Update from the African Quarter in Berlin during the Ukraine Crisis
I live on Togo Street in the African quarter of Berlin. The tiny country of Togo on the western coast of Africa — near the curve or armpit…
I live on Togo Street in the African quarter of Berlin. The tiny country of Togo on the western coast of Africa — near the curve or armpit of the continent — was once a colony of Germany, later of England and France. The other streets around me have names like Transvaal, Africa, Zanzibar, Cameroon, Congo, and Lüderitz. The last two names were covered in red spray paint during the summer of 2020 when the Black Lives Matter protests swept across the world.
Adolf Lüderitz (1834–1886) was a former bigwig merchant who tried to colonialize/commercialize what is now Namibia. His biography reads like a classic guide for “How to be a Douche” and features him failing at most business endeavors and tricking a tribal king who didn’t know what a land mile was into signing over all his territory in Namibia. The Congo, though more popularly connected to Belgium and its bloody colonization, was under the control of Imperial Germany too at one point. The signs on my way…
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