3 - Berlin

Johny finds himself at the fault-line of the 20th century. Berlin is where Cold War divisions between East and West and colonial histories continue to leave a mark on both German and African identities. Celebrated soul singer Joy Denalane shares stories about her upbringing near the former Berlin Wall, partying and crafting her musical identity in local nightclubs while having to dodge neo-Nazis from East Germany. And in the Wedding neighbourhood, internationally-renowned curator Bonaventure Ndikung discusses African art and explains the problematic context behind streets named after African countries and German colonisers.

 

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Introduction:

(00:06):
Welcome to the Afro pean Podcast.
In this episode of the Afro pean Podcast,we're in Berlin, a city that has long
been famous in the European imaginationas an open, creative city, home to epic

(00:27):
techno clubs and a thriving art scene.
It's also a city which stands right atthe centre of the monumental changes which
the 20th century wrought upon Europe.
We don't have black studies, wedon't have a real discourse which
is accepted by the mainstream.
I wasn't scared of our Nazis herein the West, but I was scared
of the Nazis from the East.

(00:49):
You don't have to look too far back tofind the Berlin Wall as the fault line
between two global superpowers, thecapitalist West and the Soviet East.
And before that we have two worldwars which had lasting impacts
on modern day society in Berlin.
I'm Johny Pitts and I'm going to belooking back at some of these key

(01:09):
historical moments unearthing the buriedpresence of the Black Diaspora in Germany.
We'll also be talking to key culturalfigures in the Berlin scene, from
Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, an activist,academic and curator, to Bonaventure
Ndikung, founder of one of Berlin's mostrespected galleries, Savvy Contemporary.
But first, let's Hi, my name is JoyDenalane . When I first heard Was auch

(01:38):
immer by Joy Denalane, a soul singerfrom Kreuzberg via South Africa, German
sounded so much sweeter than the wayI'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 wasstill a wall going through the city.
Joy lived only a stone's throw from theBerlin Wall and I began by asking her what

(02:02):
it was like growing up in a divided city.
I grew up really right next to the wall.
The wall was pretty much, um, awall that we played ball up against.
because it was so high and then therewere 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 dividedand we are on the side of people who

(02:27):
can decide where they wanted to go.
I thought it was wrong to not letpeople do whatever they want to do.
We were, you know, the part of thetown that was to become a member
of the individualistic society.
Just next to us there was the societythat was a collective society.
And then when the wall came down, I becamea teenager and it was super funny to me

(02:50):
to, uh, to go into this new club life.
I experienced the club life of thepost wall time and it was really fun
because it was, it was total freedom.
There were no laws.
There were clubs I went to oneweekend and the next, the next
weekend, either the club wasclosed or it moved somewhere else.

(03:13):
So we just followed the clubs.
I felt that was a time full of freedom.
On the other hand, we weresurrounded by the former East
and there was a rising racism.
There were Nazis in West Berlin, ofcourse, but I was never scared of them.
I would gaze at them and provokethem because, I don't know, for

(03:34):
some reason I was just not scared.
Maybe because they were alsomoderate compared to the new
Nazis that had nothing to lose.
They were part of a system that brokedown and then there came a new system,
the capitalistic system that took over.
They had nowhere to go in terms of work.
They didn't know whatto do with themselves.
Their parents lost their jobs.

(03:55):
There was a lot of anger and aggressionstemming from that fact, not to defend
that, but I think it made the Nazis fromthe East who decided to become hardcore
Nazis, more aggressive, more dangerous.
I was scared of them.
I wasn't scared of our Nazis herein the West, but I was scared of

(04:16):
the Nazis from the East, so I didn'treally go far into the Deep East.
I think the East, to me, started inMitte and it sort of ended there.
That was a safe space to me.
There was not really a community that wasstrong enough to put its foot down in the

(04:36):
entertainment industry, but also in the,in the cultural discourse, you know, in
general, not just music, but just the, thehigh cultural discourse was a discourse
that was dominated by white people, whiteGermans, and would Sort of not exclude,
but just not really look at the workand the life of black people in Germany.

