Provenance of “Kolonialdubletten”: Actor Networks and Infrastructures of Accumulation in East and Central Africa (1880-1939)

Many Ethnological and Natural History museums are inundated with objects or fragments of collections from obscure colonial actors. Reconstructing collector biographies of such indistinct historical figures is a daunting and time-consuming process. For the case of German colonies in Africa, identifying the short time periods or a region of a collector’s erstwhile movements often produces either infinite new research avenues or requires researchers to reconstruct multiple contexts from scratch. These among other considerations underscore the need for a foundational study that maps core network figures with the broadest chronological and geographical scope. As such, this project aims to reconstruct the essential colonial networks, structures and overlapping acquisition contexts in colonial East and Central Africa via the pervasive figures of Franz Stuhlmann (1888-1910), Kurt Johannes (1888-1913), Moritz Merker (1896-1908), and Richard Kandt (1897-1901, 1907-1914). These four colonial officers and multi-disciplinary collectors are exceptionally important for a widely accessible study and data regarding evolving colonial contexts, collecting practices, and for the provenance of their large and widely disseminated objects and so-called “Dubletten” in German museums. Because of their prominent status and unlimited connections in colonial circles, a reconstruction and analysis of their infrastructures of accumulation and circulation and their numerous African encounters will provide a much-needed overview and starting point for provenance research for a deluge of objects associated with them.

(c) Institute for Asian and African Studies