Returning Germany’s stolen skulls

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1:16When I was a young boy, my father told me that the skull of my grandfather is in Germany. That's what my father knew about dating.

1:32That voice you just heard belongs to Zablon Kiewelu, who I met on his recent visit to Berlin. He'd come to the capital of Germany for a unique purpose, to visit the skull of his grandfather, Akide Kiewelu. Tuesday is the day which I cannot forget in my life, going to see the remainder of my grandfather. Sunday I was happy, Monday I was happy, but Tuesday, it's really pain. I'm not happy. It's really pain. Before I saw this girl, I wasn't afraid. But now, it's really pain. Zablon lives in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania. He's an old man, but for his entire life, he's known the story of the execution, how more than 100 years ago, the German colonialists publicly killed 19 local leaders.

2:26They were hanged, one after the other, from a tree. On the same day, 19 people were killed the same day. My father was very young, so he didn't know much about his father. But he told me that your grandfather was held by the Germans, and they took the skull to Germany. After the hanging, German officers ordered that several of the victims be decapitated, and their skulls shipped off back to Germany to enter the collections of one of the city's new museums. But ever since that day over a hundred years ago, Zablon and his community have told the story of the execution and the missing skulls. And recently that oral tradition was backed up by science.

3:12DNA testing confirmed that a skull lying in an archive in a Berlin museum was that of his direct ancestor, Akira Kiewelu, and that's what brought him to Berlin. But even now, he's not permitted to bring his grandfather home.

3:54Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Peter Matthews, a journalist and writer based in Berlin. This city's museums are home to one of the largest ethnological collections of human remains in the world, many originating from former colonies. It's a history that's little known, not just because the legacy of German colonialism is often overlooked, but because the institutions themselves have kept these archives out of public view. For over a century, skulls and bones have sat in dusty basements, sealed in boxes, sometimes even buried beneath museum grounds, forgotten by the same institutions that once went to great lengths to acquire them.

4:41In this documentary, we'll speak with museum directors, activists, and with relatives of the victims to understand how did Zablon's grandfather's remains? along with thousands of others, arrive in Berlin museums? And why haven't they been sent home?

5:03In the late 19th century, European powers carved up the African continent between them. Germany had come late to colonialism, but in 1884, took control of what it named German East Africa. My name is Mnyaka Sururu Mbaro, and I am from Tanzania, which formerly, it was that biggest land in German East Africa. And German East Africa, it was not just only Tanzania, also Rwanda and Burundi is included in. Mbaro's lived in Germany for over 40 years. But back in Tanzania, his grandmother experienced colonial rule firsthand. and she saw how brutally they put down local resistance. In my childhood, since I was three years old, my grandmother used to tell me a lot about German colonialism.

5:58She told me that in our villages there on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, we had a chief, a great chief, who fought bitterly against the Germans. She was there on that day in 1900, when the Germans publicly executed 19 local leaders accused of plotting rebellion. They were taken as captives, and they decided that they were going to hang them. There were 19 of them. the villagers were forced to go and watch the hanging. And my grandmother was one of them. After this killing, German officers ordered the skulls to be shipped across continents to Berlin. So who exactly were they being shipped to?

6:53Who wanted these heads and why? My name is Ben Hatib. I'm archaeologist and curator at the Museum for Pre and Early History at the State Museum of Berlin. And I'm in charge also of an anthropological collection which contains quite a lot of colonial human remains from former German colonies. Bernhard Heeb is in charge of an archive of human skulls that was assembled during the late 19th and early 20th centuries by an Austrian anthropologist called Felix von Lushan. This collection of human skulls grew to become one of the largest in the world, and he called it the S-Collection. And S stands probably for Schädel, skull, or for Skeleton, skelet, but we don't know for sure.

7:38It's not defined anywhere what S means. As an ethnologist, von Lushan wanted to understand how different human races or peoples were related and the various stages of human development. But he was working under the preconceptions of his time when the German Empire claimed colonies from the Bismarck archipelago in the Pacific to Africa. And like many scientists of his day, he saw modern civilization as a force that was transforming the world. He believed this transformation doomed many native peoples to extinction. His task, then, was to preserve them, not as living communities, but as data in the archive.