(05:01):
And like I said, the communitywas not as huge and big as it
is today, but we were there.
One of the biggest challenges increating a shared sense of identity
or community in Europe, as opposedto somewhere like the US, is that

(05:22):
while black people across the Atlanticwere struggling to make themselves
heard, there was only one language.
However, it's been said that the truelanguage of Europe is translation.
The continent has 24 officiallanguages and is home to over 200.
How do we then find a shared culturalexperience when the very terms we
use are often not easily translatableto our brothers and sisters

(05:45):
living a few hundred miles away?
The German publication of mybook, Afropean for instance, has
been translated as Afropäisch.
I talked to Dr.
Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, an academicand curator, about the term.
She liked the English title, but foundthe German title a little bit problematic.
There is not this really kind of acceptedinstitute where you can go to and say

(06:08):
like, okay, is Afropäisch a thing?
Can we like discuss this?
Is this like the rightword to translate it?
So that was like my initial reaction.
I was like, Oh my God, not again.
There's like a new word invention,like kind of doesn't exist.
But on the other side is like, we arehaving like this conversation now.
It leads to something.
So, and I think like,this is like even more.

(06:32):
important.
And because there is like a lackin Germany of like discourse of
debate, like in an academic context.
And I think this is like superimportant that the work needs to be
done on an intellectual level, likein universities as like subjects, like
black topics, this is not happening.

(06:53):
It has to do a lot of like importeddebates and discourse from the
American, also the British context.
For years now, there has been like the,the call for implementing Black Studies,
but mabye with like recent events fromthis year, people are more like aware
that this really needs to be done andthat like also like the German colonial

(07:15):
history really needs to be worked on.
So what is the history ofcolonialism in Germany?
A key event is the Berlin Conference of1884, which was fundamental to what's

(07:39):
now called the Scramble for Africa.
This was the process of colonisationof the African continent by European
superpowers that saw the increase ofAfrican territory under foreign rule.
Formal European control leapedfrom 10 percent in 1870 to
almost 90 percent by 1914.
Otto von Bismarck organized theBerlin conference in which Africa

(08:02):
was divided among the key Europeanplayers in Africa and regulations
for the acquisition of Africancountries were officially established.
Germany actually did have quite alarge colonial empire, and it has quite
a rich history of a black presence.
We could go back into the middleages, but I specialize particularly in
looking at the colonial period onwards.

(08:23):
My name's Robbie Aitken.
I'm an historian, uh, atSheffield Hallam University.
I've written a book called BlackGermany, The Making and Unmaking of
a Diasporic Community, 1884 to 1960.
So from 1884 up to 19, 14, 1916, uh,Germany took over Tanzania, Rwanda,

(08:45):
Burundi, Namibia, Cameroon, and Togo.
And as a side effect of that, we hadblack people starting to move to Germany.
Another thing that people don't thinkabout is kind of that role that Otto von
Bismarck, the German chancellor at thetime, had in, in the division of Africa.
Could you tell us a littlebit more about that?

(09:06):
Why did Bismarck choose to holdthis Congo conference in Berlin?
In some ways, Bismarckis a reluctant colonizer.
It's not that it wasthe top of his agenda.
He was far more interestedin expanding within Europe.
Yeah, I think the kind of starsstart to align in terms of
domestic policy and foreign policy.
Germany is unified in 1870, 71,but it's not really unified.

(09:28):
There's a lot of groups withinthe population who do not feel
comfortable with this new German state.
And so Bismarck sees colonialismas a form of nationalism, as a way
of trying to bind people together.
I'll make them feel a sense of Germanpride, a kind of social imperialism, wean
them away from socialism, wean them away,particularly also from Catholicism and

(09:50):
make them feel a pride in being German.
So it's a domestic tool on the onehand, it's also a foreign policy tool
to show the other European rivals thatGermany now wants to see at the table.
Um, it has economic interestsin the West coast of Africa.
They might be fairly minimal.
But nonetheless, I think all the Europeanstates are involved in a game of poker in

(10:13):
terms of what might they find in Africa.
We need to grab things whilethey're still available.
And so you have this kind of snowballor domino effect where it was when the
French and the British start claimingterritories, the Germans want to be
involved in that process as well.
So clearly, this moment at theBerlin Congo conference is important.

