Last August – after a long, long campaign – Petersallee In Berlin’s “African Quarter” was renamed to disassociate it from Carl Peters, the first imperial commissioner for German East Africa and driving force behind the establishment of the colony. Peters was a murderous racist, a hero for the Nazis. The campaign to rename Petersallee started in 1984. It took that long.
Mnyaka Sururu Mboro was among those pushing to have the name changed. He had heard stories about Peters from his grandmother in Tanzania.
“’Carl Peters was a governor here in Kilimanjaro. And he liked to hang people, just only, most of the time, for his joy. Seeing, looking at them hanging there and he’s sipping his beer and smoking his pipe,’” Mboro recalled his grandmother saying.
Mboro moved to Germany in 1978. His grandmother made him promise her that he’d recover the head of Mangi Meli, a local chieftain hanged by the Germans in 1900, and bring it back to Tanzania for a proper burial.
“Up to today, still, I am searching for it,” the now 73-year-old Mboro said.
We also interviewed Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin’s museums, colonial loot like the Benin Bronzes, and a vast collection of human remains.
I did a tour with Decolonial Tours (highly recommended!) and we interviewed their founder, Justice Mvemba, who’s an absolute star.
“If I want to understand racism in the whole, the scope of racism, how it affects a racialized person, then we have to talk about history,” she said.
You can read the story at the link in my bio. Please do. It’s important. Colonialism is not just something that happened in the past – we live with it every day.
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