“One Of The Good White Guys — Right?” A German Seeks His Ancestor’s Truth In Tanzania

-Essay-

HAMBURG — When I started this story, I wanted to feel good. I wanted to be part of something real. When I finished writing it, I felt completely different. It is a story about the German past, those parts of our past that we have forgotten. It is about what lies in our basements: things we do not want to see. And that is not a metaphor. These basements are real.

It was in the late summer of 2022 when I received an email from a domain that I don’t normally receive mail from: @auswaertiges-amt.de, which belongs to Germany’s Foreign Office. The subject line was “Bruno Gutmann.” Bruno Gutmann was my great-grandfather, who lived as a missionary in the Kilimanjaro region in the early 20th century.

How did the Foreign Office know about my great-grandfather? The email said that Katja Keul, one of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s three ministers of state, had come across his story during a visit to Tanzania and wanted to talk to me about it.

As the email exchange continued, I was told that it was about the work that my great-grandfather had written about the culture of the Chagga. The Chagga, or Wachagga, are a Bantu society from the Kilimanjaro region who represent less than 3% of Tanzania’s current population.

My great-grandfather had written about their rites, their fairy tales, their legal system. Representatives of the Chagga people had approached Keul and asked whether these books could be translated into Kiswahili, the Bantu language that most Chagga speak today — because his books are almost the only evidence left of their rich culture.

The Foreign Ministry was looking for these books and wondered whether I, as a descendant of Bruno Gutmann, had some information about where to find them.

I wrote back with good news and told them that all of my great-grandfather’s relevant books were on the shelf at home. A few weeks later, I packed a number of his thickest books — The Folk Book of the Wachagga, Rites and Sages of the Chagga, The Law of the Chagga — into my backpack, got on my bike and cycled to the Foreign Office at Werderscher Markt 1. That’s how it all started.

Threatened with extinction

Bruno Gutmann was born on July 4, 1876 in Dresden, Germany. He was a half-orphan forced into child labor and was accepted into a Lutheran mission seminary, which sent him to what back then was the colony of German East Africa. He lived with the Chagga people for almost 30 years, building a school, a hospital and several communities there.

He was a great admirer of their culture, which he considered to be more down-to-earth and purer than those of Western civilizations obsessed with the idea of progress.

He was looking for the people who still lived in harmony with nature. That is why he was so against to the opinion of many of his fellow missionaries who believed the local population should learn German and adapt their way of life to Western culture. He learned Kichagga, the language of the Chagga, translated the New Testament into this language and founded a dance group for traditional dances.

Like almost all ethnic groups in East Africa, the Chagga had no written tradition.

He firmly believed it was important to preserve their culture and adapt Christian teachings to their way of life. He had experienced first-hand what happens when supposed progress overtakes one’s own world when his impoverished family moved to the big city: People are uprooted, lose their identity and their traditions.

He also witnessed how the culture of the Chagga was threatened with extinction, how the teachings, songs and wisdom could no longer be passed on because the young men had to work on the whites’ plantations or migrated to the new cities.

Like almost all ethnic groups in East Africa, the Chagga had no written tradition. All knowledge was passed on orally: reports about famous ancestors, techniques of cultivation and hunting. Legal norms and laws and many fairy tales, songs, dances, parables, rituals.

My great-grandfather saw the West penetrating the world on the holy mountain and he saved as much as he could by documenting it in writing. Namely in the books that I brought to the ministry.

Translation and restitution

The Minister of State’s office is in an old building with open staircases, double doors and even a paternoster elevator. Everything in this building feels heavy.

Katja Keul is responsible for relations with the African states. This also includes the task of dealing with Germany’s colonial history. It involves the return of stolen cultural assets and the repatriation of mortal remains, including thousands of human skulls that the German colonists had sent to Germany as trophies and research objects and which are still stored in German collections today.

Keul also tells me that she is a descendant of Carl Peters, the notorious founder of the colony of German East Africa, who had people brutally executed at will.

Germany could in fact return something back to the Chagga: their lost history.

Finally, she tells me why she invited me. She was in Tanzania, at the German embassy in Dar es Salaam. They were discussing how the stolen cultural assets and hoarded skulls from Tanzania could be returned. And there she was approached by a young man, Steven Sharra, who told her about the books of a German missionary she had never heard about.

If they were translated from German, they could in fact return something back to the Chagga: their lost history.

