The Treaty of Versailles names one human being by his skull. Article 246 required Germany to restore „the skull of the Sultan Mkwawa“ to Britain within six months, listed alongside the paintings and manuscripts to be given back. Everything about that sentence assumes the skull was in Germany. Germany could never find it, and a century of research has not established that it ever arrived.

A chief who would not be caught

Mkwavinyika Munyigumba Mwamuyinga, known as Mkwawa, led the Hehe from a fortified capital at Kalenga, in what is now southern Tanzania. His father Munyigumba had already built Hehe power into the dominant force in the region before his death in 1879. Mkwawa carried that expansion on, into the years when Germany was claiming the same territory for German East Africa, much as the older kingdoms and states further south had held ground through alliance and force rather than borders.

In August 1891, Hehe fighters destroyed a German column at Lugalo and killed its commander, Emil von Zelewski. It was the worst defeat German colonial troops suffered in East Africa. Three years later the Germans took Kalenga with artillery the Hehe had no answer for. Mkwawa escaped and fought on for four more years. On 19 July 1898, cornered by a manhunt driven by a bounty, he took his own life.

German soldiers removed his head. A Schutztruppe soldier stationed at Iringa, Joseph Kieferle, wrote later that the head was displayed at the boma, the fortified colonial post, for a day or two. After that, accounts diverge and never reconverge.

Four versions of where it went

The skull has more destinations than a single object can have.

In 1955 the botanist Emil Werth published his own memory of 1898. Two men in Schutztruppe uniform, one of them Sergeant Merkl, offered to sell him a skull in Dar es Salaam. What he was shown was a cigar box holding a few stacked fragments of a skull burst by a shot to the head, boiled and cleaned. He declined to buy it.

In 1899 a Dr Götze sent a skull to Rudolf Virchow in Berlin, claiming it had been dug from the Hehe dynasty’s hereditary burial site at Rungemba, where he had been shown the tomb of the last sultan with certainty. Virchow accepted it. That skull is still held, under the collection number RV.1487.

Der Spiegel reported in 1954 that the skull had never left Uhehe at all, having been swapped for another and buried by the Hehe.

And the German Foreign Ministry told the British in 1920 that it could not locate the skull and had no indication it had ever been brought to Germany.

A named skull in a peace treaty

Days after the armistice in November 1918, the British administrator of the former German East Africa, Horace Byatt, proposed recovering the skull as a gesture to the Hehe and a visible sign that German rule was over. The argument he sent to London was that the Hehe had fought on the British side in the war. In Paris, one negotiator thought it a fine idea but hardly a matter for a general peace settlement. Another pointed out that the treaty already carried a schedule of art and archaeological objects to be returned, and the skull could be added to it. That view won, and a man’s head entered a peace treaty as an item on a restitution list.

Germany did not comply, because Germany could not find it. Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, let the matter drop by 1921. The question resurfaced in the 1930s, the 1940s and again in 1951, each time going nowhere.

The skull that came back

It moved again when Edward Twining became governor of Tanganyika in 1949 and decided to bring a skull home. In 1952 the search reached the Übersee-Museum in Bremen, which held an anthropological collection including human remains from former German East Africa.

Nobody living could identify Mkwawa by sight. Identification fell to measurement. Twining had the cephalic index taken from Mkwawa’s living grandson, Chief Adam Sapi, and from the late chief’s sister, and museum staff looked for East African skulls in the collection with an unusually similar index. One candidate carried a bullet hole.

In November 1953 Twining explained his choice to the Colonial Office. He reported that a police surgeon in Germany had examined the skull and found a bullet mark from a 25 millimetre rifle, in use by the German military in Tanganyika at the time. The skull reached Tanganyika early in 1954 and was handed over at Kalenga on 19 June 1954, a date that became a public holiday in Uhehe and still carries weight in how the region tells its own history and belonging.

The British Foreign Office issued one instruction for the ceremony. Given the cooperative attitude of the authorities in Bremen, all references to British rights under the Treaty of Versailles were to be avoided. The legal instrument that had put Mkwawa’s name into world history went unmentioned at the event staged to fulfil it.

Doubts arrived almost immediately. Within weeks the German Consulate General in Nairobi reported home that it might not have been the real skull.

The tooth nobody asked for

Tom von Prince was the Schutztruppe officer whose campaign ended with Mkwawa’s death. He and his wife Magdalene took a molar from the skull and had it set in gold as a pendant, with a family seal.

Asked after the war what she knew, Magdalene von Prince said she knew nothing about where the skull had gone and thought it had probably stayed in Iringa. She did not mention the tooth.

No written source from the time records the removal. What carried it was the family, passing down the pendant together with the account of where the tooth came from, for more than a century. In 2014 Prince’s descendants returned it to Chief Abdul Adam Sapi, Mkwawa’s great-grandson.

What doesn’t add up

The identification of 1954 does not survive contact with its own paperwork.

Twining reported a bullet mark from a 25 millimetre rifle. The Bremen pathologist’s own report described a hole made by a projectile of 21.5 millimetres. The Carabiner M/71 that the Schutztruppe actually carried had a calibre of 11. Three numbers, no two of them agreeing, and the conclusion drawn from them was that the skull had been found. Brockmeyer, Edward and Stoecker, who went through the Tanzanian, German and British records together, conclude that the skull returned in 1954 was almost certainly not Mkwawa’s. Settling it would take a genetic comparison with his documented descendants. No source describes one being attempted.

The Berlin skull fails on its own terms too, and the tooth is what breaks it. RV.1487 has a complete set of teeth. The Princes removed a molar from the skull they had access to, so those cannot be the same skull. It is also largely intact, which a fatal head shot makes unlikely, and it carries an inscription identifying it as Mkwawa’s father Munyigumba rather than Mkwawa.

Then there is the storeroom itself. The figure repeated ever since, two thousand skulls in Bremen with eighty-four from East Africa, traces back to an unnamed journalist writing in the East African Standard in 1961. Staff at the Übersee-Museum could not later account for the numbers, and Sarah Fründt’s inventory of the collection does not support them. The detail that makes the scene vivid is the one with nothing under it.

What stays open

Mkwawa’s skull is usually told as the restitution story with an ending. What the record actually holds is a treaty clause about an object nobody could locate, four incompatible accounts of where it went, a handover built on three contradictory measurements, and a skull in Berlin that is probably his father.

The one piece of Mkwawa with an unbroken chain of custody is the tooth, and the chain runs through the family of the officer who took it. It was documented by nobody, kept privately for over a century, and came back only because a descendant decided to speak.

What else is sitting in a drawer somewhere, with a story attached that no archive has ever heard?

Sources

• Bettina Brockmeyer, Frank Edward and Holger Stoecker, „The Mkwawa complex: A Tanzanian-European history about provenance, restitution, and politics“, Journal of Modern European History 18(2), 2020, pages 117 to 139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1611894420909033
• Jesse Bucher, „The skull of Mkwawa and the politics of indirect rule in Tanganyika“, Journal of Eastern African Studies 10(2), 2016, pages 284 to 302. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2016.1184835
• Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany, Article 246, Versailles, 1919.
• Emil Werth, Der Wahehe-Sultan Mkwawa mit den drei Köpfen. Eine Erinnerung aus dem afrikanischen Busch, Augsburg 1955.
• Magdalene von Prince, Eine deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas. Elf Jahre nach Tagebuchblättern erzählt, Berlin 1908.
• Sarah Fründt, Die Menschen-Sammler. Über den Umgang mit menschlichen Überresten im Übersee-Museum Bremen, Marburg 2011.