photos: Jens Ziehe & Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, 2022
multi media installation: colour posters, videos, 3x channel soundwork, printed book, objects, glass, wood, postcards, digital soundwalk tour
multi media installation: colour posters, videos, 3x channel soundwork, printed book, objects, glass, wood, postcards, digital soundwalk tour
Congotay! Congotay! Sonnenaufgang im Morgenland
The Understories on Agropoetics, Technological Fugivity and Revolt in Black Feminism
Voices: Savanna Morgan, Karina Griffith, Melody Howse, Jennifer Kamau, Memory Biwa, Matilda TheGreat, Céline Rodriguez, Edna Bohnomme, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Renee A. Mboya, Ndidi Ndike, Donna Kukama, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro
Congotay! Congotay! is an artistic research project by Anguezomo Mba Bikoro looking back on colonial continuities and entanglements in Feminist Black radical experiences. The audio rituals explore sites in Berlin of unacknowledged loss, working with and against archives, and the erasure of Black life. The audio rituals are labors in accountability and mourning towards invocations of self-repair.
1_ Marienhohe Park
The wife of Muhammed Buyame Hussein remembers the massacre of Black soldiers on the movie set of Carl Peters 1942.
My name is Ingrid Buyame. I used to be the wife of actor Muhammed Buyame Hussein but he divorced me in 1934. They threw away my papers of the court case as if I never existed. Muhammed loved me as if I never existed. I had a job working as a prop maker at the UFA studios and worked on editing movie scripts and images with Unica Zurn. Her father was General Ralph Zurn, who used to be stationed in Namibia. He would send her skulls and jewels from chief family cemeteries as token of his love to his daughter. It is know that he murdered a Nama princess before digging her bones out of her own grave. Unica was haunted in her spirit and she had a fetish for violence and sex. She knew many Black soldiers that would be temporary stationed in tents in Tempelhof from Halfmoon camp in Sössen, hired as background actors in film productions. She loved them. She also hated them. She was responsible for writing the script of the death of the soldiers in Victory In The West, stating how many bullets and how many men should fall into the pit. On the production of Carl Peters in 1942, she co-hoerced with the producer General the murder of Black soldiers on screen. 179 men whose screams fell to silence and shame. This particular shooting was done in Marienhohe park. There you may find the ascending of the Kilimanjaro. They were not buried, they were hidden. The grass and trees remain.
2_ Sarotti Factory
Heidi remembers the advertisement recording in the studio (book French soldier)
My name is Heidi, my father Amadou Diallo was a militant from Martinique and my mother a German refugee in the independent Republic Free State of Goulot, a border region that was falsely divided by the British, French, Americans and Belgians states when dividing zones of occupation between 1919 to 1923. Its capital city Lorch managed its own laws, its own banks and currency and its own passports. When I was 17 years old, I was the lover of Wilhelm Panzer and I worked in the film studios of Babelsberg in prop-making, catering for African actors and working as a weekly actress. On Tuesdays I get on the elephant Milli that lives in Hagenbeck zoo and we make film advertisement for Sarotti chocolate products. On Wednesdays the producers insist on throwing me on ropes dangling over the studio floors in a Tarzan costume for selling white soaps on television. Mind you all this rope throwing taught me some skills that would later take me to Dresden’s Knie Circus in summer shows. Juliana Michael, from America, taught me how to tame tigers. I was pregnant at 23 years old with Wilhelm’s baby, Ulrich, but he was taken from me in hospital and the nurse told me he didn’t make it. He was my secret baby and Wilhelm never acknowledged that it was him. In the longer winter months I was working next the UFA film studios Babelsberg in Sarotti chocolate factory. I was working very long hours for little pay. Me, Anne Chow, Rosaline Diaw, Winnie Che went together to open a complaint to the courts about how the company cheated on our payments and the conditions of work was affecting our health, allergies, skin rashes, fevers, continuous coughing and pains in our bodies. Many of the women workers worked from 5am until midnight daily. The courts dismissed our complaints. In that time because of the heavy fumes in working with the machinery, I lost my voice and could no longer sing or talk in good pitch for the recordings in the studio. And all my parts were over-written, over-taken, edited and erased. Even Milli the elephant would find a place in peoples’ memories decades after me. Sarotti factory was taken over by Nestlé, but you will find me in the air of the factory on the 4th floor, you will see still the toxic fumes bleeding from the walls in green, purple, yellow and magenta.
