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Paper short abstract

In this multimodal and collective research German+ Tanzanian Visual Anthropologists, artists and curators try to approach to engaging with the execution of 18 political leaders under German colonial occupation in 1900 and to understand its impact on debates of the return of ancestral remains. 

Paper long abstract

The Paper introduces Kilichobaki as an example of ethnographic Action in Multimodal Anthropology and wants to reflect on the possibilities and challenges of collective research and a traunscultural and decolonial media practice.

One of the most traumatic events in Chagga history in Northern Tanzania was the mass execution on March 2, 1900, when 18 chiefs and leaders were hanged in Moshi for allegedly conspiring against German occupiers. In "Kilichobaki-what remains" german and tanzanian Visual Anthropologists, filmmakers, artists and curators try to approach to engaging with this concrete historical trauma and to understand what role it still plays today. 

In 2022, the exhibition MAREJESHO (Swahili for return, restitution) traveled to six villages on Kilimanjaro and Meru as a mobile research exhibition to share knowledge and close the gap between German museums and the communities. The exhibition showed pictures of cultural assets stolen from the region as well as historical photos and provided information about collections of ancestral remains (human bones). Tanzanian artists accompanied MAREJESHO with live drawings, while the German tanzanian Bagamoyo Film Collective documented oral traditions and did an audiovisual research with the descendants and families of the chiefs, who were executed.

Through the travelling exhibition, curated encounters, workshops, audiovisual Documentation, filmic commentaries, Photography and Illustration the collective seeked out local and activist perspectives in the debate over the repatriation of colonial objects and the return of ancestral remains. In the dialogical research process, the tanzanian/german collective reflected on its own blind spots of the divided colonial past.