MUSEA / The fish who fed museums : Remembering colonial violence and the plunder ofnorthern Togoland

In German ethno-colonial museums, thousands of belongings of Togolese, Ghanaian and Cameroonian people are kept mute and away from the public. Some of these are evidence of the violent conquest of Togoland, a territory that Imperial Germany used to label as its “model colony”. Debunking this myth with an overview of military expeditions, spoils of war and evidence of colonial violence, this paper contributes to a critical historiography of German colonialism in West Africa and reveals the absurdity of museums’ claims to science. This revisit of museum collections and archives also calls for a new type of dialogue on how to work through the violent history of colonial conquest and its material and immaterial legacies today.