3_ Halfmoon camp - Mosheestrasse
The waters remember the 9000 Black colonial soldiers emprisoned in the colonial camp I am a mermaid. I used to be a soldier, now I am echoe. I live in water and my mouth looks like ripples over the water top. My name is Martha Mbembe and I was a war prisoner in Halfmoon prisoners’ camp on Mosheestrasse in Sössen. I was a soldier with my husband. He died in the fields and I took on his uniform at the age of 19 years old. I lived as a soldier at the front lines moving from one camp to another where we would be separated until we could no longer speak each other’s language and we could no longer understand each other. I fight with other women soldiers, enrolled by the French and British armies, from Somalia, South Africa, Congo, Senegal and Cameroon. They were my girlfriends and they were my lovers too. It was forbidden in Germany to be a woman soldier and it was forbidden to be Black. They stripped us off our uniforms, with some of them shot dead in mass graves with no names and no stones to remember their names. Some of them were sent to sex work. Some of them were sent to Hagenbeck zoo. I like many other soldiers, were used as props, they recorded us on phonograph devices curated by Wilhelm Doegen and paid for by Deutsche Bank for the ethologicker museum, they measured our heads and used us in the backgrounds of cinema. I was shot dead in a pit with the decor of the Kilimanjaro on a test shoot for “Victory In The West”. Me and 300 soldiers were shot in the back in the middle of a scene under the approval and order of General Friedrich. They shot my brothers and sisters with real bullets and they said we deserved it. So now I live as water, the water that saw us running into it, the pit they dung for us was taken over by the lake in its swelling months and the tides never receded. Here you can find our diaries, our hats, our shoes, our hopes, our dreams, our loves. Even living in water I carry the weight of all the war fighters who ran and fell in with me as if I must carry them to paradise. Yet we have been screaming for such a long time and been growing mangroves in the lake for over a century yet there is no echo in our shout.
4_ Rudersdorf
Verikatamma remembers the filming of Die Indische Grabmal
My name is Verikatamma. I was trafficked here from Kerala with my husbands, who were actually my cousin and uncle. I was expected to work in the textiles industry earning wages to empower my own family lineage. On arrival I was given a number and transferred in a place called Hagenbeck in Berlin. I was not treated well neither by Germans, neither by my own kin. They gave me a paper that writes of my occupation as a singer and dancer. I was taught with the whip what this would mean. In Kerala, nobody paid mind, but in Berlin they eyes brined like whips and bullets and yet they could not see me. I use to drink a lot of alcohol with the men. I had 2 children but they have grown out of hands and out of my sight. They made me sing German songs and dance like white people until I would throw up. Dr. Wilhelm Doegen recorded me many times on his devices and I would think how ridiculous all this was. Was it really a life for me?In 1937, I was hired as one of the background actresses in the movie Die Indisches Grabmal. They took us into wagons to a place called Rüdersdorf where they built Indian Palaces in white stones and elephants from the zoo of Hagenbeck stayed. We stayed in white tents inside closed camps with barbed wire.
5_ Tempelhofer Feld
My name is Mariam Anderson, I am an American and work as an opera singer and sing German songs. I stood in this field in Tempelhof to take my first solo flying lesson of driving a plane. Little did anyone know, I crashed my own airplane in the fields and spent a few weeks in hospital from several injuries I could by the grace of God recover swiftly from. I remember my friends Paul and Eslanda Robeson who donated money towards my recovery. Both Black Radicals leading the low-class Red Wedding revolts in Berlin, they would come to every concert I gave and we shared train journeys to the north and south of the country. I was taught by German musicians in the states and in Europe and was accompanied to concert halls across the continent.
