Berlin’s longest-standing African is 13 metres tall and carries in his bones the wisdom of 150m years. The skeleton of the Brachiosaurus brancai, the star of the city’s natural history museum, was dug up by a German paleontologist between 1909 and 1913 in Tanzania, then part of the German empire’s largest colony.
When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced last November that he wanted to use his presidency to lay the ground for “the temporary or permanent restitution of African patrimony to Africa”, many thought the time had come for the dinosaur to head back home.
But, six months later, the Berlin Brachiosaurus is not moving an inch: a sign, activists and historians say, that Merkel’s government is failing to respond to Macron’s call with a similarly bold message, and that German museums are dragging their feet.
New guidelines on the restitution of objects from “colonial contexts” were unveiled by the German culture minister, Monika Grütters, on Monday. She accepted the need to re-examine the provenance of objects amassed not just in the three decades in which Germany emulated other European states empire-building on the African continent, but during a colonial period defined as stretching back to the 15th-century conquistadores and into the present day.
