3 - Berlin

[MUSIC PLAYING] In this episode of the Afro-Pian podcast, we're in Berlin, a city that has long been famous in the European imagination as an open, creative city, home to epic techno clubs and a thriving arts scene. But it's also a city which stands right at the center of the monumental changes which the 20th century wrote up on Europe. We don't have black studies. We don't have a real discourse which is accepted by the mainstream. I wasn't scared of our Nazis here in the West, but I was scared of the Nazis from the East. You don't have to look too far back to find the Berlin Wall as the fault line between two global superpowers, the capitalist West and the Soviet East. And before that, we have two world wars which had lasting impacts on modern-day society in Berlin. I'm Johnny Pitts, and I'm going to be looking back at some of these key historical moments on Earth in the buried presence of the Black Diaspora in Germany. We'll also be talking to key cultural figures in the Berlin scene from Marrette, Yomakopka, an activist, academic, and curator to Bonaventure Dekong, founder of one of Berlin's most respected galleries, Saviq Contemporary. But first-- [MUSIC PLAYING] So hi, my name is Joy Dinalani. When I first heard Vaz Alchema by Joy Dinalani, a soul singer from Kreuzberg via South Africa, German sounded so much sweeter than the way I'd been taught the language at school. I was born and raised in Berlin, Germany, on the west side of the city, during the time when there was still a wall going through the city. Joy lived only a stones through from the Berlin Wall. And I began by asking her what it was like growing up in a divided city. I grew up really right next to the wall. The wall was pretty much a wall that we played ball up against because it was so high. And then there were these platforms that you could walk up to and look into the east. But there was really not much to see. All we knew was this country is divided. And we are on the side of people who can decide where they wanted to go. I thought it was wrong to not let people do whatever they want to do. We were, you know, the part of the town that was to become a member of the individualistic society. Just next to us, there was the society that was a collective society. And then when the wall came down, I became a teenager and was super funny to me to go into this new club life. I experienced the club life of the post wall time. And it was really fun because it was total freedom. There were no laws. There were clubs. I went to one weekend. And the next week and either the club was closed or it moved somewhere else. So we just followed the clubs. I felt that was a time full of freedom. On the other hand, we were surrounded by the former east. And there was a rising racism. There were Nazis in West Berlin, of course. But I was never scared of them. I would gaze at them and provoke them. Because I don't know. For some reason, I was just not scared. Maybe because they were also moderates compared to the new Nazis that had nothing to lose. They were part of a system that broke down. And then they came a new system, the capitalistic system that took over. They had nowhere to go in terms of work. They didn't know what to do with themselves. Their parents lost their jobs. There was a lot of anger and aggression, stemming from that fact, not to defend that. But I think it made the Nazis from the east who decided to become hardcore Nazis more aggressive, more dangerous. I was scared of them. So I didn't really go far into the deep east. I think the east to me started in midter, and it sort of ended there. That was a safe space to me. There was not really a community that was strong enough to put its foot down in the entertainment industry, but also in the cultural discourse in general. Not just music, but just the high cultural discourse was a discourse that was dominated by white people, white Germans, and would sort of not exclude, but just not really look at the work and the life of black people in Germany. And like I said, the community was not as huge and big as it is today, but we were there. One of the biggest challenges in creating a shared sense of identity or community in Europe as opposed to somewhere like the U.S. is that while black people across the Atlantic were struggling to make themselves heard, there was only one language. However, it's been said that the true language of Europe is translation. The continent has 24 official languages in its home to over 200. How do we then find a shared cultural experience when the very terms we use are often not easily translatable to our brothers and sisters living a few hundred miles away? The German publication of my book Afro-Pian, for instance, has been translated as Afro-Pieche. I talked to Dr. Mare Ifio Makupka, an academic and curator about the term. She liked the English title, but found the German title a little bit problematic. There is not this really kind of accepted institute where you can go to and say like, "Okay, is Afro-Pieche a thing?" We like, discuss this, is this like the right word to translate it? That was my initial reaction. I was like, "Oh, my God, not again." There's a new word invention that doesn't exist. But on the other side, we are having this conversation now. It leads to something. I think this is even more important, because there is a lack in Germany of discourse of debate in an academic context. I think this is super important that the work needs to be done on an intellectual level, like in universities, as subjects like black topics. This is not happening. It has to do a lot of important debates in discourse from the American, also, the British context. For years now, there has been the call for implementing black studies, but maybe with recent events from this year, people are more