6_ Leopoldplatz
Rasha remembers Onkel Pelle circus
“Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove"
Schad paced the length of his studio and stopped at the wall, staring at a blank space. Behind him the clang and hum of Hardenbergstrasse, its automobiles and organ grinders. Quarter to five. His eyes traveled to the plaster scrollwork on the ceiling. Did that hold back heaven? He could not leave his skin — once he’d painted himself in a new one, silk green, worn like a shirt. He thought of Rasha, so far from Madagascar, turning slowly in place as the boa constrictor coiled counterwise its heavy love. How the spectators gawked, exhaling beer and sour herring sighs. When the tent lights dimmed. Rasha went back to her trailer and plucked a chicken for dinner. The canvas not his eye, was merciless. He remembered Katja the Russian aristocrat, late for every sitting, still fleeing the October Revolution — how she clutched her sides and said not one word. Whereas Agosta was always on time, lip curled as he spoke in wonder of women trailing backstage to offer him the consummate bloom of their lust. Schad would place him on a throne, a white sheet tucked over his loins, the black suit jacket thrown off like a cloak. Agosta had told him of the medical students at the Charité, that chill arena where he perched on a cot, his torso exposed, its crests and fins a colony of birds, trying to get out… and the students lumps caught in their throats, taking notes. Ah, Rasha’s foot on the stair. She moved slowly, as if she carried the snake around her body always. Once she brought fresh eggs into the studio, flecked and warm as breath. Agosta in classical drapery, then, and Rasha at his feet. Without passion. Not the canvas but their gaze, so calm, was merciless.
My name is Rita Dove. I am a poet. I have been in search of Rasha all my life. Her sound echo on my skin, grab and pulled me for so many years. You see the pearls on her neck? These were given to her by Christina Schad, an artist of the Brücke movement who was later kicked out by his comrades. He painted a portrait of Rasha with Agosta in 1929. Agosta had a physical deformity and looked like he had wings. She was nicknamed the Black Dove when she was working in Leopoldplatz in the Onkel Pelle circus as a snake dancer. She was hired by several artists as a sitter. She lived in a small caravan with her snake, her husband who was a circus entertainer and their son Toussaint. There are only remnants of her by 3 standing cotton trees at the place she used to live, very much like those that swing in Billie Holiday’s song Strange Fruit. Rasha moved to Germany from Madagascar. My memory remembers very little of why this happened or where she ended her life. But her son surviving two wars in Europe had a family of his own with grandchildren who live now on Krefelderstrasse.
7_ Sandune Wedding
My name is Emine Zehra Zinser. I was an actress and a bad translator of tongues. I used to be the little Magician of Sarotti when I was young but when I grew older, somehow I wasn’t paid anymore. I was a leading actress in The Riders of East Africa directed by Herbert Selpin. Herbert provided me many roles also in Kautschuk, Kongo-Express. The same props were used and the same actors also. I worked as a spy during the war after I met with Josephine Baker on tour in Berlin. She had many animals as alibis for her work as well as her companions and created a dog orphanage in Brandenburg. I remember my friend, Daisy Johnson, she was an African-American who spent many years on the film set of Quax in Africa. She lived in a caravan in Rehberge, not far from the sand dune where all the African deserts and plane crashes were filmed. I remember it was the first place for the home of Hagenbeck zoo and partly a prisoners’ camp for Germans that could not go to the colony, to experiment and research on Black people. Daisy got sick and never returned in German cinemas. I fled Germany but was sent into a German concentration camp in Sweden. There my story disappears.
8_ Treptower Park
Margareth Kamatoto remembers the uprisings against 1986 human zoo
My name is Margarethe Kamatoto. I was bought into this country for the purpose to get a citizenship for work and mobility. I ended up embroiled in a money laundering scheme by the Senate, imprisoned in a zoo in Treptower, with cardboard African villages with names that you don’t find back home. We were forced to become entertainers and we were exhibited to people and our bodies measured for scientific purposes. Many died because we did not receive adequate healthcare and we organised several court complaints for our claims of work payments and the right to return to our homelands. The German courts did not grant to us this right.
9_Hasenheide 13
Nelly Guinn remembers Sonnenaufgang im Morgenland My name is Nelly Guinn.