8:21So I asked Bernhard Hebe, how big is the S-Collection? How many skulls are we talking about? Yeah, I would say we have around 3 ,000 to 3 ,500 skulls from colonial context. When each skull was sent back to Berlin, it would enter Lushan's archive under an index number, or S number, written directly on the frontal bone, the forehead of the skull. However, Lushan worked so quickly, gathered so much, that quite often he lost track. And it seems to be quite a chaos, to be honest. So it seems to me that, for example, human remains were brought to Berlin and were stored for one or two years in cases somewhere in the museum.

9:02And when he found time and he had somebody who did it for him, they opened the case and they started to inventorize. And we know that they also made mistakes. So that means sometimes things or information are written on a scar, which is obviously the wrong scar. Or, for example, we have a cranium and mandibular, that's Kifo. Cool. Yes, which have the same number, but obviously they don't fit together. We have that quite often. That means things must have been quite a mess during the time Lu Shan was working with them. And to be honest, he was collecting, as you know, a lot of skulls, but he didn't really work on them.

9:42So this analysis or this idea he had to collect a lot of skulls, gather a lot of data, he never got over this point. He never really worked with his collection, and that's ridiculous, you know. He was, I don't know, he was a crazy collector, or he, I don't know. But it's really strange that he never used the skulls for what he wanted them. So they were collected for more or less nothing. Lushan had access to a vast colonial network. Travellers, missionaries, merchants, and especially soldiers were encouraged to collect human remains for science. Officers in the Imperial Navy were given standing orders to gather bones wherever they could.

10:26He was one of the initiators of that, let me say, some kind of a paper that was given out to everybody in the colonies. It was not a law, but it was some kind of a clear rule, so to say, that everything that was collected in the German colonies, first of all, had to be given or shown to the Berlin Museums. In von Lushan's personal letters, he inquires after skulls with a chilling clinical detachment. Collectors working for Lushan robbed graves, bribed officials, used any means necessary to gather these bodies. He also ordered directly from certain parts of the world human remains, because he knew that somebody was traveling.

11:08He connected them and he asked for things, or not things, for human remains, and he said, okay, if you're there and you can send me human remains from that community or that ethnicity, I would be very thankful, whatever. It's shocking to see Lushan operate. For example, when he learns about a trial of a German farmer in Namibia who's murdered a woman and child, he writes to the court to inquire whether the bodies are still available. He's in touch with some plantation owners in Tanzania. He sent them a statuette and asks in return if they'd be willing to preserve some skulls and skeletons for science.

11:47There was a big and sometimes a very strong network of people knowing each other. And he never had a problem to get in contact with anybody. He never got a problem to get material, so to say. So he was very clever in doing that. And after all, he sometimes made pressure also on them. This extraction of bodies took place alongside the plunder of cultural artifacts and raw materials. Germany laid down railways and shipped out goods, cotton, rubber, coffee, sisal for making rope. But it also transported the dead. The bones of colonized people traveled back to Berlin in the same crates as its plundered colonial wealth.

12:28But why did they collect so much? What were they trying to prove? You know, that's a very complicated question because I think it was really more about the question how did the mankind evolve, how we are related. But after all, you were sure that the Europeans were in some way superior and the Africans were closer to the early humans, so that they are more, let me say, in a way more primitive. Of course, that was a basic idea which more or less all of them had in mind. That assumption that some humans are anatomically less developed or more primitive is racist and has been scientifically discredited.

13:09But the belief that Africans were closer to early humans drove Lushan to want to study their bodies. He's in a hurry to gather as much material as possible before it's corrupted by contact with the modern world. In a guide to ethnographic collecting in Africa, he writes, Modernity is a terrible and relentless enemy of primitive conditions. Whatever we cannot secure and preserve is heading towards terrible destruction, never to be recovered. Conditions which have developed in unique ways over thousands of years are changing almost overnight under the influence of the white man. We must act quickly before it's too late.