aware that this really needs to be done, and that also the German colonial history really needs to be worked on. So what is the history of colonialism in Germany? A key event is the Berlin Conference of 1884, which was fundamental to what's now called the Scramble for Africa. This was the process of colonisation of the African continent by European superpowers that saw the increase of African territory under formal European control leap from 10% in 1870 to almost 90% by 1914. Otto von Bismarck organised the Berlin Conference in which Africa was divided among the key European players in Africa, and regulations for the acquisition of African countries were officially established. Germany actually did have quite a large colonial empire, and it has quite a rich history of a black presence. We could go back into the Middle Ages, but I specialise particularly in looking at the colonial period onwards. My name is Robbie Eiken. I'm an historian at Cheffelhelm University. I've written a book called Black Germany, the making of a diaspora community, 1884 to 1960. So from 1884 up to 1914, 1916, Germany took over Tanzania, Rwanda, Barunde, Namibia, Cameroon and Togo. And as a side effect of that, we had black people starting to move to Germany. Another thing that people don't think about is kind of that role that Otto von Bismarck, the German Chancellor at the time, had in the division of Africa. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Why did Bismarck choose to hold this Congo conference in Berlin? In some ways, Bismarck is a reluctant coloniser. It's not that it was the top of his agenda. He was far more interested in expanding within Europe. Yeah, I think the kind of star start to align in terms of domestic policy and foreign policy. Germany is unified in 1870, '71, but it's not really unified. There's a lot of groups within the population who do not feel comfortable with this new German state. And so Bismarck seems colonialism as a form of nationalism, as a way of trying to bind people together and make them feel a sense of German pride, a kind of social imperialism, wean them away from socialism, wean them away particularly also from Catholicism and make them feel a pride in being German. So it's a domestic tool in the one hand. It's also a foreign policy tool to show the other European rivals that Germany now wants to see at the table. It has economic interests in the west coast of Africa. They might be fairly minimal, but nonetheless, I think all the European states are involved in a game of poker in terms of what might they find in Africa? We need to grab things while they're still available. And so you have this kind of snowball or domino effect, where when the French and the British start claiming territories, the Germans want to be involved in that process as well. So clearly, this moment at the Berlin Congo Conference is important, but actually the scrambled for Africa has already started. What the conference is doing is really just rubber stamping a lot of the things that have already taken place on the ground. And I think Bismarck feels himself pulled into this. He's also a bit of a Wheeler and Dealer, I think. He likes to take advantage of the moment, and I think he feels that this is a moment where he can only win by jumping on a colonial bandwagon. Wedding in the borough of Mitter offers some clues to the colonial history of Berlin, most explicitly found in the street names. Uganda, Zanzibar, Congo and Cameroon are just some of the African countries that find themselves as "strasers" in this so-called African quarter of Germany's capital. And while these street names speak of Germany's past, today you'll find a working-class multicultural area so indicative of present-day Berlin. Someone who knows the area well is Curator and Writer Bonneventure-Saud-Bajeng-Dekong, who curates the savvy contemporary, an art-space, discursive platform, and social spot in Wedding. A space that had happened to have found it in 2009. And at some point, you'll notice that there are hardly any spaces for people like me, not only in the city, but the country, you know, very few. So, this is the second space we're having in Wedding. The first space, the address was the Plantagen Strasser, so the Plantation Street. We move from there, we're now in the right kind of a Strasser. Opposite the space is a square called the Nettelbeckplatz. Now, there is nothing that labels who Nettelbeck was and so on and so forth. If you go on Google, you check Nettelbeck to tell you he was a warrior. When you read Dipper, you notice that Nettelbeck first went to Africa at the age of 11. We're talking about 18th century here. When it came back, it decided to get involved in the slave trade. So, he was an active part in the enslavement of African people. So, he would go to West Africa, abduct people, bring them to Europe or to the Caribbean. And it's not contextualized anywhere. So, that is to me also part of Framing Wedding. Now, if you move further down, this is a quarter called the African Quarters in Wedding. So, you see the Camerona Strasse, the Tobua Strasse and so on and so forth. To me, these are nemonic tools. These are markers of German colonial history that you find in the form of street names. But you also have the literary Strasse and so on and so forth. The Petas Ali and so on and so forth. Which are all names of people that were very active in the German colonial enterprise. This is Wedding also because it's a place with the history it has. If you go out there, you meet a lot of people so be they of Turkish origin, sentient Roma people, people from Ghana, from Cameroon. There is a kiosk just next door, found by a Camerunian guy and the lady working in it is from Kenya. So you meet a lot of Camerunians and Kenians there. The diaspora is not far-fetched. It's