2/Black Europeans You Should Know: Theodor Wonja Michael and Hans Massaquoi, Two Afrodeutsch To Remember
When Germany's Errinerungskultur or culture of remembrance doesn't apply to Black people, so they have to write to be remembered
This is a long newsletter; if you read it via email, you must click on ‘view the entire message’ to read it in its entirety.
Black Europeans You Should Know is a series in which I introduce you to Black figures who made history in Europe and/or their homeland.
Before introducing you to today’s Black Europeans, I wanted to first talk about the Errinerungskultur, the German expression to describe the culture of remembrance. I think it is a concept that is necessary to introduce even before talking about the past because the culture of remembrance is all about recalling the past for a better future; it is about a society learning about its mistakes to avoid repeating them. Quite the noble concept, yet if there is something to learn, it is that rightly because men write History, there are parts they’d prefer to be buried forever.
Wikipedia defines the culture of remembrance as “the interaction of an individual or society with their past and history.” In the context of Germany, it has been exclusively associated with the Shoah. So, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the centre-left government proposed to expand the definition of Errinerungskultur to include German colonial and immigration history in 2021, their idea was met with stark criticism by institutions keeping the Holocaust’s memory alive.
The Holocaust memorial sites spokespeople said that the reform “[could] be understood as historically revisionist, in the sense of trivializing Nazi crimes.” It is fascinating to observe how revisionism is used here - as if expanding the definition of the culture of remembrance meant distorting History and the memory of the Shoah. The reform project was obviously rejected, but it highlighted the difficulty for Germany - and truly all European ex-colonial empires - to consider that the culture of remembrance is fluid and must adapt to the changes of time1. There were genocides before and after the Shoah. Furthermore, colonial and immigration history has been part of Germany before and during the Third Reich - so isn’t it revisionist refusing to acknowledge it?
"Every year, Germany changes — new Germans are born, new Germans come to the country. It would just not be realistic to think of memory as something stable and fixed, something frozen in time, something agreed upon and that's the way it remains […] The globalizing world in which we live has a longer history and this history is one where colonialism played a crucial role. So, whenever we want to understand how we got to our globalized present, we need to understand the history of imperialism, of empires, of colonialism as well.
These are the words of Sebastian Conrad, a professor of global and postcolonial history at Berlin’s Free University and a supporter of the Errinerungskultur reform that convinces me more than ever that endeavours to tell stories of people Europe willingly forgot is necessary to better understand our collective past. Thus, Black Europeans You Should Know is my little space that I hope will contribute to the culture of remembrance of Black people in Europe while shining a new light on the Old continent’s history.
Now, let our journey back in time start.
History always remembers triumphs, yet it puts failures under the rug. That’s what happened to European countries that lost their colonies during the Scramble for Africa, or better said, the colonisation process of the continent from 1833 to 1914 by the UK, Portugal, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany.
Germany, the big WWI loser, was one of them. Yet, in 1884—when Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck started turning German merchants’ possessions under the empire's protection into colonies—Germany was the third-largest colonial empire after Great Britain and France.
Until 1919, Germany’s African colonies comprised Togo, Namibia, Burundi, Rwanda, Cameroon, Ghana, and Tanzania. Interestingly, when I started researching Black people in Europe, I found more stories of Afrodeutsch - the German term for Afro-German - than stories of Black people in my own country. France has been working well on erasing the stories of Black presence in history, as has Germany. However, the difference between Afrodeutsch and Black French people is that their older generations told their stories. They wrote not to be forgotten and for future generations because they understood the Erinnerungskultur didn’t apply to them.
When I began uncovering stories of Afrodeutsch in February 2019, Theodor Wonja Michael (1925-2019) - the oldest Afro-German - was still alive. He would pass in October of the same year but has left testimonies of his story as a Black mixed-race man who lived during the Third Reich through interviews and a book, Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century2. As I kept searching, Hans Massaquoi (1926-2013) was another name that kept appearing repeatedly. Both were contemporaries sharing the similarity of being Black mixed-race men born a little bit before Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933. Yet the different trajectory of their lives couldn’t be more fascinating, so I had to write about them.
Theodor Wonja Michael was born in 1925 in Berlin to a Cameroonian father and a German mother. He lived through the end of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and the beginning of the Third Reich. So, he directly bore the brunt of the Nuremberg Laws, or the Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, adopted on September 15, 1935.
FOR THE MOST CURIOUS: SOME FACTS ABOUT CAMEROON AND GERMANY
I was born in 1987, so I witnessed France’s neocolonialism in Cameroon post-independence; nonetheless, traces of Germany’s colonial past were still palpable as I observed them within my family and in the Sawa/Douala3 culture which I belong to:
My mother learned German as a second language at school after English.
Some German words remain in my mother’s languages - Douala and Ewodi.
