The Plate of Hassan bin Omari – A case of colonial looted art

“After the market” a contribution by Rainer Beuthel on Saturday, 13.04.2024 at 12:30 pm

In the period between 1884 and 1918, the years of German colonial rule in the so-called overseas protectorates, tens of thousands of objects from indigenous cultures were brought to German museums, mainly to the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, as part of a veritable collecting frenzy.

Colonial officials, officers of the “protection forces”, missionaries and travelling salesmen were called upon by the state to contribute to the “preservation” of what was considered both wild and backward and supposedly doomed to extinction. What was under threat locally was to be archived at home in the metropolis in order to “save” it. To this day, many artefacts are stored in depots without ever having been shown to the public; many were inadequately archived and their significance was not understood.

In the context of increasing provenance research, the question of what to do with these objects in the future is becoming more and more urgent: should they be returned to their countries of origin or presented here for the first time or in a different way than before?

Since 2016, a group of German and Tanzanian researchers (“Humboldt Lab Tanzania“) has been researching a selection of objects that now form part of the collections of the Berlin Ethnological Museum. The results are now available in book form.

One of these objects is a brass plate brought to Berlin by a German colonial officer. It was falsely listed in the Berlin museum as a “gong-like brass musical instrument with apparently meaningless magic formulae in Arabic script”. In fact, the engraved inscription contains a prayer from the Koran in Arabic script, calling for resistance against colonial foreign rule. The former owner of the plate, Hassan bin Omari, was executed by the Germans in 1895 along with a number of other rebels.

Rainer Beuthel, who has been researching the colonial history of German East Africa for many years, explains the historical events and their consequences to this day.

Picture: J. C. Senckenberg University Library, Frankfurt am Main