actually quite close. It's actually very tangible in Wedding. So, that is one of the reasons why we like to be here and why we do the kind of work we're doing. I wasn't going to accept the idea that you cannot look at world art through another prison, but through the prism of the West. Starting Saudi was exactly reacting to that. But also just finding space for us to do what we wanted to do without justifying having to justify ourselves. Because we're going to accept that the world is limited to a continent of philosophy. We knew too much to accept that. [Music] Bonavancho's curatorial work brings Africans who have been erased from Western versions of art history back into the light. It feels poignant that this is happening in Berlin. It resonates with the way in which previous generations of Germans have invoked darker parts of their history. Carl Jung, writing in 1945, acknowledged that it would be one of the most important tasks of therapy to bring Germans to recognize their collective gill associated with the Holocaust. And yet it seems that this doesn't yet extend to Germany's colonial exploits. I asked Robbie Ackin about the effect that the world wars had on black people living in Germany at the time. I think in many ways this is the onset of German colonial amnesia or aphasia that's the Holocaust such a large event in German history. As you said, it looms large that the history of the colonial past really recedes into the background. The black German population becomes increasingly smaller between the 1880s and 1945. And while there are black German voices post-45 talking about their experiences, their links to the old colonial history and colonial territories, it feels as though people weren't really listening to them. So they stop talking. And at the same time we have a new population of black Germans in the form of the children of the Liberation, so children born to African American troops and to German women. And this population is so much larger in size that it really dwarfs this former black presence so that many people now look back and think it's 45 when we first see black people living in Germany. After World War One Germany will be occupied by French troops. And this includes French colonial troops. They have relationships of which children develop. The French troops have to leave the children they're left behind. The Weimar government already has its eye on them, but the Nazis in particular have their eye on these so-called Rhineland children because they are a symbol of national defeat and humiliation. When these children become grinded by early teens, it could potentially be sexually active. They have a secret meeting to discuss what to do with the children. And they ultimately will decide and it's an illegitimate action to blankly sterilize them. They choose not to sterilize the children of Cameronians and Tobalese because that could potentially form policy repercussions. Instead though if you use the Nuremberg race laws, you can try and prevent these relationships happening in the first place by effectively making it illegal for black person to marry a white person. Things will really escalate from 1939 when Germany goes to war. So the consequences have been caught in a relationship such as that will likely be either forced sterilization or forced incarceration. While the majority of black people who are living in Germany and are still alive in 1939 will still be alive in 1945, that doesn't tell us very much about those experiences between those key war years. When incarceration, sterilization, threat of sterilization really increases as an increase of violence towards black people, black bodies. Here in Robbie talking about these atrocious laws, got me thinking about how the suffering and limitations imposed on black Germans is so recent. This erasure from the history box leaves little space for a sense of black community to form. And you have this moment towards the end of the 80s when the Berlin Wall falls, seen as an optimistic moment not only for Germany, but for the entire world. This wasn't necessarily the case for black Germans, as it unleashed a new wave of right with nationalism. Mai Aim, the kind of the late great poet, said that this was meant to be this moment of unification for the German population, but when she saw people out in the street, it was simply white Germans who were celebrating this moment, and that she and people from other backgrounds, Turkish Germans felt excluded from that, that they were not part of this new population, this new German unity. In fact, we see quite a lot of xenophobic attacks that take place, often in the East post, 1989, and there is still quite a residue of xenophobia in large parts of the country. Joy Denelane and how a music became a way to build a sense of community and speak about issues of Afro-German identity. It took me a long time to really accept the fact that I am German, because obviously I spoke German, obviously I was born and raised in Germany. Obviously, through a German school system and I was surrounded by German culture. So, of course, there were so many things that made me German, but there was also something that helped me back from admitting that I was, and that had, of course, to do with the way people treated me, the way people separated me from another group that was like, let's say, the majority of white people. We all have our own coping mechanisms. I dealt with my issues and racism really privately. I didn't really speak out loud and I didn't also really know how to do that. When I got a deal with a certain record company that sort of allowed me to be free as an artist and to express myself the way I wanted to, my husband is also a musician. So, he asked me before I started my album, so what is it that you want to talk about? What