Killing at Tendaguru

Tendaguru Hill is located in southeastern Tanzania, sixty kilometers northwest of the port city of Lindi. At the time of the expedition (1909–1913), the only way to get to Tendaguru from Lindi was to walk there (a four-day trek at least), as there were no roads into the interior. Nor did the expedition have recourse to pack animals, which had been decimated by a deadly disease transmitted by tsetse flies. All of the supplies taken to Tendaguru as well as all the material extracted from it and the surrounding area were transported by bearers (Vennen Reference Vennen, Heumann, Stoecker and Vennen2024; Maier Reference Maier2003). They were recruited from near and far, as were the hundreds of men and women who performed the rest of the essential work of the expedition – exhausting and often dangerous jobs that included clearing the land; digging; extracting, preparing, and packing up the finds; and hunting, to name but a few. The expedition initially employed about one-hundred local and regional workers, but this number quickly rose to over 500 people, many of whom brought their families with them to Tendaguru. Racially segregated village structures were established in which the expedition leaders laid claim to and assumed the positions of colonial rulers, as Hennig recorded in his journal in April 1909, just days after his arrival at Tendaguru:

The number of dig sites quickly multiplied, covering a large area that the two expedition leaders could not oversee themselves. As a result, many of the pits were managed independently by local workers. In addition to the recruitment, supervision, and disciplining of the workforce (topics which will be addressed in the next section), a large part of the expedition’s logistical operations was dedicated to the packaging and removal of the objects, which was accomplished through the exploitation of local materials, expertise, and labor. To this day, the museum storerooms hold crates and drums made of bamboo, baobab fruit, clay, and cotton, some of them still unopened (Schwarz et al. Reference Schwarz, Fritsch, Issever and Hildebrandt2022).

Hennig’s vision of himself and Janensch as “absolute monarchs” can be seen reflected in their seizure of colonized nature. Dozens of uncataloged archive boxes kept in the museum’s Archive attest to this. They contain images of animals, grouped by taxon; most of them are photographs, but there are copperplate prints, newspaper clippings, and drawings as well. In a box labeled “Antelopes,” there is a black-and-white picture of a reedbuck that has been shot and killed (see figure 1).

Figure 1.

A reedbuck shot by Werner Janensch at Tendaguru. The photograph was presumably taken by Janensch and is one of many images documenting collecting activities at Tendaguru. It is held in the archives of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin in an uncataloged box numbered 51-3re. 7_S2_F1.

The dead animal is in the foreground, in shades of gray; its legs are stretched out as though in mid-jump; its eyes are open, and a wound is visible on its flank. Dry grass and bushes can be seen in the background, as well as sand and a wide sky. A note on the back of the photograph, handwritten in ink, reads: “Tendaguru, Prof. Janensch G., 30-XI-12.”Footnote ⁹ Many other pictures of animals shot and killed during the Tendaguru Expedition can be found scattered throughout the archive boxes. These photographs were made possible by a German optics company, Voigtländer & Sohn, which provided the expedition leaders with three cameras free of charge on the condition that the company be mentioned in all presentations and publications.Footnote ¹⁰ The numerous pictures taken as a result of this arrangement document Hennig’s and Janensch’s experience of daily life at Tendaguru and their success at hunting. They were also meant to provide a record of the diversity of East African wildlife and convey a sense of the animals, which were later preserved and arrived in Berlin only in parts. As a historical source, they reflect Hennig’s absolutist outlook and illustrate the expedition leaders’ privileged access to colonized nature (Wonders Reference Wonders2005; MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie1988; Diebold Reference Diebold2019). Ultimately, the photos reveal a political ecology in which exploitation of the environment served as a means of enacting colonial power and defining the relationship between Europeans and Africans (Gissibl Reference Gissibl2016a, Reference Gissibl and MacKenzie2016b). The killing of animals was just one facet of the expedition’s violent incursion into the natural environment of Tendaguru. Today, the hill is regarded as a spiritual place that may be entered only after certain ritual acts have been performed.Footnote ¹¹ Sources indicate that this was true at the time of the excavations as well. Hennig himself described Tendaguru as an “enchanted spot,”Footnote ¹² and the enormous fossils that lay buried there were considered by the local people to be their property.Footnote ¹³

The seizing and hunting of colonized plant and animal life were part of the expedition leaders’ metamorphosis from mainland Europeans into colonists, from sedentary naturalists to field naturalists. Until they left for German East Africa in early 1909, Hennig and Janensch had both worked at the museum as geologists and paleontologists. Neither of them had ever left Europe before or even worked outside of Germany. Given this background, their use of weapons and killing of animals must be interpreted as a demonstration of their newly developed skills as European expedition leaders. Under Janensch’s supervision, Hennig learned to shoot.Footnote ¹⁴ After several failed attempts, he managed to kill pigeons and wrote with increasing frequency that he had successfully taken down larger animals. Like Janensch, he began looking forward to encounters with big game and was soon catching leopards, hunting antelope, and after a few months had even plucked up the courage to go after gnus.Footnote ¹⁵ The handling of weapons gradually became second nature – “after all, it was Africa; I had my pistol at the ready”Footnote ¹⁶ – and can be read as part of Hennig’s transformation into a colonial expedition scientist.