(10:34):
But actually, the scramble forAfrica has already started.
What the conference is doingis really just rubber stamping
a lot of the things that havealready taken place on the ground.
And I think Bismarck feelshimself pulled into this.
He's also a bit of awheeler and dealer, I think.
He likes to take advantage of themoment, and I think he feels that

(10:55):
this is a moment where he can only winby jumping on a colonial bandwagon.
Wedding in the Borough ofMitte . Offers some clues to the
colonial history of Berlin, mostexplicitly found in the street names.

(11:19):
Uganda, Zanzibar, Congo and Cameroonare just some of the African
countries that find themselves asStraßes in this so called African
quarter of Germany's capital.
And while these street names speakof Germany's past, today you'll find
a working class multicultural areaso indicative of present day Berlin.
Someone who knows the area well iscurator and writer Bonaventure Soh

(11:43):
Bejeng Dikung, who curates the SavvyContemporary, an art space, discursive
platform and social spot in Wedding.
A space that I happened to found that In2009, and at some point I noticed that
there are hardly any spaces for, forpeople like me, not only in the city,
but the country, you know, very few.

(12:05):
So this is the second space we are havingin Wedding . The first space, the address
was the plantation Straße . So theplantation streets, we move from there.
We are now in the Rhine KingdomStraße . Opposite the space is a a
square called the Nettelbeck plaza. Now there is nothing that labels who

(12:25):
Nettelbeck was and so on and so forth.
If you go on Google, you,you check Nettelbeck, they'll
tell you he was a warrior.
When you read deeper, you noticethat Nettelbeck first went
to Africa at the age of 11.
We're talking about 18th century here.
When he came back, hedecided to get involved.
in the slave trade.
So he was an active part in theenslavement of African people.

(12:48):
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, alsoa part of framing Wedding

(13:09):
.Now, if you go further down, this is a quarter called the
African Quarters in Vedding.
So you see the Cameroon Strasse,the Togo Strasse, and so forth.
To me These are mnemonic tools, these aremarkers of German colonial history that
you find in the form of street names.
But you also have the Luderitzstrasseand so on and so forth.

(13:31):
The Petersallee and so on and soforth, which are all names, of
people that were very active inthe German colonial enterprise.
You know, this is Wedding also becauseit's a place with the history it has.
If you go out there, youmeet a lot of people.
So be they of Turkish origin,Sinti and Roma people, people

(13:54):
from Ghana, from Cameroon.
There is a, A kiosk just next door,uh, uh, founded by a Cameroonian guy.
Uh, and the lady workingis in it is from Kenya.
So you meet a lot ofCameroonians and Kenyans there.
The diaspora is not far fetched.
It's actually quite close.
It's actually verytangible in, in bedding.

(14:17):
So that is one of the reasons why welike to be here and why we, we, we,
we do the kind of work we're doing.
I wasn't going to accept the ideathat you cannot look at, you know,
were art through another prism,but through the prism of the West.
Starting Savvy was, was, was exactly,you know, reacting to that, but also

(14:42):
just finding space for us to do what wewanted to do without justifying, having to
justify ourselves, you know, because we'regoing to accept that the world is limited
to Continental philosophy, you know, weknew too much to, to, to, to accept that.
Bonaventure's

(15:28):
curatorial work brings Africans whohave been erased from Western versions
of art history back into the light.
It feels poignant that thisis happening in Berlin.
It resonates with the way in whichprevious generations of Germans have
invoked darker parts of their history.
Carl Jung, writing in 1945, acknowledgedthat it would be one of the most

(15:49):
important tasks of therapy to bringGermans to recognise their collective
guilt associated with the Holocaust.
And yet it seems that this doesn't yetextend to Germany's colonial exploits.
I asked Robbie Aitken about the effectthat the World Wars had on black
people living in Germany at the time.
I think in many ways, um, this is theonset of German colonial amnesia or

(16:12):
aphasia, that the Holocaust is such alarge event in German history, as you
said, it looms large, that the history ofthe colonial past really recedes in time.
to the background.
The Black German populationbecomes increasingly smaller
between the 1880s and 1945.
And while there are Black Germanvoices post 45 talking about their

(16:33):
experiences, their links to theold colonial history and colonial
territories, it feels as though peopleweren't really listening to them.
So they stopped talking.
And at the same time, we have a newpopulation of black Germans in the
form of the children of the liberation.
So children born to AfricanAmerican troops and to German women.