Ambas-bay is a traditional dance of the Sawa people inspired by German ballroom and traditional Sawa dances. You will often hear dancers counting in German while dancing. Ambas-bay is also a musical genre sung in Douala that became popular in the 1960s. Below are videos of the dance by two dance groups so you can see the differences in style (you can start watching the second video at minute 1:47).
Members of the Douala royal family, the Douala Manga Bell, were sent to study in Germany when Cameroon was still Kamerun—its German spelling. One of the princes, Alexandre, left for Germany when he was two in 1902 and only returned to Cameroon 17 years later.
In 2021, Germany had 27,545 Cameroonians, of whom 8,000 were students. Thus, Cameroonian students are the largest African diaspora in German universities.
Though it is undeniable that racism reached its peak during the Third Reich, there is a narrative around race and racism in Germany, and Europe, that wants us to believe that racist laws were a pure product of the Nazi regime when Germany’s endeavour in the Scramble for Africa started way before 1933 and therefore laid the ground for the Nuremberg Laws.
The legal and political manifestation of the rampant racism that was already present before the Nuremberg Laws's enactment first applied to Jewish people. They were extended to Romani, Black people and Afro-Germans in November 1935. The Nuremberg laws prohibited Jewish people, Romani people, Black people and Afro-Germans from having relationships with Germans and were discriminated against for housing, healthcare, welfare and employment. But above all, the Nuremberg laws turned all these people into stateless citizens.
In the many Afrodeutsch stories I read, there was a pattern of being orphaned or raised by a white parent in a Germany that was still paying the price for WWI. Theodor Wonja Michael was a prime example of this. But before telling you about his story, let’s talk about Hans Massaquoi, whose story doesn’t exactly fit the mould of that pattern.
Born to a German mother and a Liberian father in 1926 in Hamburg, Hans Massaquoi was the grandson of Momulu Massaquoi, a monarch of the Vai people of Liberia and Sierra Leone and the consul general of Liberia in Germany from 1922 to 1930. This last piece of information is essential because it shows Germany had established diplomatic relationships with Liberia. Formerly an American colony settlement, Liberia obtained independence in 1847, making it the first independent African nation. Such a status allowed Liberia to stay sovereign during the Scramble for Africa. Therefore, Liberia's diplomatic status and Hans Massaquoi’s grandfather's position allowed him to grow in a privileged environment during the first four years of his life.
In the 2005 two-part German TV movie, Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger!4 ("Negro, Negro, chimney sweep!"), whose German title is directly borrowed from Hans Massaquoi’s autobiography Destined To Witness, first published in the USA; the story opens with a teenage Hans Massaquoi looking at a devastated Hamburg at the end of WWII. His mother, afraid the Gestapo would take him, asked him to be careful and hide himself, to which he answers with a smile, “But mom, the war has ended.” The scene continues with two Black American soldiers in a tank stopping at Hans, first speaking to him in English, wondering why he is there until they realise he is German. Both are so happy to see a Black German boy has made it alive that they gift him sweets. We then travel back to 1926 with a very pregnant Bertha Baetz - Hans’ mother - in a nurse uniform, singing a song with a colleague in a hospital. There, a young Hans narrates his life from his birth to 1930:
The beginning of my life was awesome. My mother was eagerly looking foward to having me. So, I was born on Tuesday 19th January 1926. My grandfather was nobody less than an African king, Momulu Massaquoi, king of the Vai people and first general consul of Liberia in Hamburg. My mother had known his son Al-Haj during a visit in the hospital and she had fallen for him immediately. A great romance started between them and I was the result of it. Since my father was studying in Dublin, he couldn’t welcome me personally.
My grandfather wanted my mother and I to live with him until the marriage, and so we moved to the consul mansion in Johanisallee.
My mother had given up her job in the hospital. She dreamt of living in Africa with me and my father.
I grew up with the belief that dark skin and curly hair was a symbol of superiority. White people were our servants, white people admired me. I was so sure to be the centre of the universe and something really special.
That little Hans would think of himself as the centre of the world and superior to white people made me giggle, but above all, it revealed he lived in a microcosm free of discrimination and racism. Outside the Johannisallee mansion, Germans were still bearing the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919 and ratified in January 1920. This treaty, called Diktat by Germans to highlight its unilateral and unfair conditions, stipulated in particular that Germany had to lose its colonies and, above all, pay reparations of 132 billion marks gold, which, as of 2024, amounts to 12,370 billion dollars5.
Such a colossal debt meant the average German lived humbly, and that’s how Bertha Baetz and her son had to live when Momulu Massaquoi returned to Liberia in 1930. Hans Massaquoi’s grandfather invited Bertha to follow him in Liberia, but she refused. She did the same when he offered to support her financially. By then, Bertha’s hope to marry Al-Haj had fallen apart.