Janensch’s and Hennig’s descriptions of the perils of everyday life, as well as their repeated accounts of using weapons for self-defense, attest to colonial power asymmetries, especially in the aftermath of the Majimaji War. For years, German colonial hunting laws had suppressed local hunting cultures, and disarmament after the war was the last step in this process (Sunseri Reference Sunseri1997; Gissibl Reference Gissibl2016a). In this context, hunting at Tendaguru not only came in a “multiplicity of forms” (Gissibl Reference Gissibl and MacKenzie2016b, 1131), but also in a multiplicity of functions. The sources reveal several ways in which the hunt was staged and enacted. These may be described as patriarchal, sustentive, and accumulative. In the first, Hennig and Janensch presented themselves as mighty rulers who were defending the lives of their subjects (i.e., the unarmed workers and their families) and held the power of life and death over animals. They shot animals that made their way into the fields, hunted lions (in vain), and posed as protectors of the people, who were portrayed as incapable of surviving in their natural environment (Pandian Reference Pandian2001). The patriarchal hunt invariably aimed to “make a big impression”Footnote ¹⁷ on local hunters and leaders. Hennig commented on these power-play aspects of hunting in a letter: “Europeans must shoot well, if only out of political considerations.”Footnote ¹⁸

Hennig and Janensch also hunted for sustenance, and the longer the expedition lasted, the more regularly did they do so – on their way to and from the excavation pits, in the evenings, and on weekends, always in the accompaniment of at least one man, whose job it was to carry the gun. The purpose of these hunts was to kill “high-utility” animals (Hennig Reference Hennig1912a, 61) that would allow the expedition to conserve its supplies of canned foods and provide the workers with “sumptuous roasts.”Footnote ¹⁹ This mode of hunting, in its assumption of sustentive responsibility, appears to echo the East African culture of the caravans and the social order that developed over the course of almost a century (Rockel Reference Rockel2006; Greiner Reference Greiner, Malzner and Anne2018). However, a closer look reveals that the distribution of meat, like the procurement of it, became a demonstration of power:

The provision of meat was a way of establishing and maintaining colonial power structures, a puzzle piece in a system that was in no way “easy-going,” as Hennig put it in his cynical description of colonialism, but instead predicated on structural inequalities and violence (Wirz Reference Wirz1993).

In addition to patriarchal and sustentive modes of hunting, there is a third mode that might be described as accumulative. While on “safari,”Footnote ²¹ Hennig and Janensch systematically killed animals that ended up in their own trophy collection or in the zoological collection of the Museum für Naturkunde, as demonstrated by the rows upon rows of antlers in the museum’s storage rooms. Hennig justified hunting on scientific grounds (Hennig Reference Hennig1912a, 66; Hennig Reference Hennig1955) and attempted to shoot animals of all major mammalian species.Footnote ²²

These different modes of hunting overlapped and served to mutually legitimize one another. For example, parts of animals shot or trapped in the field might be preserved and sent to the museum, parts of animals intended as food might similarly be redefined as scientific specimens, and conversely animals “bagged” on safari and intended as trophies might be used for food once their antlers and hides were removed. What all the modes had in common was that during the hunt, the expedition leaders had total power of disposal over colonized nature. Hunting was part of the “ecoracist regime” (Gissibl Reference Gissibl2016a, 9) by which privileges – the use of weapons, the ability to procure meat as food, the possession of hunting licenses, the suspension of punishment for hunting law violations,Footnote ²³ etc. – could be granted or revoked. Using the terminology of historian Bernhard Gissibl (Reference Gissibl2010, Reference Gissibl2016a, Reference Gissibl and MacKenzie2016b), these overlapping modes of hunting can be described as the political ecology of German colonialism at Tendaguru.

While the killing of animals was a demonstration of power, it also represented a loss of control: “As far as this killing business goes, it actually feels like I’m a predator, totally wild,” Hennig commented in a reflective moment.Footnote ²⁴ He struggled with this existential boundary between human and animal, between hunting and murder. He weighed “animal cruelty”Footnote ²⁵ against the expedition’s need for meat, “rampaging”Footnote ²⁶ (Wüten) against collecting. This did not prevent him from overstepping these boundaries again and again, however – for example, when he failed to land his shot and wounded the animal but did not bring it down. In January 1911, he described an outing in which, accompanied by unnamed African attendants, he observed some hippopotamuses:

In an instant, observation had turned into killing, satisfying not Hennig’s thirst for knowledge but his “bloodlust.”Footnote ²⁸ His attitude to hunting fluctuated between sympathy with “the beautiful animals” and complete objectification of them as “roasts,” “kills,” and “trophies.” ^{Footnote 29} At the same time, Hennig condemned other European hunters whose “butchery” he blamed for the decimation of the area’s wildlife.Footnote ³⁰

From 1910 onward, animals from Tendaguru began to appear in the accession log of the museum’s mammal collection. Other specimens went to Hennig’s family or ended up in his personal collection.Footnote ³¹ Wanting to keep their career options open, the expedition leaders also collected plants specimens, and the hundred-plus pressed samples held in Berlin’s Botanisches Museum (Engler Reference Engler1912, 101) – among them several new species – support the statement that “the botanical takings … were also quite substantial.”Footnote ³² In addition, Hennig recorded his observations of local culture and language, wrote a paper on them while in Tendaguru, and published it in Sitzungsberichte der Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin (Protocols of the Berlin Society of Friends of Natural Science) in 1912 (Hennig Reference Hennig1912b).Footnote ³³ The prepared animals, plant matter, photographs, letters, and notes were carried by bearers to the coast, along with the fossils. From there, they were shipped to Berlin and distributed among different institutions. The case of Tendaguru illustrates the blind spots found in virtually all of Europe’s museums. Collecting in the colonial era was by no means a dispassionate recording of natural phenomena. It was contingent, accumulative, and exploitative in a way that affected not only nature but people. This becomes particularly clear when we look at the history of war and work at Tendaguru.

War and work at Tendaguru

Tendaguru was part of a “war landscape” (Rushohora Reference Rushohora2015, 260; Reference Rushohora2017). Not long before the expedition arrived, efforts to resist the colonial regime had been brutally put down by the German colonial army, which continued to conduct a genocidal war against the area’s inhabitants for the next three years. Over the course of the Majimaji War (1905–7) and in the period that followed, approximately 300,000 Africans lost their lives. Colonial troops laid waste to villages and fields and killed livestock and pack animals, destroying the villagers’ essential food sources and livelihoods for a long time to come. Women and children were abused, arrested, and enslaved. Residents of the area were forced to flee, and hundreds of men were executed. The years of famine that followed affected subsequent generations for decades (Gwassa Reference Gwassa2005; Schmidt Reference Schmidt2010a, Reference Schmidt, Giblin and Monson2010b; Koponen Reference Koponen2010; Rushohora Reference Rushohora2019). After the war, people in the former war zones were forced to give up their weapons and pay fines, or, when that was not possible, to work them off (Gwassa Reference Gwassa2005, 202−204) – creating the conditions that forced people to work at Tendaguru.Footnote ³⁴ Large tracts of land were abandoned, those who had lived and farmed there either dead or displaced. When German paleontologist Eberhard Fraas conducted a survey of the paleontological find sites at Tendaguru in 1908, he described his four-day journey from the port city of Lindi as a trek through a wasteland. The “land between Lindi and Mbemkuru is now only sparsely populated,” he wrote, but the settlements, “which it takes hours to traverse, prove that the land had been extensively cultivated and populated before the uprising in 1905, and that the sole causes of this depopulation are the famine and the war, which tore through here with particular violence” (Fraas Reference Fraas1908, 108−109; see also Stoecker Reference Stoecker, Heumann, Stoecker and Vennen2024).

Evidence of the war was still omnipresent when Hennig and Janensch began digging in the spring of 1909. After they arrived in Lindi and walked to the find sites in mid-April 1909, Janensch wrote in his journal: “We made camp early at the boma of Jumba Mumedati. A tall thorny hedge forms a ring around the few huts. The skulls of rebels … could be seen, still impaled on stakes in the hedge, there since the time of the uprising.”Footnote ³⁵ People that Hennig and Janensch met had been scarred by imprisonment, rape, hunger, and displacement.Footnote ³⁶ The expedition remained within this paradigm of colonial violence, as demonstrated by two aspects of its operations in particular: the organization of labor and the institutionalization of violence.

Even before Janensch and Hennig arrived at Lindi, the region’s colonial administrator, or “district officer,” Walther Wendt, had assigned 120 bearers and a vanguard of forty other men to work for the expedition and tasked them with readying the camp. Before long, there were several hundred men, women, and children working at Tendaguru. Janensch compared the organization of the expedition with the “founding of a commercial enterprise, like a plantation” (Reference Janensch1914, 23). In referencing plantations, Janensch was essentially comparing the expedition’s organization of labor to the work regime imposed by colonial rulers, a regime built on multiple forms of forced labor and reliant on a system of oppressive taxation and military subjugation (Haschemi Yekani Reference Yekani2019; Sunseri Reference Sunseri2005). Considerable effort and funding went into recruiting, supervising, and managing the expedition’s workforce, which constituted the largest item in the expedition’s budget. Monthly wages for field work were set at six rupees – this was approximately half the amount paid on cotton plantations. Preparators and supervisors received an additional one to two rupees a month (Janensch Reference Janensch1914; Maier Reference Maier2003, 33). Bearers were paid one to one-and-a-half rupees per transport (the four-day trek to or from the coast).Footnote ³⁷ The expedition profited from the fact that “bearers offered their services in greater numbers … whenever the prospect of hut tax collection began to loom” (Janensch Reference Janensch1914, 41).Footnote ³⁸ It was tax liabilities, in addition to the war’s destruction of people’s land and livelihoods that forced the local population to work (Sprute Reference Sprute, Assilkinga, Breuer, Cornilius Refem, Gouaffo and Haoang2023).