13:52As a scientist, the director of a royal museum, Lushan was at the forefront of scientific theories of his day, but worried about the effects of the same modernity he stood for. His predecessor at the Ethnological Museum described, Western civilisation as blowing like a storm across the world, destroying everything it touched. Yet these men commanded steamships, sent out explorers with measuring tools, prospected for rare metals, established mines and laid down railways. They saw civilisation as a coming storm, but they were the storm they feared.

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15:16This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I met Minnaka Su 'uru Mboro on a windy day outside his office in Berlin. As a child, he had been told by his grandmother about the missing skulls. And from the moment he arrived in Germany, he was determined to bring them back. She has been always saying, these heads must be brought back so that we finish the burial according to our rituals. When did I realize that they were in Berlin Museum? It took years and years when I started for searching and nowhere I could get any kind of a clue where are they being kept or whether they are there or not, because no one wanted to talk about it.

16:08We were not in any archive, because we didn't have information, and they were holding the whole information. They were not giving us the information. It took years of campaigning, but eventually, Mbora persuaded the museums to commission provenance research into the colonial origins of their collections. I asked him, what was it like when he first saw the skulls himself? The experience like, the experience like when, when, when I first them. I don't know how should I put it, because I didn't believe, because they were in these boxes, which they look like shoeboxes. and I couldn't understand how someone can keep.

17:05For me, they are human beings. They are not yet buried. For me, they are as if they are alive. How can you do that? How can you do that? Once he began working with German researchers, Mboro became a crucial connection between Germany and the communities in Tanzania. It was Mboro who contacted the Kuelu family, who took the DNA sample, which allowed researchers at the Berlin Museum to confirm the match. And it was in response to Mboro's work that the Museum of Pre - and Early History, where Bernhard Hibb oversees that huge collection of skulls, commissioned an in-depth report on their East African origins.

17:43Eventually, this led to them identifying four individuals with living descendants, one of which was Ekide Kuelu. After decades of refusing to open up their archives, the German museums were now ready to make a return But we're blocked Zablon was permitted to come to Germany and visit his grandfather, but not to bring him home Which from borrow after all this work can feel agonising I've been working direct on this case I know they are lying there I have seen them myself I know they are lying there and I'm sitting here with you guys talking to you and they are lying there and I don't know what I can do.

18:28How should I say? I feel so weak. So why is it that they can't send a kidikuelu back home? From a practical level, bringing a dead body home is not that easy. You need official permission to transport human remains. In some cases, restitution of ancestral remains has seen the state issue a passport for a dead person to allow it to travel through customs. While it's difficult, it's not impossible, if there's political will. We reached out to the German and Tanzanian governments to try to understand. On the German side, everyone we spoke to affirmed that they are willing to make a return. They want to send Zablon's grandfather home.

19:10A spokesperson from the Federal Foreign Office told us that it is our historical and moral responsibility to return ancestral remains. Another spokesperson for the culture ministry said that they've clearly indicated their willingness to return the remains to Tanzania. So, what's stopping them? Well, the perspective on the Tanzanian side is a little different. We reached out to the Tanzanian government, and while they declined to make an official statement, the sources we spoke to told us that their process of actively dealing with cases like this began only recently. In late 2023, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited Tanzania.

19:51There he gave the first official apology for German colonial crimes, even visiting the grave of someone whose head was stolen for the German museums. Following that visit, Tanzania set up a national committee to look into the restitution of ancestral human remains, as well as antiquities and cultural artefacts. That committee made a research visit to Germany earlier in 2025, even visiting the same museum that contains Akiri Kiewelu's skull. I think they were three days in Berlin and they visited the Atlantico Museum and I also had a talk with them. And that was the first sign from the official Tanzanian side that they start getting active or start getting interested in, you know.

20:36And maybe that's what we have to wait for now. But that is not the only museum they visited, which actually is part of the problem. There are so many objects to take in, so much looted wealth that one individual case can get lost. They even paid a visit to the Natural History Museum, whose most famous exhibit is the fully reconstructed skeleton of a Brachiosaurus dinosaur, also stolen by the German colonialists in Tanzania. That Tanzanian committee is still preparing its findings. And while they wouldn't give us an official position on the Kuelu case, they may represent the best chance to bring Akira Kuelu's skull back home.