I was born in the state of Louisiana in the United States of America. I travelled here with my friend Sam. We are artists, musicians, dancers and singers looking for recognition, work and a world that escapes the racial injustice and obscurity we were living in America. Well, it certainly was not better in Germany but the industry of ‘exotic’ exhibitions and the movements of surrealism art gives us an opportunity to work, meet people and travel space without being lynched. We arrived in Hamburg and worked for the Hagenbeck circus. In Dresden we were hired as sitters and part-time dancers. Ludwig Kirchner from the Brücke movement hired us as sitters for his paintings. We lived with him and his wife living a good life I guess, but it became quite exhausting to live life with 2 identities, the one you want to live and the one they want to see. The circles of artists were tiring, elite and poor building a better definition of their identities battling to be pioneers of something new, a re-birth of life after the war. I ranaway a few times, sitting for artists in their studio homes was not as pleasant and easy as I imagined it to be. I met with other women in Berlin, Black women from Dresden, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Cameroon, Congo, Tanzania and America who worked in theatres, cinema and owned their own jazz clubs. I joined an all Black theatre group organised by Louis Brody, a fine man, with sass, political vision and fought against racial injustice in Germany. I did the make-up and costumes from all the skills I had learned from living in artists studios, to co-produce the play Sonnenaufgang in morgenland with Tania, Margaretha, Frieda, Emine, Daisy and Sam. We played it in outdoor beer gardens and the Festspiel Theatre in Hasenheide 13 in 1930. I felt like I was part of something very surrealist in itself, where our team spoke in different languages, enacted the masks of whiteness in Europe both in white and Black communities, class divisions, unemployment, and spoke about the brutality of colonialism. The story was not all so sharp though as it was re-written and edited many times, we kinda lost the thread of it with positive and bad reviews, theatres wanted to re-adapt it with white actors and it was impossible to organise the production with no compensation for all the men and women involved. I remember disputes and things not being coherent nor transparent and the group slowly dismantled to focus on work to get through the long winter.
10_ Siegesaule - Bismarck
Kaera Ida Kahitjene Getzen-Leinhos (or Ada Maria Green) remembers her letters to Bismarck
My name is Kaera Ida Kahitjene Getzen. I am a Nama woman and married General Leinhos. He lived in Tiergarten without a wife and children and knew that as a white man he could entitle himself to as many wives and children he wanted here in my farm Okatjiho near Okahandja. He sexually abused me for many years and the German courts in Windhoek protected him when I made legal claims against him. We had the head of Bismarck in the side gardens of the house. He used to write letters to his leader whilst Maherero and Witbooi would write letters of complaint about the massacres and crimes the Shulztruppe were committing here. Dividing and ruling us, sending us to concentration camps, burning our homes, raping our daughters. One of my daughters was Tatiana Kony. She was born in Cameroon and became my step-daughter. She was taken into an aristocratic family in Druisburg. At the age of 15 years, she was no longer of use for their services and sold her to General Leinhos, loosing the very little fortune he has ever known. That is why he never returned to Germany, with no money, no inheritance, no woman, no home, returning to a country that would no longer recognise him.
1_ Marienhohe Park
The wife of Muhammed Buyame Hussein remembers the massacre of Black soldiers on the movie set of Carl Peters 1942.
My name is Ingrid Buyame. I used to be the wife of actor Muhammed Buyame Hussein but he divorced me in 1934. They threw away my papers of the court case as if I never existed. Muhammed loved me as if I never existed. I had a job working as a prop maker at the UFA studios and worked on editing movie scripts and images with Unica Zurn. Her father was General Ralph Zurn, who used to be stationed in Namibia. He would send her skulls and jewels from chief family cemeteries as token of his love to his daughter. It is know that he murdered a Nama princess before digging her bones out of her own grave. Unica was haunted in her spirit and she had a fetish for violence and sex. She knew many Black soldiers that would be temporary stationed in tents in Tempelhof from Halfmoon camp in Sössen, hired as background actors in film productions. She loved them. She also hated them. She was responsible for writing the script of the death of the soldiers in Victory In The West, stating how many bullets and how many men should fall into the pit. On the production of Carl Peters in 1942, she co-hoerced with the producer General the murder of Black soldiers on screen. 179 men whose screams fell to silence and shame. This particular shooting was done in Marienhohe park. There you may find the ascending of the Kilimanjaro. They were not buried, they were hidden. The grass and trees remain.