According to the narrative established early on in letters and reports sent back to Berlin and maintained in later accounts, work at Tendaguru was “popular,”Footnote ³⁹ “easy-going” (Hennig Reference Hennig1912a, 32), and “fun” (ibid.). In fact, this work was grueling and sometimes dangerous. Injuries from shovels and hoes were a daily occurrence, and the heat in particular was debilitating.Footnote ⁴⁰ The expedition leaders maintained that, given these conditions, “and quite apart from the cost, [local workers] could not be replaced by European workers” (Hennig Reference Hennig1912c, 549). This was particularly true of fossil preparation, as Janensch wrote later in his final report on the expedition:

In this topos of the local population being better adapted to extreme working conditions, we can hear the echoes of contemporary acclimatization theories, which argued on the pretext of physiological grounds that Europeans were not fit to perform physical labor. This appeared to be supported by the recurrent illnesses suffered by the expedition leaders, their need for rest and relaxation (often in the form of long reading breaks), and the impact on their “vigor, which admittedly ebbs somewhat under the tropical sun” (Janensch Reference Janensch1914, 42).Footnote ⁴¹ The division of labor was based on the bigoted assumption that Europeans and Africans were fundamentally different with regard to their sensitivity to pain, their stamina, and their resilience.

This pervasive racism can also be seen in the second pillar of colonial collecting practices: the infliction of physical violence. Three weeks after excavation work had begun at Tendaguru, Hennig made a point of recording the first caning of a worker.Footnote ⁴² It did not take long before Janensch and Hennig had established their own punishment-based work regime. If a worker was late and considered by either of them to have a valid excuse, a fine was deducted from their wages. If the excuse was not considered valid, or if someone did not come to work at all, “then it’s fifteen lashes or they make up for it by working on Sunday, or both,” as Hennig wrote to his mother in a tone of great complacency.Footnote ⁴³ He did place value on a rules-based approach, however, and made a conscious attempt to restrain his use of violence: “I want to administer milder punishments for offenses directed against myself and reserve the harshest punishment of fifteen lashes for moral transgressions or legal violations.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In fact, the use of violence at Tendaguru was despotic and arbitrary. It cemented the status of the two expedition leaders as rulers, and regardless of the circumstances in which it occurred, it was invariably a cautionary and threatening demonstration of colonial power (Muschalek Reference Muschalek2019; Bischoff Reference Bischoff, Reinkowski and Thum2012; Hull Reference Hull2005). Establishing this power structure would have appeared crucial to Janensch and Hennig, given their dependence on local men to find new dig sites, extract fossils from the matrix, prepare them, and transport them across difficult terrain to the coast. There was an acknowledgment that jobs performed by local workers were essential to the success of the expedition, but at the same time the exploitation of the workers was legitimized on racist grounds. Statements made by Hennig, Janensch, and Hans and Ina Reck (leaders of the second stage of the Tendaguru Expedition from 1912 to 1913) – both in private letters and journals and in published articles – reveal their assumption that whites were of greater fundamental worth, an assumption that pervaded all their interactions with local workers and residents and served to justify their use of violence (H. Reck Reference Reck1926, Reference Reck1933; I. Reck Reference Reck1924; Hennig Reference Hennig1912a, Reference Hennig1912c, Reference Hennig1938, Reference Hennig1955).