makes you different from the rest? What is there deep within you that you would like to talk about and that you feel like is something that you know about? And when he asked me that questions, I really started digging a little deeper, and then I decided I wanted to sort of portray my family's story, which started with my father, who came all the way from South Africa to the small town where he met my mom, and then they decided to start a family. So, that was interesting for me because it made me lead conversations with my father, but it also made me go to South Africa to talk to my family in South Africa and check out their perspective, because I mean, it's like we said before, there are always these sweet myths that go around when you don't check them with other people, they sort of become their own story, and my father had his own understanding of what he experienced, and I just wanted to sort of add other voices, and that made me go to South Africa, and that made me start working with Huma Sekela, and really go deep into my family story, which was of course super interesting to me. Black music from America and the Caribbean had long been popular in Germany, but Joyce 2002 debut album Mamane, sung mostly in the German language, went gold, and helped to bring afro-German identity into the public consciousness. Mamane is a South African term, and it stands for female ancestors and mothers. I chose the title because I was talking about the Black diaspora. I was also talking about becoming a mother because I had my first child when I was right in the middle of writing the album, and I lost my own mother, so that was enough for me to say this title would be great to express that this album is about South Africa, it's about blackness, it's about motherhood. Definitely I wanted to empower black females in Germany, but also in Europe, but foremost in Germany. What I wanted to ask next is about another track on your first album, which was a via Frauen, which to me is just again just another incredible, liable moment for me, really inspiration in terms of when I was putting this book together, and could you tell me more about how that came to be and tell us more about that song because it's these four different dialects. And when you listen, of course, to four very different voices actually, but they seamlessly kind of blend together, there's something really, really that sings of the diaspora. That was the idea to put four women together who tell us or tell the listener about their look or their view, you know, being part of the black diaspora. Obviously we used Nina Simone's for a women's song to do that. That's the idea to flip it a little bit and add a few more voices and narratives and so I started working with a single from the Cap Verts, from Kenya and from France and the Francsinger. She was a white singer, Debora, but she had a black child. She was telling about her perspective as a white mother, you know, bringing up a black child and I thought it was just so interesting to me to hear those different voices and their different perspectives. The German Black Live is I think growing now, but back then I think it was not really existing for a lot of people. Wherever I went, whether it was France or England or America, I mean America was really the worst. Whenever I said to people I was from Germany, they have black people in Germany, that's impossible. The struggle to make Germans let alone the world understand that there is a sizable black presence in the country is something that musicians, artists, writers and thinkers have had to fight for over many decades and with far right political parties like alternative for Germany on the rise, it's a struggle that still isn't over. There's so much beauty out there, there's so much culture out there. That's Bonaventure speaking from Mitter and actually that the whole project of denigrating your culture, your language, your knowledge is so on and so forth was also to hide a certain moral epistemic cultural poverty from one side. So it's been really about opening one's mind with developing Europe. We engage in an incredible amount of cultural epistemic development and even economic development. Around Germany there are musicians, artists, decolonising organisations and activists making their voice heard, building upon decades of work put in place after reunification in Germany. They are laying the foundations that might finally open up a national discussion in Germany about its colonial past and its multicultural present. The Afro-Pian podcast is a co-production brought to you by Afro-Pian and Reduce Listening. It's written and presented by Mate Johnny Pits and produced by Femi or Yogan Williams. Charlie Tallah was the assistant producer. This episode was supported by National Geographic. You can read more stories from Black Europe in my book Afro-Pian notes from Black Europe, which is out now published by Penguin in the UK and translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Dutch and Portuguese. Afro-Pian, the journal, a photographic essay, bringing together 20 years of images and a femur from my work, is out now published by Marell. And don't forget you can contribute your own story to the website, I run with Yomi Bazaway, Natalie Lumin, Tallah Ossetello, and Nina Camara afro-Pian.com, do get in touch. Next time on the Afro-Pian podcast. Stockholm is one of the most beautiful cities there are. Sweden has promoted itself as a country untainted by histories and legacies of colonialism. We cannot live a life of eternal gratitude. One of them told me that you'd rather go home and die fighting than die in paradise doing nothing. What is this space? What is it to exist as a black person in the world and to be able to find a sense of belonging that feels simultaneously African and global?