Cross-Border Appropriations and Colonial Cooperation

A Trans-Imperial Approach to a Collection from Lake Malawi

Abstract

On 28th October 1896, the Lower Saxony State Museum Hanover received an ethnographic collection consisting of 164 objects from the shores of lake Malawi as a gift by Captain Theodor Berndt. Half of the collection is attributed to German East Africa, todays Tanzania, the other half to British Central Africa, todays Malawi. Theodor Berndt was captain of the Hermann von Wissmann, a German gunboat on nowadays Lake Malawi, then Lake Nyasa, and deputy commander of the German colonial station Langenburg. Little was known about the objects’ provenance and many questions arose, among them why and how a German colonial officer could appropriate half of his collection from a foreign colony. Research following up on this trans-imperial background revealed intense cross-border interactions between the German and British colonial administrations and a high degree of cooperation against the local African population around the lake, involving logistic and personnel support of colonial wars and military strikes to please the European counterpart. While it cannot be proven that the collection originates from these interactions, the historical context enables approaching the collection’s provenance towards a tendency that many of the objects may have been brought into Berndt’s possession by violent means.