21:18However, while things may be moving forward behind the scenes, for the activists, museum researchers, and most of all for the families, this lack of transparency can be frustrating. It has been to the museum for a long time because they have never been identified. But now, if they have been identified, they shouldn't stay here anymore. It's a pain to my family and it's a pain to the government of Tanzania also. So let them return this card and we can be happy. Of course, I find it frustrating. If you invest work for years and years and you are in connection with the families and the communities and you know what kind of trauma is still existing and you're very, you know, everything has been done.

22:03You reached everything you can reach doing a provenance research project. and then you are blocked and you're not allowed to give it back home. So, of course, it's frustrating. I asked Bernhard Hebe, does he think Zablon will bring his grandfather home? I'm not a prophet, I don't know. We can't change the politics of Tanzania. We can't force Tanzania to do what we want them to do, after all. So that's the main problem. It's not about that we would not like to and would not support that, but we're blocked by the official obstacles. But let's remember this is not the only case. There are hundreds and thousands of other such remains, and the Tanzanian government needs to find a solution for all of them.

22:44I mean, we cannot just only condemn the Tanzanian, but the whole delay which was here already years and years, when we, the civil society, started asking about it, this human remains here since already over 100 years. But I asked Bernhard Him, where are the skulls now? They are kept here in my office, and they are kept here in a special cupboard, and they are kept in special wooden boxes made for them. And that's what we also agreed upon. And these are the boxes which I hope they will travel home in, you know, because they were prepared for them. That's not an anonymous human remain anymore for me.

23:31All this work has gone into getting one match, piecing together documents, taking DNA tests, combing over archives and matching missing bones. But this is just one of the over 3 ,000 colonial skulls in the S-Collection, not to mention the thousands of others in museums, universities and cultural institutions. And what's true for Berlin reflects the situation all across Europe. There are a lot of collections everywhere. In Berlin, you know, Leipzig has a big collection. Zürich has a big collection. Vienna has a very big collection. Paris has a big collection. London has a big collection. I think also Eremitage in Petersburg has a very big collection, and most of them don't want to talk about that.

24:15Dan Hicks is curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, an institution which has been working to investigate and repatriate its collection of human remains since the 1990s. The terrible thing really is that these stories are just the tip of an iceberg. From Berlin to London to Paris and New York and far beyond, we understand still so little about the fate of the untold, hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of ancestral remains that are still warehoused in museums, university and medical collections. Some of the task of looking after our museum collections then would mean finding out what they really hold.

24:55Here's Dan Hicks again. The most urgent task for museums in the 2020s is surely the tedious but necessary work of the cataloguing of these collections and making the information about what is held public. Right now our museums are like libraries without a catalogue, filled with the remains of the dead from the imperial past. And that's an unsustainable situation. Yet political momentum for this work is stalling. Money is increasingly hard to find. Berlin's cultural budget was just cut by 130 million euros. And the slow, hard-won effort to reckon with Germany's colonial past, which for decades seemed to be moving ahead, now risks sliding backwards.

25:38Because the funding stopped and there is, at the moment, no really perspective to get it running again. Because there's, you know, times are changing, priorities are changing, and I don't know how it will go on with the providence research. A spokesperson from Germany's culture ministry assured us that Germany was committed to providence research and the return of cultural assets. But no matter what happens within the institutions, activists like Mboro are not going to give up. Anything can happen. We can even start again, back to square one. Although we'll not be exactly square one because they cannot destroy the results which we do have collected up to now.

26:27Meanwhile, more than a year since he came to Germany, back in Tanzania on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, Zablon Kuelu is still waiting. By us going to Germany, the people from the village and the whole family of Kuelu were expecting us coming back with a scar.

27:12Yet they believe he will return.

27:17The whole village, the whole family will be there to see and they will celebrate about it because he was a very, very important person to the village and to my family.