The head of chief Mkwawa and the transnational history of colonial violence, 1898-2019

Abstract

This dissertation is a history of Chief Mkwawa’s severed head. I explore the historical context by which his head was taken, the shifting terminology which categorised his remains, the international and internal movements of the skull, and the polymorphous quality imposed onto the head through a myriad of perspectives. In this dissertation, I argue that, as an artefact, Mkwawa’s skull shifted in meaning and significance as it transformed from a trophy of colonial conquest to a political tool of colonial governance to a relic and symbol of anticolonial resistance. I map these changes over the long twentieth century (1898 to 2019) in order to historically contextualise the head’s various meanings under divergent narratives. A microhistory of this single object centres this dissertation as I analyse global historical and historiographical debates concerning colonial violence, collection practices, the legacies of empire, and current debates on restitution and repatriation. Drawing upon archival research, oral histories, private diaries, photographs, and site visitations during fieldwork in Europe, the United States, and Tanzania, this dissertation brings a cultural history of materiality to studies of German and British colonialism, postcolonial legitimacy, and transnational repatriation movements. Mkwawa’s head was a symbolic object, severed under systems of violence implicit in empire making. The transition of human remains from a trophy head to a specimen skull documents the weaponisation of anthropology for imperial control. The inclusion of the head in the Treaty of Versailles provided a space to humiliate Germany and contrast its colonial project against British imperial rule’s paternal protection, whilst Britain also seized Germany’s East Africa colony. The eventual repatriation of a skull to Tanganyika in 1954 illuminates the tightening of colonial control under a Cold War context. The anonymous skull’s transformation into Mkwawa’s skull shows the provenance of the skull was less important than the fact that it became recognised as Mkwawa’s. The abandoned intrinsic cultural qualities of the skull emphasised the centrality of colonial collecting as constitutive to the looting and exhibition of colonial artefacts. The continued display of a skull in Tanzania demonstrates the moral challenges colonial legacies pose for successor regimes. Focusing scholarly attention on Mkwawa’s head as a symbolic object, therefore, reveals how processes of meaning and myth-making anchor colonial and postcolonial power projections.