Adam Sapi Mkwawa, East Germany, and the Memory of the Hehe War in Tanzania

This paper examines the relationship between Adam Sapi Mkwawa, the speaker of the Tanzanian National Assembly, and East Germany (GDR) in the 1960s and 1970s. Sapi's importance to the Tanzania-GDR relationship was in part due to his political prominence, but it also depended on his family's historical relationship with Germany.

Sapi was the grandson of Mkwawa, the leader of a guerrilla campaign that resisted German conquest in the 1890s. The return of Mkwawa's skull, taken to Germany as a trophy, was important enough as a symbol of German brutality that its return was required in the Treaty of Versailles. Germany claimed that the skull could not be located, but the issue of its repatriation was picked up again in the 1950s and finally returned in 1954.

The man to whom the skull was returned was Adam Sapi, the grandson of Mkwawa and the hereditary chief of the Hehe. Sapi became a powerful politician in post-independence Tanzania. He became the primary contact between the GDR and mainland Tanzania from the late 1960s. East Germany, which denied any connection to Germany's colonial past, tried to use the relationship to discredit West Germany as the heir of German colonial brutality. Sapi's motives were more complicated. For one, his relationship to the GDR ensured Mkwawa's continued importance in the pantheon of Tanzania's anticolonial heroes. But the relationship also served as an implicit threat to western nations. Sapi used the GDR's rhetoric to imply a willingness to shift Tanzania's alliances due to frustration with western aid conditions.

As a case study, Sapi's discussions with GDR officials are revealing about the changing ways that Tanzanians deployed history in the wake of the Arusha Declaration and the ways that East Germany tried to use the history of German colonialism in its diplomacy with Tanzania.