Search

This dissertation is a history of Chief Mkwawa’s severed head. I explore the historical context by which his head was taken, the shifting terminology which categorised his remains, the international and internal movements of the skull, and the polymorphous quality imposed onto the head through a myriad of perspectives. In this dissertation, I argue that, as an artefact, Mkwawa’s skull shifted in meaning and significance as it transformed from a trophy of colonial conquest to a political tool of colonial governance to a relic and symbol of anticolonial resistance. I map these changes over the long twentieth century (1898 to 2019) in order to historically contextualise the head’s various meanings under divergent narratives. A microhistory of this single object centres this dissertation as I analyse global historical and historiographical debates concerning colonial violence, collection practices, the legacies of empire, and current debates on restitution and repatriation. Drawing upon archival research, oral histories, private diaries, photographs, and site visitations during fieldwork in Europe, the United States, and Tanzania, this dissertation brings a cultural history of materiality to studies of German and British colonialism, postcolonial legitimacy, and transnational repatriation movements. Mkwawa’s head was a symbolic object, severed under systems of violence implicit in empire making. The transition of human remains from a trophy head to a specimen skull documents the weaponisation of anthropology for imperial control. The inclusion of the head in the Treaty of Versailles provided a space to humiliate Germany and contrast its colonial project against British imperial rule’s paternal protection, whilst Britain also seized Germany’s East Africa colony. The eventual repatriation of a skull to Tanganyika in 1954 illuminates the tightening of colonial control under a Cold War context. The anonymous skull’s transformation into Mkwawa’s skull shows the provenance of the skull was less important than the fact that it became recognised as Mkwawa’s. The abandoned intrinsic cultural qualities of the skull emphasised the centrality of colonial collecting as constitutive to the looting and exhibition of colonial artefacts. The continued display of a skull in Tanzania demonstrates the moral challenges colonial legacies pose for successor regimes. Focusing scholarly attention on Mkwawa’s head as a symbolic object, therefore, reveals how processes of meaning and myth-making anchor colonial and postcolonial power projections.

This thesis interrogates traditional understandings of race within Zimbabwean nationalism. It explores the interactions between socio-cultural identities and belonging in black African nationalist thinking and politics, and focuses on the formative decade between the emergence of mass African nationalist political parties in 1957 and the widespread adoption of an anti-white violent struggle in 1966. It reassesses the place of non-black individuals within African anti-settler movements. Using the chronological narrative provided by the experiences of marginal non-black supporters (including white, Asian, coloured, and Indian individuals), it argues that anti-colonial nationalist organisations during the pre-Liberation War period were heavily influenced by the competing racial theories and politics espoused by their elite leadership. It further argues that the imagined future Zimbabwean nations had a fluid and reflexive positioning of citizens based on racial identities that changed continuously. Finally, this thesis examines the construction of racial identities through the discourse used by black Zimbabweans and non-black migrants and citizens, and the relationships between these groups, to contend that race was an inexorable factor in determining belonging. Drawing upon archival sources created by non-black 'radical' participants and Zimbabwean nationalists, and oral interviews conducted during fieldwork in South Africa and Zimbabwe in 2015, the research is a revisionist approach to existing academic literature on Zimbabwean nationalism: in the words of Terence Ranger, it is not a nationalist history but a history of nationalism. It situates itself within multiple bodies of study, including conceptual nationalist and racial theory, the histories of marginal groups within African nationalist movements, and studies of citizenship and belonging. It seeks to critically approach the ideologies and practices of Zimbabwean nationalism, and to interrogate the role race played in defining the imagined Zimbabwean nation, her citizens, and her politics. It also provides much-needed detail into the under-examined histories of minority racial groups and their relationships to early Zimbabwean nationalist parties. The conclusions drawn demonstrate that identities and participation within Zimbabwean nationalism were inherently affected by overarching concepts of biological race and skin colour, and that Zimbabwean nationalism was reciprocally shaped by these factors as well.