Keul wants to have my grandfather’s books translated. She asks me what I think about it. I think it’s good, of course. I think it’s exactly what he would have wanted.

A long-forgotten tragedy

Almost two years later, in March 2024, I am standing on a runway on a rainy night. The air is stuffy and warm, the rainy season is starting in Tanzania.

I have just tumbled out of the back door of an airplane and I am a little disorientated, the words “Kilimanjaro International Airport” are lit up on a terminal building. My great-grandfather’s first book, a Chagga hero saga, has just been translated. I am here to accompany Keul to the handover of the book to communities in the Kilimanjaro region.

A row of white Toyota Landcruisers rolls over the asphalt, past the waiting people (more white than Black), and more follow. One of the Toyotas stops right in front of me, a door opens, a woman waves to me: “There you are, we’ve been looking for you.”

She is Keul’s office manager. I get in, and 30 meters further on, the car stops at the airport’s VIP terminal. Keul gets out of the car in front of me. She shakes a few hands in a friendly manner, local officials who have come to greet her. There are huge armchairs made of reddish-brown leather in the VIP terminal. There is tea.

The first major colonial war of extermination on African soil was led by Germans.

The previous year, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was in Tanzania. He had come on a state visit to ask for forgiveness for the first time in history. Forgiveness for the crimes that Germany committed in Tanzania during its colonial era, long before the two world wars.

Back then, between 1905 and 1907, Germany wiped out about a third of the population in order to crush the Maji Maji uprising. The German colonial corps and its auxiliary soldiers moved through the country and burned down villages and fields in order to starve out the rebels. Up to 300,000 people died; it was the first major colonial war of extermination on African soil, and it was led by Germans.

Very few people in Germany know about it. Nor is anyone aware that Mangi Meli, one of the leaders of the Chagga, was hanged in 1900 because he was accused of conspiracy. He is also said to have refused to pay a hut tax to the colonial administration: an incomprehensible tax for the locals, who had built their huts themselves.

This was how the colonial administration wanted to force people to work on the plantations — to earn money that the Chagga had not needed before the arrival of the whites. After the execution, Meli’s head was cut off, boiled and sent to Germany. The same happened with thousands of other skulls.

Do you remember me?

For a long time, there was little interest in coming to terms with the past in Germany. The other German crimes of the 20th century overshadow everything. There are hardly any memorials for the African victims of German colonialism. Germans liked to see themselves as an unimportant former colonial power and forget about what happened.

Then, Steinmeier traveled to Tanzania to discuss colonial crimes and ask for forgiveness. In Tanzania this was a big deal, but in Germany very few people noticed.

I get my passport checked: no visa queue, no waiting for luggage. This is a special treatment for diplomats, and I am uncomfortable with it.

A new convoy is waiting for us in front of the terminal. With lots of sirens, blue and red lights and hazard lights on, we drive through the otherwise very quiet night in Kilimanjaro towards our accommodation in the city of Moshi. The air blows in through the window, moist and warm, as if it wanted to kiss you. I am alone in the car with the driver.

“Excuse me,” he says in English, “do you remember me?” I say I don’t. “I’m Bosco. You were here a few years ago, right? I drove you then too, your name is Tillmann, isn’t it?”

The handover of the book will take place at the very place where my great-grandfather once preached.

It’s true, I have actually been here once before, when I wrote a book about my great-grandfather. Since then, I have been in email contact with the people from the Chagga communities from time to time, but have not heard anything from them for a long time. And now I am here, in the back seat of a Toyota rumbling through the night on Kilimanjaro, sirens blaring.

A lot had happened since my visit to the Foreign Office. The ministry didn’t even have to look for a translator for my great-grandfather’s writings: Somehow, it all happened spontaneously. They were contacted by a retired music teacher named Hartmut Andres from the Tübingen-Moshi twin town association.

He had come across my great-grandfather’s writings and immediately came up with the idea of having them translated, together with the University of Dar es Salaam. There, Andres quickly found a partner: the archaeologist Valence Silayo, who is working to recover pre-colonial Tanzanian cultural assets. For my great-grandfather, that would have been proof of divine providence.

I understand from the program that the handover of the book will take place at the very place where my great-grandfather once preached, in Kidia, Old Moshi, a village on a plateau on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, nestled between avocado trees and banana plants.