Although the expedition gained a reputation for taking exemplary care of its workforce – including medical care (Heinrich and Schultka Reference Heinrich, Schultka, Glaubrecht, Kinitz and Moldrzyk2007, 60) – this reputation was based on claims by the expedition’s leaders that are revealed on closer examination to be empty boasting. It is true that cuts and scrapes sustained by workers in the excavation pits were bandaged. Internal ailments were a different matter, however. Hennig treated these with laxatives and sugar water, sometimes mixed with red wine. He later made fun of what he perceived to be the naivety and helplessness of the people in his care, recounting that he would feign medical expertise and order them to perform “mysterious acts.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Only twice in four years were workers taken to Lindi for medical treatment by actual doctors.Footnote ⁴⁶ The overarching goal of this or any treatment was to maintain the patient’s ability to work. After an incident on a plantation in Pemba, an island north of Zanzibar, in which six workers died after receiving medication for worms, the district officer told the expedition leaders at Tendaguru how to use the tablets, warning them that “an incident like the one in Pemba can make labor procurement considerably more difficult.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Once the fossils had been extracted from the surrounding rock, they were packed up in what were called “bearer loads” and taken to the port in Lindi. The bearers carried everything either directly on their heads and shoulders or suspended from poles carried on their shoulders. It was hot, and although Janensch and Hennig had new paths cleared regularly, the terrain remained rough and difficult to cross. A “bearer load” typically weighed from twenty to thirty kilos, but an upper arm bone or vertebra often was substantially heavier and would be carried by up to twenty-two bearers. The transport numbers listed in Janensch’s final report (Reference Janensch1914) reveal the magnitude of this operation: In 1909, 566 bearer loads were taken by 585 bearers to Lindi. In 1910, it was 1430 loads, and in 1911 it was 2150, carried by 3000 bearers. Bearers were subjected to violence on a massive scale, a fact which Hennig tried to legitimize on racial grounds:

In view of the racism and routine violence experienced by workers at Tendaguru, it is not surprising that Hennig and Janensch struggled to procure food in the surrounding villages and recruit enough people. “Had to requisition several bearers using considerable violence,” Hennig wrote in his journal in 1911.Footnote ⁴⁹ About a year earlier, he had written a detailed description of this recruitment practice, which was commonly used by the expedition:

An ordinance regulating the recruitment of workers in German East Africa had been enacted in February 1909 at the initiative of Bernhard Dernburg, an advocate of colonial reform who headed the Imperial Colonial Office (Reichskolonialamt), but it did not apply to domestic workers. Since bearers came under this category, and there was virtually no effort made to ensure compliance with the act, it would have had little effect on the expedition leaders’ recruiting practices, assuming news of it had even reached them (Schröder Reference Schröder2005, 349−401). Even after the ordinance was enacted, it remained common practice among colonial administrators and business owners to outsource the job of recruitment, thereby absolving themselves of any criminal liability. It was this example that Hennig was following when he tasked Ali, whom he had hired as a personal servant, with the violent recruitment of additional workers.

Over the course of four years, the expedition ruthlessly exploited hundreds of people without whose labor the fossils of Tendaguru – including those that make up the world-famous Giraffatitan brancai exhibit – would not now be in Berlin. Just as important as the local people’s labor, however, was their knowledge, which the expedition leaders likewise exploited (Stoecker Reference Stoecker, Heumann, Stoecker and Vennen2024). It was local people who first knew of the fossils and led the searches for new dig sites. These lay ever further away from the main camp, and their supervision was entrusted to local workers, chief among them Boheti bin Amrani.

Bin Amrani was described as “our very skilled senior overseer,”Footnote ⁵¹ and Hennig originally planned to take him along to Berlin to reassemble the bone fragments. Under Janensch and Hennig, bin Amrani took charge of the dig during the rainy seasons when they moved to the north of the country, and he also supervised operations in the interim between their departure and the arrival of the new expedition leader. Historical sources do not allow us to reconstruct how work in the excavation pits was managed when German expedition leaders were not on site. It is clear, however, that it was a very productive time. In the rainy season of 1911/12, bin Amrani supervised the excavation of over 700 bearer loads and had them taken to Lindi, where they were waiting to be shipped to Berlin when the new expedition leader Hans Reck arrived in Dar es Salaam in May 1912.

It was not the expedition’s European leaders who did the collecting at Tendaguru – sometimes all they did was pick out the best pieces from a collection put together by local people (Maier Reference Maier2003, 88).Footnote ⁵² It is with local people, therefore, that the history of studying, reconstructing, and valorizing the Tendaguru Collection began, a history that is still being written. In it, we can see the practices of accumulation that allowed the collection to become one of the largest of any museum in the world. This is the topic of the next section.

Excessive accumulation

One of the 800 shipping crates that Berlin received from Tendaguru contained the hide and skull of a wild dog. These objects were examined on June 24, 1911, by Paul Matschie, curator of the museum’s Mammal Collection, who added them to the collection despite the hide being “unusable.”Footnote ⁵³ A few years later, Matschie reexamined the remains more closely. In his article “Mitteilungen über Hyänenhunde,” he used them (and an additional six skulls and four hides) to describe a new species that he named Lycaon hennigi in honor of “the collector, Herr Dr. Hennig” (Matschie Reference Matschie1915, 320).Footnote ⁵⁴ Morphological and genetic research performed several decades later revealed that the animal Matschie described as the type specimen for a new species in fact belonged to Lycaon pictus, a species that had been described in 1822.

