The colonial legacy of Africa's place names

Kilimanjaro: The Chagga people have lived on the slopes Africa's most famous mountain for centuries. They call the summit Kibo.

But for much of modern history, Tanzanian children were taught that Kilimanjaro was discovered in 1848 by a German missionary, Johannes Rebmann. In fact, German geographer Hans Meyer renamed Kibo Kaiser Wilhelm Peak when he reached the summit in 1889.

The cultural importance of Kilimanjaro to the local Chagga was completely ignored. Yet the European explorers were very aware of the symbolism attached to renaming landmarks: That they were the new masters of Africa, and they were in Africa to "civilize" the African inhabitants. As a consequence, local names were devalued — and in some cases forgotten.

It's telling that in 1964, to commemorate the birth of the United Republic of Tanzania, Kilimanjaro's Kaiser-Wilhelm Peak became Uhuru Peak, which means "freedom" in Kiswahili.

Also in the East African Rift Valley, Lake Victoria is still named after the 19th century British monarch. Namibia, Germany's only settler colony, is still full of German names. This includes the town of Lüderitz, after the first German to buy vast tracts of land that set off colonial expansion in the region. Recently, though, there have been some initiatives to rename the town.

German geographers of the time, like Friedrich Ratzel, influenced colonial thinking by proposing that Germany, as a "strong nation" had a right to expand into so-called weaker states. The ideology of "Lebensraum", or living space, was used to justify German colonialism, and conquered lands had to be made amenable to German culture. "Lebensraum" later became key tenant of Nazi thinking.

Stripping the identity of a people, even after livelihoods were wrecked through colonial suppression and violence, was a defining factor in establishing complete control.

It has been challenging, and it has been handled differently. Take Hermann von Wissmann's notorious legacy in East Africa. In the early 1900s, imperialists nicknamed Von Wissmann "Germany's Greatest African" for his daring raids and buccaneering military conquests. In 1905, a statue of him was erected in Dar es Salaam. In the German capital Berlin and elsewhere, streets were named in his honor. But to East Africans, Wissmann was notorious, and his soldiers were known for terror and murder, rampaging punitive expeditions and subjugating local populations. In 1921, the Wissmann statue was removed by British colonial administrators before reappearing in Hamburg mid-century. A new generation of German students tore down the statue in 1967, protesting against the glorification of imperial Germany.

Perhaps the biggest lightning rod for Tanzanians is the issue of stolen artefacts and human remains looted from East Africans and taken to Germany as war trophies, and for research into scientific racism. Hundreds of African skulls were taken from colonial era battlefields, or stolen from graves, and brought to Germany where they were displayed in museums or withered away in private collections. Few of these human remains have ever returned home to be honored in accordance with local customs.

Tanzanian historians, and the ancestors of those killed during colonialism, have long demanded the human remains be returned. And while there may be few written archives recording the colonial era from a Tanzanian perspective, oral histories of German colonialism are still being passed down through generations.

In November 2023, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier did visit Tanzanians in Songea to ask for forgiveness for German atrocities committed during the Maji Maji war, which cost between 120,000 and 300,000 African lives. He said Germany was working on returning human remains to their rightful ancestors.