As festive as it can be

The next morning, Bosco drives the Toyota up the hill to where the old church is, which my great-grandfather did not build but greatly expanded. Today, the building is still used for children’s services. Right next door, a larger, less picturesque church is being built; it is huge because the Christian communities here have also become huge.

There is a poster hanging at the entrance to the site. It says “Welcome” and “The Writings of Bruno Gutmann: A Gift to the Chagga,” along with a picture of my great-grandfather, a grumpy-looking man with a pointed white beard. Dancers wave palm fronds (yuccas, to be precise), cheer and trill.

The church building, still half a construction site, is decorated, bows and flags are tied all around the concrete pillars, garlands are strung up. It is as festive as it can be.

The Tanzania’s deputy culture minister is there, Hartmut Andres is there, Valence Silayo is there, church and government representatives. Even an aunt of mine, Friederike Kochem, has come; she manages Bruno Gutmann’s estate. The state minister is there. It’s the big show in honor of my great-grandfather, and I’m a part of it.

Here, I am probably the one who is the most critical of the missionary movement. My great-grandfather tried very hard to preserve the Chagga culture, but he never doubted the legitimacy of the Germans to establish colonies in Africa, even though he had plenty of opportunity to do so after his return.

Only when you write something down does it have a chance of coming back home.

But that is not what we are talking about today. There are many speeches of greeting, I also give one, but the most important thing is what the deputy culture minister says: “Only when you write something down does it have a chance of coming back home. Our children will read these poems and they will learn from their ancestors, and that will make them more committed to Tanzania.” And: “The Chagga were very lucky that Gutmann lived among them.”

Then the first translated book is distributed, the biography of Chief Rindi, written by my great-grandfather. The village elders get a copy, as do teachers from the neighboring schools, and I do, too. A website is launched, run by the initiative in Tübingen and the University of Dar es Salaam. My great-grandfather’s translations (and those of others) will gradually be published on the internet, in Swahili.

There is food, there is dancing. Andres is happy. “There is an incredible wisdom in it,” he says about the teachings of the Chagga. Again and again, people are reminded to look after their neighbors, to make sure that the hungriest person gets the first bite when eating together. The balance of power between men and women is also a big issue in the book: How progressive that is compared to the dominant mentality of the West at the time.

One of the good ones? 

Of course, Steven Sharra is also there, the man who got everything rolling. He stays in the background. He is a great-great-grandson of the Chagga chief Rindi. He was a leader who turned the relatively small community into a small power on Kilimanjaro in the 19th century because he negotiated skillfully with the colonialists and was then able to quickly subjugate his neighbors.

Sharra founded the Kilimanjaro Heritage Society, an association whose aim is to bring the cultural heritage of the Chagga people back to Kilimanjaro. Sharra studied medicine in Tanzania and Liverpool. He worked in England, then moved to Cuba, where he married and had children. He then took a teaching position at a biochemical institute in China. When his father became ill, he had to return to Kilimanjaro to care for him.

How can you be a whole person if you have no culture, if you do not know where you come from?

“I had seen in London how important museums are. How they can bring people closer to their history,” he said. He also wanted to build a museum, one about the Chagga. “I want us to feel whole,” he says. “How can you be a whole person if you have no culture, if you do not know where you come from?”

He felt this void and asked himself what he could do about it. “The French have their culture, the Germans have their culture, the Greeks have their culture,” he says. “Why don’t the Chagga have their own culture?”

I agree with him. I’m in a good mood, for some reason. I’m one of the good white people, a descendant and spiritual heir of the great Gutmann. Let all the others be a problem, I’m part of the solution. One who has kept the writings of the Chagga on his shelf.

I also want to speak to Valence Silayo, the man who leads the translation project in Dar es Salaam. I greet him, almost exuberantly. But he is distant. That makes me feel uneasy. Shouldn’t he want to get to know me? The great-grandson of the man whose books he is translating? Silayo seems to want to talk to everyone here, but not to me.

The skull of Mangi Meli 

The next day, there is an event to commemorate the murder of Mangi Meli. There is a memorial on the spot where he was murdered: a concrete stele with a golden bust of Meli on it. He was hanged with 18 other Chagga leaders, right in front of the military station.

The tree is still standing. It is hard to imagine how 19 people could fit on a tree. The Germans were looking for the greatest possible humiliation. The execution was botched and cruel. Meli’s suffering is said to have lasted more than six hours, because his neck did not break, and the rope did not strangle him properly.