(16:54):
And this population is so muchlarger in size that it really
dwarfs this former black presence.
So that many people now look backand think it's 45 when we first
see Black people living in Germany.
After world war one, Germany willbe occupied by French troops.
And this includes French colonial troops.

(17:15):
They have relationshipsof which children develop.
The French troops have to leave.
The children are left behind.
Uh, the Weimar government alreadyhas its eye on them, but the Nazis
in particular Rhineland children,because they're a, they are a symbol
of national defeat and humiliation.

(17:35):
When these children become, um,round about early teens, and could
potentially be sexually active, theyhave a secret meeting to discuss
what to do with the children.
And they ultimately will decide,and it's an illegitimate action,
to blanketly sterilize them.
They choose not to sterilizethe children of Cameroonians

(17:57):
and Togolese, because that couldpotentially form policy repercussions.
Instead though, if you use the Nurembergrace laws, You can try and prevent these
relationships happening in the first placeby effectively making it illegal for a
black person to marry a white person.
Things will really escalate from 1939 whenGermany goes to war, so the consequences

(18:21):
of being caught in a relationship suchas that will likely be either forced
sterilization or forced incarceration.
While the majority of Black people whoare 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 waryears when incarceration, sterilization,

(18:44):
threat of sterilization really increases.
There's increased violencetowards Black people.
black people, black bodies.
Hearing Robbie talking about theseatrocious laws got me thinking about
how the suffering and limitationsimposed on black Germans is so recent.
This erasure from the historybooks leaves little space for a
sense of black community to form.

(19:07):
Then you have this moment towards the endof the 80s when the Berlin Wall falls,
seen as an optimistic moment not onlyfor Germany but for the entire world.
This wasn't necessarily the case forblack Germans as it unleashed a new wave.
of right wing nationalism.
May Ayim, the kind of, the late greatpoet, said that this was meant to be

(19:27):
this moment of unification for theGerman population, but when she saw
people out in the street, it was simplywhite Germans who were celebrating
this moment, and that she and peoplefrom, from other backgrounds, Turkish
Germans, um, felt excluded from that,that they were not part of this, this
new population, this new German unity.
In fact, we see quite a lot ofxenophobic attacks that take

(19:50):
place often in the East post 1989.
And there is still quite a residue ofxenophobia in large parts of the country.
Joy Denalane and how her musicbecame a way to build a sense
of community and speak aboutissues of Afro German identity.

(20:13):
It took me a long time to reallyaccept the fact that I am German
because, uh, Obviously I spoke German.
Obviously I was bornand raised in Germany.
Obviously went through aGerman school system and I was
surrounded by German culture.
So of course, There were so manythings that made me German, but

(20:36):
there was also something that heldme back from admitting that I was.
And that had, of course, to do withthe way people treated me, the way
people separated me from anothergroup that was like, uh, let's
say the majority of white people.
We all have our own coping mechanisms.
I dealt with my issues andracism really privately.

(20:59):
I didn't really speak out loud and Ididn't also really know how to do that.
When I got a deal with a certainrecord company that sort of allowed
me to be free as an artist and toexpress 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?

(21:20):
What makes you different from the rest?
What is there deep within you that youwould like to talk about and that you feel
like is something that you know about?
And when he asked me that questions, Ireally started digging a little deeper.
And then I decided I wanted to sortof portray my family's story, which

(21:40):
started with my father, who, whocame all the way from South Africa to
the small town where he met my mom.
And then they decided to build,to, to, to start a family.
So, so that was interesting for mebecause it made me lead conversations
with my father, but it also mademe go to South Africa to talk to
my, uh, uh, family in South Africaand check out their perspective.

(22:04):
Because, I mean, it's, it's like wesaid before, there are always these,
these, sweet myths that go around whenyou don't check them with other people,
they sort of become their own story.
And my father had his, his ownunderstanding of what he experienced.
And I just wanted tosort of add other voices.
And that made me go to South Africa.

