Allow me to start by expressing my gratitude to you, the members of the Mbano family. The fact that you have invited me here is certainly not something to be taken for granted. After everything that happened in Songea 117 years ago on 7 February 1906, I am profoundly grateful that I was allowed to come here as Germany’s Federal President and that we had the opportunity to speak to each other.

You, the members of the Mbano family, have invested a lot of time to tell me your story. And I have come here first and foremost to listen to you – doing so is something which is very important to me and which is a matter of integrity.

You have told me the story of Songea Mbano – the story of the presumably most famous chief of this region – Songea’s national hero, your great forefather. I was very moved by this story and I am thankful that you felt able to share it with me.

I am aware of the great burden the fate of Chief Songea still places on your people today, and what anguish it causes his family. I sense how deeply the pain of his death and of how he was murdered is felt to this day. And I understand that this cruel deed has left its mark on many generations and still continues to echo in your families. And yet it is a story that we in Germany, of all people, know too little about. We know very little, even though Songea stood for the revolt of many other Tanzanians against the German colonial power.

That is another reason why I came to Songea: to take this story back with me to Germany so that more people in my country hear it. What happened here is part of our shared history – the history of your forefathers and the history of our forefathers in Germany. We Germans also need to face up to this history so that we can build a brighter future together with you.

I have learnt that Chief Songea was a courageous leader of the Ngoni in the Maji Maji War. He led his people in the fight against the German colonial masters who ruled over East Africa with brutal severity. Chief Songea was a man with considerable influence; he was brave and the German colonial masters therefore wanted to have him on their side, devising a cynical pact: They offered to let him live in return for helping them, the oppressors. Or, in other words, in return for betraying his people.

Songea Mbano was not a traitor. Prolonging the suffering of his own people, switching sides to join the oppressors – for him, that was out of the question. He was willing to die rather than live under the yoke of colonialism. This steadfastness, this determination is plain to see on the photo that we saw in the Maji Maji Memorial Museum. This is not the face of someone who abandons his people. The revenge that the German colonial troops took was brutal. They hanged and beheaded him together with 66 other Ngoni warriors.

Members of the Mbano family, even people in Germany who have some knowledge of German colonial history must still be appalled by the extent of the brutality dispensed by the German colonial forces, must be appalled by what you have told me today. It shames me. I am ashamed about what German colonial soldiers did to your forefather, his fellow warriors and many others in what is now Tanzania.

Despite this dark history, you invited me, the German Federal President, to your town today, to your family, to have the opportunity to tell me about it directly face to face. That is a grand gesture.

I join you in mourning Chief Songea and all who were executed. I bow before the victims of German colonial rule. And, as Germany’s Federal President, I want to ask for forgiveness for what Germans did to your forefathers.

I ask for forgiveness, and I want to assure you that we Germans will together with you look for answers to the unresolved questions that haunt you.

After all, you did not just recount today what happened in the past. You also asked me many pressing questions: Why did the colonial soldiers do that? Here and in other places during the Maji Maji War? What happened with the human remains of those who perished? And where are they now, 117 years on?

What we know is that many remains from East Africa were brought to Germany back then and were placed in museums and anthropological collections. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands of skulls. Most of them were forgotten after the colonial era, after the First and Second World Wars. More than a century has now passed. And over this long period, families like the Mbano family have mourned here in Tanzania because their forefathers were robbed of the peace of the dead.

I promise that we will work together with you also to find Chief Songea’s skull in Germany. If we have not succeeded in finding it so far, it is not for a lack of will or because we are not trying hard enough. It is just that work to identify human remains and ascertain who they belonged to is still very, very difficult, even with the expertise of qualified scientists. I owe it to you to be honest, even though these are words I find hard to say. I promise you that we will do everything in our power to seek, to find, to identify it and to return it.

Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday I spoke to the Tanzanian President about the current state and the future of the relations between our two countries. There are so many positives connecting Tanzania and Germany today, so many shared projects and partnerships. And we will make the most of them! Yet we are also tied by the burden of a difficult past.

My message to you is that I have come to Songea today as President of a different Germany. Of a country different from the one that your ancestors had to encounter. Germany stands ready to address the past together. No-one is to forget what happened back then. And my great hope is that especially young people will get involved in addressing the past together. Schoolchildren, students, scientists, museum staff.

The Humboldt Forum in Berlin is planning a joint exhibition next year with the National Museum in Dar es Salaam on the history of Tanzania, in which the chapter depicting the colonial past will play a very important role. And my hope is that this exhibition can be shown here in Tanzania the year after. The bleak past can thus create something that brings us together, something that forges bonds, something enduring, something that takes us to a shared future. And that is my ardent hope for us: a shared future!

I will now go to visit your primary school which is named after the Maji Maji War. The children there are Tanzania’s future and they are also the future of the German-Tanzanian friendship. During the talks with the Mbano family, the Mayor has just expressed his hope that the town of Songea will forge a partnership with a town in Germany during a conversation with the family. Minister Ndumbaro greatly supports this idea, as you just heard in his speech. Ladies and gentlemen, Minister, Mr Mayor, I assure you that I will help and provide support in the search for a partnership of this kind.

To close, I would like to express my thanks once again. Thank you for receiving me and my delegation from Germany here so warmly. Let us work together to ensure that the relations between our two countries will for all time be characterised only by partnership and friendship.