In her speech, Keul recalls the murder of the Chagga leaders. The colonial occupation was brutal and unlawful. She tells stories of murder and punitive expeditions, of heads cut off and shipped to Germany. The victims were not even given a dignified burial.

“As a German, I am ashamed of what our ancestors did,” she says. She apologizes on behalf of the German government. She speaks of the skulls of the deceased having to be returned to Tanzania, once and if they will be found. And that knowledge of the crimes in Tanzania must be increased in German society. She sounds sincere, not dutiful.

History catches up

After the event, the delegation visits the local Mangi Meli school. Students from another school are also invited, including German exchange students. Representatives of the regional administration are there, as well as a representative of Tanzania’s foreign affairs and culture ministries.

The purpose of our visit is to discuss what the young people know about the colonial period. The headmistress is given five copies of the Gutmann translation. She would probably have been happier with money; she says the school urgently needs a fence and a new outbuilding.

But the delegation has no money in their luggage.The students present what they have learned about colonialism. Two elementary school girls say that the Germans came to the country and built roads.

The delegation applauds, polite but embarrassed. An older girl stands up and says that she has learned that colonization by the Germans was not so good for the people of Tanzania, but that now the relationship with the Germans is much better. Then the students are silent.

How are we supposed to feel like Tanzanians if we don’t know even who we are?

Keul says that she is also open to questions. A boy in the corner speaks up. He asks when Mangi Meli’s skull will be returned. Keul explains that she would like to return it, but that they do not yet know where it is.

Then the older girl speaks up again. Her name is Angel and she is 21 years old. Angel says she has a question for the Tanzanian government representatives: “We are always told that we should be proud of being Tanzanian, but we don’t know anything about our history. What was it like before the Germans came? We had our own culture, but I don’t know anything about it. How are we supposed to feel like Tanzanians if we don’t even know who we are?”

The Ministry of Culture representative stutters and says that they are currently considering revising the school books. The Foreign Ministry representative gets angry and says that the children should listen to less music and should Google more if they want to know something about history.

Angel’s eyes sparkle, she remains silent. There is anger in the room. On the surface, it is anger at the government. But behind it, there is the anger toward Germans like me.

For the first time, I feel like history is catching up with me.

Collections of colonialism

Months later, in the summer, I meet Valence Silayo again. This time, we have a good chat, in an office on the top floor of the Linden Museum in Stuttgart.

He has been in Germany with his family since February, and his stay is being paid for by a foundation. He is here to research the provenance of the approximately 7,000 objects from Tanzania that are stored in the depot in Stuttgart. They are cult objects, jewelry, weapons, shields — and many everyday items. Silayo is trying to identify them, clarify their use and, if possible, find out who they belong to.

The Linden Museum is a controversial place. Some see the ethnological museum as a contribution to international understanding, in which cultures from around the world are exhibited. Others see it as a cabinet of colonialism, a gallery of cultures that the West feels superior to. At the museum’s entry, the figures of a white man and a stereotypically depicted African man with thick lips and curly hair bend over the archway.

The museum’s director is Inés de Castro. She brought Silayo to Stuttgart. “We are very open to restitution,” she says, adding that she believes museums are being unfairly criticized. “We are not the owners of the collections, and we do not decide on restitution alone.”

These things do not belong here.

In the case of her museum, the owners are the state of Baden-Württemberg and the city of Stuttgart. And she does not agree with the fact that the museums are being portrayed as slowing down this process. “On the contrary, the museums started the process.” Still, it’s not happening as quickly as some would like.

Let’s be clear, not all objects in the collections are stolen. The origin of the objects must be determined in detail, and there is often a lack of staffing: It’s a hard job, and a slow one. It is often not clear who to negotiate restitution with. In Tanzania, for example, a corresponding commission is only just being set up.

Silayo finds it difficult to wait. An archaeologist, he researches the way of life of the people in the Kilimanjaro region, but the weird thing about his job is that most of the artifacts from his country can no longer be found in his country. And it’s impossible to trace how they left the region: whether they were bought, stolen or given away.

Yet for Silayo, that is not the most important question. “These things do not belong here,” he says. “They belong in a museum in Tanzania.”

Cultural genocide

He thinks it is possible that some objects came to Germany legally, that they were gifts, but he still believes most of them were taken by force. Objects of everyday use, such as vessels with obvious signs of wear, were certainly not gifts. Some pieces of jewelry, elaborate pearl necklaces and gold bracelets, show signs of time indicating that a woman had worn them for her entire life. There was actually no non-violent way to take possession of such items. A warrior would certainly not have given up his spears and shields alive.