So, from the gigantic mansion in Johannisallee, she moved to a modest flat in the working-class neighbourhood of Barmbek. The steep social class change is illustrated in the movie not only by the new place they go to live but also by the fact that Bertha goes from being a stay-at-home mother in a wealthy family to a single working mother in need of a nanny to look after her son. Another detail in the movie signalling their social class change is when Hans sees his sailor suit in a window shop - the outfit symbol of his high status at the beginning of the movie.
As the first part of the film progresses, we follow Hans and Bertha’s lives and discover how racism starts infiltrating the little boy’s life as Germany embraces more and more Nazism. Three scenes illustrate it:
Hans goes to the zoo with his mother, his mother’s friend, and his nanny. They went because he wanted to see “Indians”, but there was none. Instead, one of the employees tells them there are “real Africans, just like the young boy [pointing at Hans] in the genuine negro village of Chaka-Chaka.” The little shock Bertha had once she heard this quickly turns to outrage when, in front of the “real Africans”, her friends comment about them and compare them with Hans’paternal family. Then, the final blow hits when the crowd around them associates her son with the “real Africans”. Bertha and Hans leave with the child, repeatedly saying, “I am not like them; I live in Stückenstrasse.” An episode of racism that recalls that Germany and other European countries created human zoos that supposedly recreated what an African village was and how its people were. In the case of Germany, these human zoos “employed” Black actors to play the part of the uncivilised Africans.
Hans goes on an errand in a pub to buy beer for his mother and her friends and finds himself in a middle of a Nazi rally. As the boy is going back home, a man grabs him by the collar and yells to his singing companions, “Here, look! This is the racial shame! A German woman with a negro! He comes from the seed of a negro!” The scene is even more heart-wrenching as Frantz, Bertha’s boyfriend, who is a supporter of Hitler, is in the room and sees Hans calling him for help but prefers running away instead of helping the boy. And it is Bertha who takes her son away. The saddest thing is Hans has embroidered the Swastika on his sweater - something he asked his nanny to do as he wanted to belong, to be part of the Hitler Youth.
At the end of the first part of the movie, Hans is delighted to be ten because it means he can finally be part of the Hitler Youth. So, he and two friends go to their school headmaster’s office (spoiler: the headmaster is a blond version of Hitler) to ask if he can enter the Hitler Youth. This will result in a traumatic experience that will push Hans to visit the hospital where his mother is working and ask her, “Mom, I am a German boy, right? I want to join the Hitler Youth.” Both then go to the headquarters of the Hitler Youth, only for Hans to hear even harsher words from a teenage boy acting as the chief of the Hamburg branch and who used to protect him from bullies at school.
Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger! really is a great watch not only to witness what the life of a Black mixed-race boy was with the advent of Nazism but also to understand how average German citizens became Nazis. The movie also alludes to how some Germans didn’t share Nazi values. Of course, Bertha Baetz embodies such people, but Hans' teacher, too. The fact that someone in the education system - whose role looks minor in the movie - didn’t discriminate but saw Hans' intelligence, nurtured it and contributed to offering the boy a safe space to study and be shouldn’t go unnoticed in such an environment and era. Hans’teacher is the one who goes to her student’s house and tells his mother about the changes happening at school and how she was fired from her job because she didn’t embrace nazism and advised them to be careful.
Hans Massaquoi’s autobiography Destined To Witness was first published in the USA in 1999, then translated into German and turned into a two-part movie in 2006 for German television. The book was surprisingly well-received in Germany: it stayed for months as a top bestseller of the weekly newspaper Der Spiegel. It is even more surprising such a story entered German households through television as Theodor Wonja Michael explained that his book, Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century, published in 2013, didn’t receive as nearly a warm welcome. Theodor Wonja Michael said in many interviews that German people felt ashamed when they read his story. It made them uncomfortable because it was a past they wanted to stay buried.
No comparison should be made between the hardships Hans Massaquoi and Theodor Wonja Michael encountered, but it is fascinating to see how the culture of remembrance works. People embraced Hans Massaquoi’s story because, though it was horrible, what a white audience reads about/sees is the story of a Black mixed-race child with an illustrious African lineage raised by a white mother. Whiteness in such stories always softens the blow, making the narrative more bearable to accept. A German white audience won't feel as guilty watching or reading about Hans Massaquoi’s life. Instead, Theodor Wonja Michael’s story shows the ugliest side of Germany’s systemic and institutional racism because he was born into poverty and had to fend for himself as early as eight years old. This is where social class and proximity to whiteness make the difference, but this is also where Errinerungskultur shows its limits when the people who decide what should be remembered haven’t yet dealt with their past.
This is all for you, dear free subscribers! If you enjoy the story and want to know more about Theodor Wonja Michael, Hans Massaquoi, and access my footnotes, upgrade your subscription.
By the way, Le Journal Curioso monthly and yearly subscriptions are 60% off until January 31st, so don’t miss out on this opportunity!