“I could not prevent me thinking about the violence behind each human skull.”

Mikael Assilkinga

Cameroon

My name is Mikael Assilkinga and I come from Maga, Cameroon. I am completing my doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Dschang, researching objects of power from Cameroon in German museums. In parallel, I am working on the provenance of Cameroonian human remains from the colonial context. The human remains from Cameroon in Göttingen have not been researched so far. The project „sensitive provenances“ was the best opportunity for me to deal with this and to make the history of violence known both in Germany and in Cameroon, and above all to work on repatriation. Justice must be done. I want to contribute to this through my research.

Doing Research

Working with the collection

“The remembrance is something they describe as a catastrophe –
thinking about the German time in their countries”

Label of a skull from a boy from today’s Batibo

Cameroon / c. 1905 / Anthropological Collection

In Göttingen, I was particularly interested in the “skull of a boy from the tribe Batibé” (today Batibo), “vassal state of the Bali King” that was probably collected around 1905 and is now in the anthropological collection. Bali was allied to the Germans in the region and together they organised several military expeditions against the neighbouring kingdoms to bring them under their respective colonial yoke. During such wars, villages were plundered, palaces burned, cattle taken away and parents killed. Children who lost their parents died often sometimes afterwards. Katharina Stötzel and I could determine that the boy died of anemia, a disease caused by malnutrition. Unfortunately, his fate was not the single case. In addition to the Cameroonians killed directly in colonial wars, the Germans sealed the fate of thousands of children in the former colony Cameroon. Although it is difficult to visit Batibo due to an ongoing war, I followed up this lead because it was important for me as descendant of a formerly colonised society to clarify the tragic death of this boy.

Mikael Assilkinga

Four skulls in the anthropological collection were brought by Leo Frobenius (1873-1938), a character I met for the first time though his ideas during a seminary at the University of Dschang. He was presented as a great contributor to scientific racism through his studies. The archival materials indicate that one (4:17) of these skulls belongs to the Nandji people (actual Adamawa region), but did not answer all my questions. I went to Adamawa to discuss with different communities. Clearly, there is not idea about the skull. In fact, in all the communities I met, people thought that their ancestors the Germans killed were all buried. It was a great shock for them to learn only today that some of their ancestors’ skulls have been secretly taken away. It was difficult from that moment to move forward, since in the region all communities used to bury dead people directly after their death. This situation of an unburried ancestor was simply new to them.

Mikael Assilkinga

Label of a skull collected by the ethnologist and African explorer Leo Frobenius

Cameroon / c. 1905 / Anthropological Collection

Giving Context

Cameroon

“This crisis plays a role in research and even in the restitution process.”

Cameroon was a German colony from 1884 to 1916. There are ten human remains from Cameroon in the Anthropological Collection, and one skull is still kept in the Hamburg Ethnological Museum. The acquisition contexts are very different: slaughters, “punitive expeditions”, desecration of tombs. In the collection documents, the private scholar and merchant Julius Konietzko and the explorer Leo Frobenius are named as collectors, but there is usually no information about the contexts of origin. More in-depth provenance research on the Cameroonian human remains is going on. In February 2023, the State set up an inter-ministerial committee to coordinate restitution requests and negotiate with the former colonial powers. This committee has embarked on an European tour to visit museums and has initiated discussions with scientists working on the issue. The State and the government have made the issue of restitution a priority, but to date there have been no official requests for the restitution of human remains.

Transliteration

“Schädel eines Knaben vom Stamme Batibé (Vasallenstaat des Balikönigs). Bali = Gebiet“

“Skull of a boy from the tribe Batibé (vassal state of the Bali king). Bali = territory”