In Tanzania, the National Museum has only a handful of objects from the Kilimanjaro region. That’s all. In Germany, 1 of thousands of them are stored in museum basements. In other museums, for example in the Grassi Museum in Leipzig and the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, there are many more than in Stuttgart.For Silayo, it is not just about objects that were stolen, but about the history that was erased. In Germany, people now talk about the colonial period and the theft of cultural assets.

What is not often talked about is the fact that the colonial powers did not only destroy palaces: They erased identities. They wiped out languages, wisdom, and cultural treasures — sometimes not intentionally, but out of pure ignorance.

We are talking about a cultural genocide here.

For Europeans, this is hard to imagine: suppose the warriors of the Chagga had invaded Germany in 1872 and burned every single book in the country, every sheet of music, every technical drawing, every collection of formulas, just everything: poetry from Goethe to Lessing, philosophy from Kant to Fichte, Bach, the railways and the 1516 law that still regulates the purity of German beer. What would be left of us then?

That is what we did to the Chagga. And also to the Pare, the Sukuma, the Nyamwezi, the Hehe, the Haya, the Makonde, the Maasai and many others. And we have forgotten it.

White Europeans today like to express their respect for the “Black identity,” but there was never a single “black identity” in what is now Tanzania. There were hundreds of identities. They all fell victim to cultural destruction. The Europeans did not want to leave anything that the local people could identify with.

When Silayo tells me about the white ignorance of his culture, I am reminded of the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who writes in her book Americanah about a girl who moves from Nigeria to America: She only found out that she was Black once she lived among white people.

Silayo does not try to use gentle words: “We are talking about a cultural genocide here,” he says: “The colonialists stole the artifacts to accelerate the dissolution of local cultures.” They did not want self-confident people in German East Africa, but rather compliant workers who would serve the white man.

It’s not over

Cultural genocide. The term sinks into the pit of my stomach. I sense that for Silayo, I am not part of the solution. I am part of the problem.

Part of the people who hide skulls and artifacts of the Chagga in their basements and now want to talk to people from Tanzania on an equal footing about what could be done with them. But for Silayo, we Germans still owe the people of Tanzania a great debt.

We think colonialism is over. I thought so, too. But it is only over for us — not for the Chagga, not for Silayo. It is often not easy to gain an insight into the Tanzania collections in Germany, he says. In order to visit his own culture, which was stolen from him, he has to ask the thieves’ heirs for permission.

In autumn last year he was able to visit the collection in Leipzig for the first time, he says. In the warehouses he saw beautiful works by the gunsmiths, works that showed great craftsmanship.

“Today a blacksmith would not be able to make something like that.” He saw his own history, kept away from him in a German basement, and he cried.

I ask him if that makes him angry. He stands silent. He then pulls himself together and says that of course he feels anger. But he knows that he has to make peace with it. “I feel that only people like me can make a difference now.” He knows that being accusatory won’t take him far. Because the whites are still more powerful than him. They are still the ones who decide whether he can bring the history of the Chagga back to the country.

Leaving ancestors behind

If Silayo wants to learn about the rites and law of the Chagga, he has to rely on foreign sources. That is why my grandfather’s work is so important to him.

“Gutmann’s writings show that he was keen to present events as objectively as possible.” Silayo’s hope is that the erased history of the Chagga can be experienced again through this keyhole. I ask him whether the people on Kilimanjaro are interested in their own history. He says that more and more young people are. “But how can you be interested in something you know nothing about?”

I say goodbye, I have to catch the train.

I have a feeling about what will happen when more young people know about their heritage: They will be angry at those who once took it from them. At us. And it doesn’t matter if Katja Keul traveled to Kilimanjaro to apologize, or if my great-grandfather tried to save their cultural heritage. They surely have nothing to thank us for.

I say goodbye, I have to catch the train. I leave Valence Silayo behind in the remains of the world that my ancestors destroyed.

I feel sick and I’m sweating, but I’ll be fine, something will distract me. Today is today, and tomorrow is tomorrow — not for the Chagga, not for Valence Silayo, for Steven Sharra, for Bosco, whose full name I did not even care enough to ask. For them, yesterday will forever be yesterday.