’s trip to the USA to explore the transatlantic enslavement trade.
Bernard is a member of Ajabu Ajabu, a cinema and artists’ collective in Dar es Salaam, which has set itself the task of preserving and promoting his country’s audiovisual heritage. As a curator at the non-governmental Dar es Salaam Centre for Architectural Heritage, he is also dedicated to the architectural heritage of Dar es Salaam.
The podcast DECOLONIAL MEMORIES hosted Bernard in September 2025.>
The Missing Ocean in Global Memory
In many international conversations about colonialism, the transatlantic narrative dominates. The story of slavery, plantations, and the Middle Passage is rightly central – but it is not the whole story. From my position as a historian and curator working in Tanzania, I often find that East Africa and the Indian Ocean world are treated as footnotes. Yet our histories are deeply entangled with these global systems of extraction and violence.
Full text by Bernard (pdf)
Places That Speak
In my work, I often move between film, archives, and public spaces. One thing has become clear to me: places carry a kind of knowledge that cannot be fully captured in books or statistics. A former plantation, a slave fort, a colonial administrative building-these are not neutral sites. They are charged with memory. They hold contradictions. They invite different people to see different things.
Can one place hold multiple memories at the same time? I believe it must. But that coexistence is not always comfortable. It requires negotiation, humility, and sometimes confrontation. It requires acknowledging that memory is not only about the past – it is about power in the present.
From Symbolism to Structural Change
During the discussion, we were asked a critical question: if remembrance is to be more than symbolic politics, what concrete change should we expect in the next five years? This is where the conversation inevitably turns to restitution.
Restitution, therefore, cannot be reduced to the movement of objects from one place to another. It must be understood as repair. Repair of knowledge. Repair of memory. Repair of dignity.
Tanzania and the Journey Home
In Tanzania, the conversation around restitution is gaining momentum. There are ongoing efforts to identify and reclaim human remains taken during the colonial period, as well as cultural artifacts held in European museums. But beyond the legal and diplomatic processes, there is a deeper question: what does it mean for these histories to return? For me, it is not only about bringing objects back. It is about reactivating them within communities. It is about integrating them into education, into storytelling, into everyday life.
Toward a Shared Future
Restitution debates often position Europe and Africa as opposing sides – one holding, the other demanding. But perhaps the more productive approach is to see this as a shared challenge. How can European institutions move from acknowledgment to action? How can African countries prepare to receive, interpret, and integrate returned heritage? And how can both engage in a process that is not extractive, but restorative? These are not easy questions. But they are necessary ones.