inicial

Last may in Berlin I attended a presentation that was part of the campaign organised by Berlin-Postkolonial, a collective of historians linked to the alternative left. The presentation featured a historian from the collective and an African-German activist from a Pan-African group based in Berlin and whose work focuses on topics related to the Black resistance against the racist legacy of African colonisation still existing today.

This campaign, linked to the postcolonial line of thought, has a decolonial perspective with the goal to change the names of the streets in what is known today as the African neighbourhood in Wedding and in the workers and multicultural areas to the north of Berlin.

One of the key points of this campaign is the collaboration between the German white-people collectives and the Pan African ones, working together towards the same goal to express their rejection of the racist substratum that exists in the German society today. This is translated in a mixture of subjects united in the goal to try, step by step and side by side, to deconstruct and put an end to this supremacist thinking that exists everywhere. Therefore, this relation is understood as dialectic where the change also implies a change in the other.

What is important to see here is the fact that the oppressed and colonised subject –in this case, the Africans who are living in Berlin – have decided to take action on this issue with the aim to write their own history and bring justice. That is crucial, because in my opinion one of the problems in postcolonial critics is that it is dominated by white people and sometimes reproduces some of the aspects that are being criticized, not to forget the frequent contradiction of the subject being, mostly, privileged heterosexual white men. Obviously it is not always like that, and the participation of African collectives, for example in this particular campaign, makes it in my opinion, all the more essential. In short, it should be clear that the white people should be able to question their privileges, but it is also necessary that the oppressed subjects can build their own narrative with a post and decolonial perspectives.

These collectives proceed on the basis that actually there is a wide array of racisms in Germany; from the more structural, like institutional racism or national borders, to the micro racisms often unnoticed. Therefore, we may note a big network of powers and micro powers in both the colonisers’ and the colonised societies, even today. Also the domination structures inherited pass through all aspects of daily life: from the way of thinking to the political or economic fronts, from the cultural to the social, and so on. I tend to believe that only by taking this argument as basis, the situation can be challenged and changed, slowly but steadily.

In addition, it is crucial in the campaign to understand the historical context of this African area in Berlin's Wedding area. It can be said that it started1 to take shape towards the end of 19th century when the first streets, Kamerunerstraße (Camerun Street) and Togostraße (Togo Street), were formed in what used to be uncultivated field2, exactly in 1899. According to the historian group Berlin Postkolonial, which is linked to Wedding's antiracist and anti-capitalist platform “Hände Weg Vom Wedding”, the initiative to give the two newly formed streets names with German colonialist references came from the Berlin City Council. Besides, it should be added that both Togo and Cameroon, together with Namibia, Wituland and Tanzania –today this area takes also Burundi, Rwanda and Tanganyka– are the areas that corresponded to Germany after the Berlin Conference3, organised between 1884 and 1885 by England, France, Belgium and Germany. It goes without saying that in this conference the African continent was distributed among these countries in a malice plot.

As time went by, new streets with African references appeared: Afrikanischestraße, Damarastraße (Damara Street, city of Central African Republic), Dualastraße (Douala Street, largest city in Cameroon), Ghanastraße, Guineastraße, Kongostraße, Lüderitzstraße (Lüderitz Street, city in Namibia), Mohasistraße (Moshi Street, Tanzanian municipality), Otawistraße (city in Namibia), Petersallee (Peters Avenue, he was a german coloniser), Sambesistraße (Zambezi Street, the fourth-longest river in Africa), Sansibarstraße (Zanzibar Street, semi-autonomous part of Tanzania), Senegalstraße, Tangastraße (Tangier Street), Transvaalstraße (actually South African Republic), Ugandastraße, Usambarastraße (mountains in North-East Tanzania) and Windhukerstraße (Windhoek Street, the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Namibia). Adding to this list streets with clearly negative connotations or undertones like Mohrenstraße (Dark-Skinned Street). It is important to underline that although some street names are not directly connected to German colonialism; they do carry however referenced to European colonialism in general.

As I pointed out above, one of the goals – linked to the decolonial perspective– would be the attempt to replace the names with colonial references with names linked to African revolutionary processes, African national liberation experiences or just names related to organisations or movements connected with the black African communities.

However, and as an anecdote to illustrate the institutional racism that exists currently in Germany, but fully applicable anywhere in Europe; the Wedding section of Merkel's Party (CDU) has already publically demonstrated opposition to this initiative denying racist substratum in these names derived from European colonialism.

This is just a small anecdote –but charged with symbolisms– that make evident the problems with colonial mentality in Europe, posing it as a real and current issue. This is why a postcolonial critique with a decolonial and intersectionalist (interlocking matrix of oppressions) perspective(s) is needed more than ever. Thus, white supremacy and racism –despite appearing to be issues of the past– are equally prevailing nowadays and are often disguised in innocent-seeming actions.