Graves, Houses of Pain and Execution: Memories of the German Prisons after the Majimaji War in Tanzania (1904–1908)

German colonisation of Tanzania was entrenched in the militia and a coercive apparatus that sought to both suppress local communities and dominate their territories. A network of institutions such as the boma, prison, askari, akida and chiefs were either set up or perverted to establish a colonial system of justice that destroyed the local authorities. This alien system legalised forced labour, imprisonment, detention in chains and corporal punishment – kiboko (whip). It was this same over-reliance on corporal punishment that triggered more than 50 local wars of resistance against the German rule established between 1890 and 1908. Majimaji was one of these resistance uprisings that occurred in 1904–1908. To suppress these outbreaks of resistance, the Germans utilised prisons for the detention and execution of indigenous combatants that forms the focus of this paper. Memories of German colonialism in Tanzania associate prisons with incarceration, pain, execution and the systematic recourse to violence, which I argue represents cultural genocide that deliberately intended to destroy the lives and cultural identity of local communities. Following an archaeological survey, and according to ethnographic and archival sources, this paper reconstructs the history of penology in Tanzania, German recourse to colonial prisons to quench the Majimaji War as well as contemporary memories of mass executions and incarceration in southern Tanzania.