Species descriptions and species names have had the potential to be used as historical sources ever since the taxonomic revolution set in motion by Carl Linnaeus. In the mid to late eighteenth-century debate on nomenclature and classification, a system prevailed which called for species to be given a “binomial,” or two-part name – one part for the genus to which the species belongs and a second part that distinguishes the species itself (hennigi or pictus). When a new species is thought to have been found, it is up to the writer of the species description to come up with a name. This binomial, which identifies a natural creature and yet is a human invention, is a prime example of the “dual character of natural history objects as products of nature and culture” (Stoecker and Ohl Reference Stoecker, Ohl, Heumann, Stoecker and Vennen2024, 236).

The taxonomic history of the African wild dog provides a particularly striking example of this dual character, given that Matschie did not stop at Lycaon hennigi but named an additional twenty-seven supposedly new African wild dog species – all of which were in fact synonymous with Lycaon pictus – between 1912 and 1915 (Matschie Reference Matschie1912, Reference Matschie1915; Kindgon and Hoffmann Reference Kindgon and Hoffmann2013, 51). The names created by Matschie reveal the museum’s ties to military institutions and activities, providing insight into its key instruments of accumulation. Eight of the new names referenced military bases or colonial place names associated with military infrastructure and military, showing how colonial geopolitics and zoogeography overlapped. These were Lycaon gobabis, Lycaon cacondae, Lycaon kondoae, Lycaon ruwanae, Lycaon ssongeae, Lycaon taborae, Lycaon takanus, and Lycaon manguensis. Gobabis was on the edge of the Omaheke Desert in modern-day Namibia. A fortification was erected there in 1897; in 1904 it became a site of fighting in the German colonial war against the Nama and Ovaherero (Bührer Reference Bührer2011, 278–280). Caconda was established as a fortified military settlement by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century and served primarily to facilitate the trade of enslaved people (Candido Reference Candido2003). Kondoa was in central German East Africa. A military outpost was established there in March 1898 to provide, as a contemporary source put it, “protection against invasion by the Masai” (Nigmann Reference Nigmann1911, 162); later, offices of the regional colonial administration were situated here, as was the garrison of the German colonial army’s 13th Company (ibid.; Bührer Reference Bührer2011; Kuß Reference Kuß2017). Tabora and Songea were also located in German East Africa. A military base was established in Tabora in 1890, and the regional colonial administration, or “district office,” set up operations there in 1906. It also served as the administrative headquarters for the colonial army’s 8th Company. Songea was founded in 1897, and a district office was established there in 1905. During the Majimaji War, it became a place of execution.

Behind every one of the place names immortalized in the wild dog taxonomy were colonial military facilities and consequently military personnel. The type specimen for Lycaon ssongae was sent in by Captain Gebhard Lademann, head of the district office at Songea. Lycaon kondoae was based on an animal killed “by Sergeant Linke” (ibid., 331), that is Wilhelm Linke, who commanded the military outpost in Kwamtoro. The animal that inspired Matschie to create Lycaon manguensis was shot north of the town of Mangu by First Lieutenant Gaston Thierry (ibid., 364). Thierry had led military operations in the area, located in the then colony of Togo, and been responsible for looting and destruction on a scale that even in times of normalized colonial violence prompted an investigation by the colonial administration (Sebald Reference Sebald1988). Most of the species names created by Matschie honored the “soldier-naturalists” (Greer Reference Greer2020, 13) themselves, many of whom were described as “donors.” In addition to Lycaon hennigi, this category includes the names Lycaon diesneri, Lycaon ebermaieri, Lycaon gansser, Lycaon stierlingi, Lycaon lademanni, Lycaon wintgensi, and many more. In these names, we meet Captain Paul Diesener, Captain Rudolf Gansser, Karl Ebermaier (the last governor of Cameroon), Major Wilhelm Langheld, Surgeon Major Jan Stierling, Captain Gebhard Lademann, and Captain Max Wintgens.Footnote ⁵⁵ Matschie’s Lycaon species descriptions read like a network of the museum’s connections in the military and colonial civil service. They also show how the museum stimulated and cultivated a passion for collecting. This is evident from the many letters that Matschie exchanged with hunters before he rewarded them with taxonomic immortality.

Wintgens, who would later have Lycaon wintgensis dedicated to him in “Mitteilungen über Hyänenhunde,” began a correspondence with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin in August 1907 that would continue for several years. “While your name has long been known to me, mine will presumably be completely unknown to you,” he wrote in a letter in which he announced that he would be sending a shipment of “donations” consisting of eighteen antelope hides and skulls.Footnote ⁵⁶ The fact that Wintgens was familiar with the museum’s work is not surprising, given Matschie’s publications on the mammals of German East Africa, the museum’s outfitting of potential collectors with equipment for trapping, killing, labeling, and preserving animals, and its practice of systematically sending instructions for the collection of natural-history objects to newly posted colonial civil servants and military personnel. Taken all together, these activities enabled the museum to build up a wide-reaching network of men in the colonies who were ready and willing to collect (Matschie Reference Matschie1895; Zoologisches Museum Berlin 1907).Footnote ⁵⁷