2_ Sarotti Factory
Heidi remembers the advertisement recording in the studio (book French soldier)
My name is Heidi, my father Amadou Diallo was a militant from Martinique and my mother a German refugee in the independent Republic Free State of Goulot, a border region that was falsely divided by the British, French, Americans and Belgians states when dividing zones of occupation between 1919 to 1923. Its capital city Lorch managed its own laws, its own banks and currency and its own passports. When I was 17 years old, I was the lover of Wilhelm Panzer and I worked in the film studios of Babelsberg in prop-making, catering for African actors and working as a weekly actress. On Tuesdays I get on the elephant Milli that lives in Hagenbeck zoo and we make film advertisement for Sarotti chocolate products. On Wednesdays the producers insist on throwing me on ropes dangling over the studio floors in a Tarzan costume for selling white soaps on television. Mind you all this rope throwing taught me some skills that would later take me to Dresden’s Knie Circus in summer shows. Juliana Michael, from America, taught me how to tame tigers. I was pregnant at 23 years old with Wilhelm’s baby, Ulrich, but he was taken from me in hospital and the nurse told me he didn’t make it. He was my secret baby and Wilhelm never acknowledged that it was him. In the longer winter months I was working next the UFA film studios Babelsberg in Sarotti chocolate factory. I was working very long hours for little pay. Me, Anne Chow, Rosaline Diaw, Winnie Che went together to open a complaint to the courts about how the company cheated on our payments and the conditions of work was affecting our health, allergies, skin rashes, fevers, continuous coughing and pains in our bodies. Many of the women workers worked from 5am until midnight daily. The courts dismissed our complaints. In that time because of the heavy fumes in working with the machinery, I lost my voice and could no longer sing or talk in good pitch for the recordings in the studio. And all my parts were over-written, over-taken, edited and erased. Even Milli the elephant would find a place in peoples’ memories decades after me. Sarotti factory was taken over by Nestlé, but you will find me in the air of the factory on the 4th floor, you will see still the toxic fumes bleeding from the walls in green, purple, yellow and magenta.
3_ Halfmoon camp - Mosheestrasse
The waters remember the 9000 Black colonial soldiers emprisoned in the colonial camp I am a mermaid. I used to be a soldier, now I am echoe. I live in water and my mouth looks like ripples over the water top. My name is Martha Mbembe and I was a war prisoner in Halfmoon prisoners’ camp on Mosheestrasse in Sössen. I was a soldier with my husband. He died in the fields and I took on his uniform at the age of 19 years old. I lived as a soldier at the front lines moving from one camp to another where we would be separated until we could no longer speak each other’s language and we could no longer understand each other. I fight with other women soldiers, enrolled by the French and British armies, from Somalia, South Africa, Congo, Senegal and Cameroon. They were my girlfriends and they were my lovers too. It was forbidden in Germany to be a woman soldier and it was forbidden to be Black. They stripped us off our uniforms, with some of them shot dead in mass graves with no names and no stones to remember their names. Some of them were sent to sex work. Some of them were sent to Hagenbeck zoo. I like many other soldiers, were used as props, they recorded us on phonograph devices curated by Wilhelm Doegen and paid for by Deutsche Bank for the ethologicker museum, they measured our heads and used us in the backgrounds of cinema. I was shot dead in a pit with the decor of the Kilimanjaro on a test shoot for “Victory In The West”. Me and 300 soldiers were shot in the back in the middle of a scene under the approval and order of General Friedrich. They shot my brothers and sisters with real bullets and they said we deserved it. So now I live as water, the water that saw us running into it, the pit they dung for us was taken over by the lake in its swelling months and the tides never receded. Here you can find our diaries, our hats, our shoes, our hopes, our dreams, our loves. Even living in water I carry the weight of all the war fighters who ran and fell in with me as if I must carry them to paradise. Yet we have been screaming for such a long time and been growing mangroves in the lake for over a century yet there is no echo in our shout.
4_ Rudersdorf
Verikatamma remembers the filming of Die Indische Grabmal
My name is Verikatamma. I was trafficked here from Kerala with my husbands, who were actually my cousin and uncle. I was expected to work in the textiles industry earning wages to empower my own family lineage. On arrival I was given a number and transferred in a place called Hagenbeck in Berlin. I was not treated well neither by Germans, neither by my own kin. They gave me a paper that writes of my occupation as a singer and dancer. I was taught with the whip what this would mean. In Kerala, nobody paid mind, but in Berlin they eyes brined like whips and bullets and yet they could not see me. I use to drink a lot of alcohol with the men. I had 2 children but they have grown out of hands and out of my sight. They made me sing German songs and dance like white people until I would throw up. Dr. Wilhelm Doegen recorded me many times on his devices and I would think how ridiculous all this was. Was it really a life for me?In 1937, I was hired as one of the background actresses in the movie Die Indisches Grabmal. They took us into wagons to a place called Rüdersdorf where they built Indian Palaces in white stones and elephants from the zoo of Hagenbeck stayed. We stayed in white tents inside closed camps with barbed wire.
