Summer 1914. Paul Messi from Cameroon lands in Hamburg to work as a language assistant at the Hamburg Colonial Institute. But the summer of 1914 is not a good time for a research stay in Germany. The start of world war I prevents Messi from returning to Cameroon. The buildings are empty. The students, the staff have been drafted into a great, strange war.
The colonial institute of Hamburg had only just been founded, a few years earlier. To train colonial officials, they said. To prevent genocides and massacres. To put colonialism on a "scientific basis". Yet colonialism and science had long been entangled in a close relationship. For some decades, they were hardly conceivable without each other. Collecting and observing, registering, mapping, ordering, all those scientific methods were also techniques of domination without which colonialism could never have exercised its power. At the same time, science was dependent on colonialism, which opened up a world to scientists that had not been accessible to them before.
But the world of science was not a purely white project. Everywhere, researchers drew on local experts whose knowledge was adopted, while their involvement was concealed.
In five chapters, the film traverses the university's archives and collections, its greenhouses and laboratories to find the traces of colonialism in it, but also the voices that science silenced. It accompanies an expedition to the savannas of Central Africa, reads letters of an African language assistant and searches for a skull he is not allowed to see.
