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The article reports on the panel "Grenzmissverständnisse in der Globalgeschichtsschreibung (ca. 1500-1900)" at the Deutscher Historikertag (Annual Meeting of the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands [VDH, German Historians' Association]), from September 28 to October 1, 2010, in Berlin. Several papers on the concepts of borders and frontiers in European imperialism and colonialism in Asia, Africa, and Australia, from the perspective of global history, were presented.

After ending their migration to the Great Lakes Area, estimated around 1500, the Hima (= Tutsi) established a supremacy, based on their culture as livestock herders. Milk containers played an important role in their myths and rituals. Wooden Hima containers, carefully carved and of special shape, express the "ethnic superiority" in terms of remembering the Hima as having been "superior". In some societies like the Nyoro kingdom in Uganda, they expressed the social distinction between the Hima and the Hutu, the indigenous agriculturists. The containers were also "holy" objects. Several of them, collected between 1895 and 1902 by two Germans, Richard Kandt and Karl Paul Kollmann, are part of the African collection of the Ethnological Museum Berlin and some of them are described in the article. The container shapes also show the impact of the Hima supremacy within the region: they "migrated". Wooden containers act as cultural witnesses but also give an example of East African design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]