5_ Tempelhofer Feld
My name is Mariam Anderson, I am an American and work as an opera singer and sing German songs. I stood in this field in Tempelhof to take my first solo flying lesson of driving a plane. Little did anyone know, I crashed my own airplane in the fields and spent a few weeks in hospital from several injuries I could by the grace of God recover swiftly from. I remember my friends Paul and Eslanda Robeson who donated money towards my recovery. Both Black Radicals leading the low-class Red Wedding revolts in Berlin, they would come to every concert I gave and we shared train journeys to the north and south of the country. I was taught by German musicians in the states and in Europe and was accompanied to concert halls across the continent.
6_ Leopoldplatz
Rasha remembers Onkel Pelle circus
“Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove"
Schad paced the length of his studio and stopped at the wall, staring at a blank space. Behind him the clang and hum of Hardenbergstrasse, its automobiles and organ grinders. Quarter to five. His eyes traveled to the plaster scrollwork on the ceiling. Did that hold back heaven? He could not leave his skin — once he’d painted himself in a new one, silk green, worn like a shirt. He thought of Rasha, so far from Madagascar, turning slowly in place as the boa constrictor coiled counterwise its heavy love. How the spectators gawked, exhaling beer and sour herring sighs. When the tent lights dimmed. Rasha went back to her trailer and plucked a chicken for dinner. The canvas not his eye, was merciless. He remembered Katja the Russian aristocrat, late for every sitting, still fleeing the October Revolution — how she clutched her sides and said not one word. Whereas Agosta was always on time, lip curled as he spoke in wonder of women trailing backstage to offer him the consummate bloom of their lust. Schad would place him on a throne, a white sheet tucked over his loins, the black suit jacket thrown off like a cloak. Agosta had told him of the medical students at the Charité, that chill arena where he perched on a cot, his torso exposed, its crests and fins a colony of birds, trying to get out… and the students lumps caught in their throats, taking notes. Ah, Rasha’s foot on the stair. She moved slowly, as if she carried the snake around her body always. Once she brought fresh eggs into the studio, flecked and warm as breath. Agosta in classical drapery, then, and Rasha at his feet. Without passion. Not the canvas but their gaze, so calm, was merciless.
My name is Rita Dove. I am a poet. I have been in search of Rasha all my life. Her sound echo on my skin, grab and pulled me for so many years. You see the pearls on her neck? These were given to her by Christina Schad, an artist of the Brücke movement who was later kicked out by his comrades. He painted a portrait of Rasha with Agosta in 1929. Agosta had a physical deformity and looked like he had wings. She was nicknamed the Black Dove when she was working in Leopoldplatz in the Onkel Pelle circus as a snake dancer. She was hired by several artists as a sitter. She lived in a small caravan with her snake, her husband who was a circus entertainer and their son Toussaint. There are only remnants of her by 3 standing cotton trees at the place she used to live, very much like those that swing in Billie Holiday’s song Strange Fruit. Rasha moved to Germany from Madagascar. My memory remembers very little of why this happened or where she ended her life. But her son surviving two wars in Europe had a family of his own with grandchildren who live now on Krefelderstrasse.
7_ Sandune Wedding
My name is Emine Zehra Zinser. I was an actress and a bad translator of tongues. I used to be the little Magician of Sarotti when I was young but when I grew older, somehow I wasn’t paid anymore. I was a leading actress in The Riders of East Africa directed by Herbert Selpin. Herbert provided me many roles also in Kautschuk, Kongo-Express. The same props were used and the same actors also. I worked as a spy during the war after I met with Josephine Baker on tour in Berlin. She had many animals as alibis for her work as well as her companions and created a dog orphanage in Brandenburg. I remember my friend, Daisy Johnson, she was an African-American who spent many years on the film set of Quax in Africa. She lived in a caravan in Rehberge, not far from the sand dune where all the African deserts and plane crashes were filmed. I remember it was the first place for the home of Hagenbeck zoo and partly a prisoners’ camp for Germans that could not go to the colony, to experiment and research on Black people. Daisy got sick and never returned in German cinemas. I fled Germany but was sent into a German concentration camp in Sweden. There my story disappears.