Wintgens’s first letter, send from Mpororo in modern-day Rwanda, concluded with an offer of additional animals: “Perhaps you may be interested in one or two of my other kills, for example, buffalo from Duma, buffalo from Russissi, lions from the Serengeti steppe, African wild dogs from Ikoma, etc.” Beneath this, Matschie noted, “Thanked and put in some requests.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Wintgens’s initial shipment was followed by several more over the next few months. He continued to send letters as well, informing the museum that he was being posted to the military base in Tabora, reporting on the area’s antelope species, and repeatedly offering to accommodate any special requests the museum might have. Everything was welcome, the director of the Zoological Museum assured him, and if Wintgens “would rather not prepare the hides, we would be pleased to receive only the skulls.”Footnote ⁵⁹ By 1914, Wintgens had sent in thousands of reptiles, mammals, and insects – all caught, killed, and prepared by him or other, unnamed helpers – and in addition to the African wild dog, two moth species, one buffalo species, and one beetle species had been named in his honor.Footnote ⁶⁰

The museum’s relationship with Gebhard Lademann, to whom Matschie dedicated Lycaon lademanni (Matschie Reference Matschie1915, 315), was even more productive. Lademann had killed the type specimen of Lycaon lademanni in June 1914, but he had been corresponding with Matschie ever since 1904, when he was assigned to the military outpost in Kondoa-Irangi and promptly received his first collecting kit from the museum, containing trapping equipment, instruments for preparing specimens, and consolidant. It was not long before the first of many shipments arrived at the museum. One of them, received in January 1907, was “one of the largest ever to be sent from German East Africa.”Footnote ⁶¹ It contained 175 pelts, thirteen entire animals preserved in alcohol, and 437 animal skulls. Like Wintgens, Lademann provided detailed descriptions of the local wildlife in his letters to Matschie and offered observations on such things as the locomotion of pangolins and the birthing season of antelopes. He also supplied photographs, noting on the back the place and date of the find depicted in the photo. Sometimes he would send prints, which he developed himself on base, and sometimes plates, in which case Matschie sent copies back to Lademann.Footnote ⁶²

As Lademann continued to collect for the museum, he gradually came to act as its unofficial liaison in German East Africa, coordinating with troops there who were interested in hunting. When he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1906 and made head of the military base in Kondoa-Irangi, he started sending animals that other soldiers and officers had shot. That in itself was nothing unusual. Wintgens had also sent, alongside his own kills, animals shot by other men on his base.Footnote ⁶³ The number of collectors that Lademann worked with was far greater, however. One shipment that reached the museum in January 1907 contained, in addition to Lademann’s own diverse contributions, animals shot by First Lieutenant Eugen Styx, Sergeant Otto Rehbaum, Paymasters-in-training Fiedler and Franke, Medical Sergeants Diepolder and Weiland, and Corporal Karl Tost. This was followed by further shipments containing animals from multiple hunters, always grouped by donor. The museum honored Styx with the species name Lycaon styxi and acknowledged the contributions of lower-ranking soldier-collectors in the form of personal letters of thanks, commendations sent to the ministry, and notices placed in the Deutsches Kolonialblatt, the official gazette of the German colonial administration (Anonymous 1907). Just as the names of Matschie’s wild dog species point to a vast network of military personnel, Lademann’s specific case demonstrates how well connected and organized the collectors themselves were.

This history of the description of the African wild dog reveals the mechanisms by which Berlin facilitated the excessive killing of animals and steered the carcasses to its own storerooms. In the three decades in which Matschie worked in and led the Mammal Collection, he was able to multiply the number of its holdings many times over. The 8000 objects the collection had in 1890 grew to 200,000 by the time he died in 1926 (Pohle Reference Pohle1928). Even if this last number is inflated – the collection’s holdings are currently estimated at 150,000 objects – it still reflects the craze for collecting that took hold in the museums of the German Empire, including natural history museums, during the decades of colonial expansion.

Museums were able to gain unprecedented access to natural specimens through a two-prong strategy designed to motivate military personnel and other amateurs to enrich Berlin’s collections and reward them for the work of preparing the animals they had shot. The first and most important part of this strategy took the form of detailed correspondence with the collectors, which often lasted for many years. In these letters – the “poetics of collecting” (Buschmann Reference Buschmann2023, 59) – the museum and the hunters exchanged personal observations, expert advice on preparation, and information regarding things such as the distribution of game or the local names of animals. The second part of the strategy was a system of accolades that included the naming of new species after donors, the mention of their contributions in the colonial gazette, and the awarding of honorary degrees (Buschmann Reference Buschmann2023, 64–66).Footnote ⁶⁴ If the donor did not receive one of these forms of recognition, the museum would quickly receive letters asking why not: “Has the Kolonialblatt published a notice of my contributions? I haven’t seen anything yet.”Footnote ⁶⁵ These various mutually reinforcing incentives helped accomplish through personal contact a policy that had been decided at higher managerial and political levels in 1889. This was when the German parliament had resolved that all ethnographic and natural-history collections amassed as a result of publicly financed expeditions would be “centralized” in the country’s national museums for ethnography, natural history, and botany – that is, in the Museum für Völkerkunde, Museum für Naturkunde, and Botanisches Museum (all located in Berlin). This resolution was expanded on in directives issued by the colonial administration in 1891 and 1896, stating that all collections acquired by colonial civil servants and military personnel would first have to pass through these Berlin-based institutions (Kaiser Reference Kaiser2022, Reference Kaiser2023).

