Mar Oomen went to see Talengwa Kaseza Lukumbuzya, the king of Ukerewe.
She knew from the diaries of White Fathers that she saw in Rome that there is, or must have been, ‘all sorts’ of heritage’.
At the end of 1938, the Catholic missionaries wrote that they had persuaded King Gabriel Ruhumbika, Kaseza’s grandfather, on his deathbed, to hand over a chest to them that was full of objects from which he derived power as king: amulets, horns, weapons and many more, mainly spiritual attributes.
The collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin includes some 10,000 objects which are attributed to the area of present-day Tanzania. Most of the objects were acquired – often in violent ways – during the period of German and British colonial rule.