8_ Treptower Park
Margareth Kamatoto remembers the uprisings against 1986 human zoo
My name is Margarethe Kamatoto. I was bought into this country for the purpose to get a citizenship for work and mobility. I ended up embroiled in a money laundering scheme by the Senate, imprisoned in a zoo in Treptower, with cardboard African villages with names that you don’t find back home. We were forced to become entertainers and we were exhibited to people and our bodies measured for scientific purposes. Many died because we did not receive adequate healthcare and we organised several court complaints for our claims of work payments and the right to return to our homelands. The German courts did not grant to us this right.
9_Hasenheide 13
Nelly Guinn remembers Sonnenaufgang im Morgenland My name is Nelly Guinn.
I was born in the state of Louisiana in the United States of America. I travelled here with my friend Sam. We are artists, musicians, dancers and singers looking for recognition, work and a world that escapes the racial injustice and obscurity we were living in America. Well, it certainly was not better in Germany but the industry of ‘exotic’ exhibitions and the movements of surrealism art gives us an opportunity to work, meet people and travel space without being lynched. We arrived in Hamburg and worked for the Hagenbeck circus. In Dresden we were hired as sitters and part-time dancers. Ludwig Kirchner from the Brücke movement hired us as sitters for his paintings. We lived with him and his wife living a good life I guess, but it became quite exhausting to live life with 2 identities, the one you want to live and the one they want to see. The circles of artists were tiring, elite and poor building a better definition of their identities battling to be pioneers of something new, a re-birth of life after the war. I ranaway a few times, sitting for artists in their studio homes was not as pleasant and easy as I imagined it to be. I met with other women in Berlin, Black women from Dresden, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Cameroon, Congo, Tanzania and America who worked in theatres, cinema and owned their own jazz clubs. I joined an all Black theatre group organised by Louis Brody, a fine man, with sass, political vision and fought against racial injustice in Germany. I did the make-up and costumes from all the skills I had learned from living in artists studios, to co-produce the play Sonnenaufgang in morgenland with Tania, Margaretha, Frieda, Emine, Daisy and Sam. We played it in outdoor beer gardens and the Festspiel Theatre in Hasenheide 13 in 1930. I felt like I was part of something very surrealist in itself, where our team spoke in different languages, enacted the masks of whiteness in Europe both in white and Black communities, class divisions, unemployment, and spoke about the brutality of colonialism. The story was not all so sharp though as it was re-written and edited many times, we kinda lost the thread of it with positive and bad reviews, theatres wanted to re-adapt it with white actors and it was impossible to organise the production with no compensation for all the men and women involved. I remember disputes and things not being coherent nor transparent and the group slowly dismantled to focus on work to get through the long winter.
10_ Siegesaule - Bismarck
Kaera Ida Kahitjene Getzen-Leinhos (or Ada Maria Green) remembers her letters to Bismarck
My name is Kaera Ida Kahitjene Getzen. I am a Nama woman and married General Leinhos. He lived in Tiergarten without a wife and children and knew that as a white man he could entitle himself to as many wives and children he wanted here in my farm Okatjiho near Okahandja. He sexually abused me for many years and the German courts in Windhoek protected him when I made legal claims against him. We had the head of Bismarck in the side gardens of the house. He used to write letters to his leader whilst Maherero and Witbooi would write letters of complaint about the massacres and crimes the Shulztruppe were committing here. Dividing and ruling us, sending us to concentration camps, burning our homes, raping our daughters. One of my daughters was Tatiana Kony. She was born in Cameroon and became my step-daughter. She was taken into an aristocratic family in Druisburg. At the age of 15 years, she was no longer of use for their services and sold her to General Leinhos, loosing the very little fortune he has ever known. That is why he never returned to Germany, with no money, no inheritance, no woman, no home, returning to a country that would no longer recognise him.