A notice published by the Museum für Naturkunde in Deutsches Kolonialblatt in 1906 shows just how effective this system was. The museum announced that, thanks to “the rich material [it had] received over the last several decades as a result of support from the Colonial Department and from so many civil servants and officers,” it now ranked “first among all the museums in the world, as far as the African animals in most collection departments are concerned” (Brauer Reference Brauer1906, 728). At the same time, it pointed to gaps in its collections and requested the continued “support of the public authorities” and “the interest and good will of private [individuals and enterprises]” (ibid.). In other words, the museum stated explicitly that it was the colonial administration, in cooperation with military networks and infrastructures that made Berlin one of the world’s largest natural history museums, which it remains to this day.

This is also demonstrated by the museum’s African wild dog collection, which was amassed almost entirely through contributions from military officers. None of these soldier-naturalists had any education or training in zoology, much less any specialization in mammals. Their professional expertise lay in the fields of warfare and military administration. Apart from financial considerations, it was the prospect of rapid promotion and active involvement in military conflicts that prompted many in the colonial army to join what were called the “protective forces” (Bührer Reference Bührer, Ludwig, Pöhlmann and Zimmermann2014; Wesseling Reference Wesseling2005). Given this background, the history of the African wild dog is in many respects a history of violence – violence against nature and above all against colonized people.

This last point is illustrated particularly clearly by the history of the African wild dog that Edwin Hennig sent to the museum and that would become the type specimen of Lycaon hennigi. The dog had been shot near Lindi and belonged to a pack that, as Matschie noted in his species description, “attacked a European junior non-commissioned officer” (Matschie Reference Matschie1915, 320). When Hennig packed up the dog’s hide and skull in spring 1911 before shipping it to Berlin, he added a note that read as follows: “Lacking time and better shipping opportunities, I have had to put the wild dog skull alongside the Negro skull that Dr. Janensch collected for the privy councilor Professor Hansemann on Noto Plateau.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Once the shipment arrived in Berlin, it went through the usual channels. Brauer took receipt of it and sent it to the curator of the Mammal Collection, i.e., Matschie, who noted that “this wild dog is especially welcome, as it displays characteristics of species found south of Zambezi River.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Matschie entered the Lycaon hide and skull into the accession catalog, remarking that he had set aside the human remains, which would be passed on to David von Hansemann. The museum deaccessioned the hide in 1984 but kept the wild dog skull, which is still in its collection today.

After Hansemann’s death, the human skull was transferred to the collection of Felix von Luschan.Footnote ⁶⁸ An anthropologist and director of Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology (Museum für Völkerkunde), Luschan had amassed a collection of human remains comprising several thousand skulls (the “S-collection”; Heeb Reference Heeb, Heeb and Kabwete2022; Kunst and Creutz Reference Kunst, Creutz, Stoecker, Schnalke and Winkelmann2013). These remains, packed in paper bags and gray crates, are currently held in an offsite storage facility of the association of Berlin state museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). Among them is a human skull (collection number S 4621) that is missing its lower jawbone and bears two inscriptions written in black ink: the number 228 (presumably from the now missing catalog of Hansemann’s collection), and the note “v. Hansemann leg., Wandondi Negro.” This skull, then, previously belonged to the Hansemann collection (Kowalak Reference Kowalak, Heeb and Kabwete2022, 265) and was among the forty-seven human skulls missing lower jawbones that were integrated into Luschan’s S-collection.Footnote ⁶⁹ Wandondi or Wandonde referred to an ethnic group that lived in the Lindi region around the Noto Plateau (Weule Reference Weule and Schnee1920, 669) and that was heavily involved in and suffered from the Majimaji War (Wimmelbücker Reference Wimmelbücker, Becker and Beez2005, 90). On what basis Hansemann classified the skull as Wandondi and why it had been buried on Noto Plateau is unknown: Existing sources are silent on these points. Nor is the identity of the person known. There are likewise no sources containing information about the location and specific circumstances in which these human remains were taken. What the history of shipment A.92.11 does speak to, however, is the total objectification of a human being. Not only was a human skull collected, it was transported, administered, and moved back and forth among institutions as though it belonged to a dead animal.Footnote ⁷⁰