(22:26):
And that made me start working withHugh Masekela . And, um, really go
deep into my family story, which was,
Black music from America and the Caribbeanhad long been popular in Germany, but
Joy's 2002 debut album, Mamani, sungmostly in the German language, went

(22:47):
gold and helped to bring Afro Germanidentity into the public consciousness.
Mamani is a South African term and itstands for female ancestors and mothers.
I chose the title because I wastalking about the, uh, black diaspora.

(23:10):
I was, I was also talking aboutbecoming a mother because I had
my first child when I was right inthe middle of writing the album.
And I lost my own mother.
So that was enough for me to say thistitle would be great to express that
this album is about South Africa.
It's about blackness.

(23:31):
It's about motherhood.
Definitely I wanted to empower, uh,black females in Germany, but also
in Europe, but foremost in Germany.
What I wanted to ask next is aboutanother track on your first album,
which was, uh, Vier Frauen, um, whichto me is just, again, just another

(23:51):
incredible, light bulb moment for me,really inspirational in terms of when
I was putting this book together.
And could you tell me more abouthow that came to be and tell us
more about that song, because it'sthese four different dialects.
And when you listen, of course, Fourvery different voices, actually, but
they seamlessly kind of blend together.
There's something really, reallythat sings of the diaspora.

(24:18):
That was the idea to, to put fourwomen together who tell us or tell the
listener about their look or their view.
You know, being partof the black diaspora.
Correct.
Obviously we used Nina Simone'sfor Women's Song to do that.

(24:49):
My skin is black.
My arms are long.
That's the idea, to flip it alittle bit and add a few more
voices and, and narratives.
And so, uh, I started working with,uh, from Kenya and from France and the

(25:13):
France singer, she was a white singer,Deborah, but she had a black child.
She was telling about her perspective asa white mother, you know, uh, bringing up
a black child and, and, uh, I thought itwas just so interesting to me to, to, to,
to, to, uh, hear those different voices.
And yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're different perspectives.

(25:45):
The German black lifeis, I think, growing now.
But back then, I think it was notreally existing for a lot of people.
Where, wherever I went, whetherit, whether it was France or
England or America, I mean,America was really, uh, the worst.
Whenever I said to people, I was,I was from Germany, They have black

(26:07):
people in Germany, that's impossible!
The struggle to make Germans, letalone the world, understand that there
is a sizeable black presence in thecountry is something that musicians,
artists, writers and thinkers havehad to fight for over many decades.
And with far right political partieslike Alternative for Germany on the rise,

(26:29):
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 Mitte.
And actually, that the whole projectof denigrating your culture, your
language, your, your, your knowledges,so on and so forth, was also to hide.

(26:54):
a certain moral epistemic, you know,cultural poverty from one side.
So it's, it's been really about, you know,opening one's mind with developing Europe.
You know, we, we engage in an incredibleamount of cultural epistemic development
and even economic development.

(27:17):
Around Germany, there are musicians,Artists, decolonizing organizations,
and activists making their voice heard,building upon decades of work put in
place after reunification in Germany.
They are laying the foundations that mightfinally open up a national discussion
in Germany about its colonial past.
And it's multicultural present.

(27:45):
The Afropean Podcast is a coproduction brought to you by
Afropean and Reduce Listening.
It's written and presented byme, Johny Pitts, and produced
by Femi Oriogun Williams.
Charlie Towler was the assistant producer.
This episode was supportedby National Geographic.
You can read more stories from BlackEurope in my book, Afropean, Notes
from Black Europe, which is out now,published by Penguin in the UK, and

(28:08):
translated into French, Spanish, Italian,German, Polish, Dutch, and Portuguese.
Afropean, the journal, a photographicessay bringing together 20 years of
images and ephemera from my work,is out now, published by Morel.
And don't forget, you can contributeyour own story to the website I
run with Yomi Bazawe, Natalumin,Tola Ositelou, and Nina Kamara.

(28:29):
Afropean.
com.
Do get in touch.
Next time on the Afro Pianpodcast, Stockholm is one of the
most beautiful cities there are.
Sweden has promoted itself as acountry untainted by histories
and legacies of colonialism.
We cannot live a life of eternalgratitude, and one of them

(28:52):
told me that he would rather gohome and die fighting than die.
What is this space?
Um, what is it to exist as, as a blackperson in, in the world and to be able
to find a sense of belonging that feelssimultaneously African and global?