Keshia Fredua-Mensah & Jamie Schearer
The Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD)* has been actively working on the empowerment of people of African descent and Black people in Germany for almost 30 years. Its aim is to raise their voices and also to generate visibility for their perspectives and realities in the German society. The ISD is dedicated to challenging the discourse that does not want to see nor acknowledge Black presence in Germany. For more than three hundred years, people of African descent have been born and raised in Germany, have made Germany their place of home, but narratives about the Black experience in Germany often remain silenced in the public discourse. While their stories do not exist in the dominant historiography, stereotypical clichés dominate the images of the Black Diaspora. Racist pictures and beliefs need to be understood as a historically developed relationship of power – blurring past and present depictions of Black people’s realities.
This must also be interpreted through the lens of colonialism. There is almost no awareness in German society about the atrocities committed during colonialism. The fact that the first concentration camps were built in Namibia, former German South-West Africa, usually remains unknown to the wider German public. This is particularly ignored in the education sector. The genocide against the Herero and Nama and the traces it has left, affecting these communities until today, remain obscured with no effort of reparations made from the German side¹. Hence, it is especially offending that Germany’s `development aid´ is inadequately being advertised as a form of reparations for the genocide against the Herero and Nama. Development aid is clearly not working towards healing the trauma of the colonized peoples, who suffered a “war of extermination (1904 -1908)”². This strategy of the German government deflects from the cruelties that took place and once again imply that the colonizer takes the lead in the defining what is needed to repair the suffering of the affected groups, rather than inquiring about and respecting the way in which the Namibian society wishes to come to terms with the past and its repercussions in present times.
Groups like AfricaVenir, Berlin-Postkolonial e.V., AK Panafrikanismus e.V. – Bündnis Decolonize München and Tanzania Network e.V. as well as the ISD and ADEFRA have been standing in solidarity with demands for reparations from the global South. In 2011 20 human remains of Herero and Nama were handed over to a Namibian delegation. The skulls were taken from Namibia after the genocide between 1904-1908 for experiments³. A second handover took place early this year. Many more human remains are still in Germany’s research hospitals and archives. The active support and campaigning in Germany have strengthened the position of the Namibian side. Tools like interventions, media outreaches, inquiries to the German Parliament were used to increase the pressure on the German government to deal with the topic.
The ISD does not view reparations solely as a mechanism of financial compensation for people of African descent / Black people. Instead there is a need for a structural approach that will allow for the rectification of a broken system. A system that was not built to equally protect and provide for everyone. The Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires (CRAN) in its dossier “Esclavage et Réparation” highlights the need to actively tackle racism through “legally, morally, culturally and symbolically”4 repairing the broken system that leaves Black people disenfranchised.
