Contribution short abstract:

Taking the German Colonial Records housed by the Tanzania National Archives in Dar es Salaam as point of departure, I explore the possibilities of my ongoing ethnographic work to contribute to anti-racism and intersectional justice in anthropology.

Contribution long abstract:

Taking the German Colonial Records in the Tanzania National Archives in Dar es Salaam as ethnographic object and point of departure, I explore the possibilities of my ongoing research on violence, witnessing and gender justice between Tanzania and Germany to contribute to anti-racism and intersectional justice in anthropology.

The German Records present an archive of “violent differentiation” (Davis in Venkatesan 2019: 45) along the lines of race, gender and sexuality. I propose a set of possible approaches to the Roundtables’ questions, and to the overall question whether (and how) “anthropology [can] enable decolonization” (Venkatesan 2024: 1).

Firstly, and because “racism is a relational concept” (Mullings 2005: 684), an anti-racist (and anti-colonial) anthropology should center the praxis and theory of Tanzanian anthropology as a primary site from which to reframe existing anthropological narratives on ‘anti-racism’ and ‘intersectional justice.’

Secondly, in order to build a more inclusive community of practice and anchor our discipline in an anti-racist path, we should take seriously, and as part of our making of theory, the long-standing Tanzanian feminist activist political struggles against racism, colonialism and various injustices beyond the academy.

And finally, anthropology could contribute to intersectional justice by refusing to reproduce the “unequal relationship involving both accumulation and dispossession” (Mullings 2005: 685)” that the notion of ‘race’ represents by actively building alternative archives of anti-racist and gender justice histories that may help shift i.e. the accessibility to certain sources (such as the German Records) and support the redistribution and repossession of knowledge.