German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier has expressed “shame” for the colonial atrocities his country inflicted on Tanzania.
“I would like to ask for forgiveness for what Germans did to your ancestors here,” he said.
“What happened here is our shared history, the history of your ancestors and the history of our ancestors in Germany.”
German forces killed almost three hundred thousand people during the Maji Maji rebellion in the early 1900s in one of the bloodiest anti-colonial uprisings.
The Maji Maji rebellion was triggered by a German policy designed to force the indigenous population to grow cotton for export and Tanzania was a part of German East Africa, which consisted of modern-day Rwanda, Burundi and parts of Mozambique.
President Steinmeier, speaking at a museum in Songea, where the uprising took place, said he hoped Tanzania and Germany could work towards “communal processing” of the past.
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