A Griot of the Black German Experience: A Conversation with Katharina Oguntoye

A Griot of the Black German ExperienceA Conversation with Katharina Oguntoye Karlos K. Hill (bio) Bearing Witness In his ongoing column, Karlos K. Hill highlights the efforts of cultural figures doing works of essential good around issues of social justice. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo of Oguntoye courtesy of Widen the Circle Katharina Oguntoye is a renowned Black German educator, activist, and community leader. A historian, she is best known for authoring the books Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (1987; Engl. 1992) and Eine afro-deutsche Geschichte (1997; Eng. 2024). She was one of the founders of the JOLIBA Intercultural Network, which provides support for children and families focusing on Afro-German and African families in Berlin, and served as its director for more than two decades. Oguntoye spent her early childhood in East Germany, two years in Nigeria, and from the age of nine lived in West Germany. Until the Black German movement, which Oguntoye helped found, there were no positive terms for Black Germans, only negative terms like neger, mischling, and "war babies." In 1984 the African American activist and author Audre Lorde became Oguntoye's mentor and helped inspire the founding of the Afro-German movement and the use of such terms as "Afro-German" or "Black German" for the first time. Since that time, Oguntoye has worked to promote greater recognition and respect for Black Germans within German society. In January 2024 Oguntoye was awarded a prestigious Obermayer Award in Berlin for her lifelong commitment to fighting against racism and hate and advocating for intercultural dialogue and reconciliation. Prior to the ceremony, I [End Page 13] was able to interview her about her life and about why winning an Obermayer Award is so meaningful to her and to Black German people. Katharina Oguntoye's story is an inspirational one that deserves to be known more widely. Karlos Hill: Can you tell me about your childhood and what it was like for you to grow up in Germany? Katharina Oguntoye: I was born in Zwickau, but from the ages of one to seven, I lived with my family in Leipzig, which is a big town, an old town, in East Germany. We then moved to Nigeria for two years, where we lived in Ife and Ibadan. And then we came back to Germany, but this time to West Germany, to the old town of Heidelberg. It was very nice there; a million tourists visit Heidelberg every year. Before the Wall fell, most people in West Germany had no understanding of how the East worked. Even as a child, I felt very strongly that the atmosphere was different there. The language was the same, but people thought differently and there were different connotations of what people were really about. My experience of being raised partly in the East and partly in the West led me to call myself doppelt Deutsch (double German). I saw things from both sides. Hill: What was it like to be a young Black woman of Nigerian heritage growing up in Heidelberg? Was there an experience that was defining for you? Oguntoye: I liked the people around me, and they were nice to me in return. I had a pleasant personality, so people often referred to me as a "nice girl" or a "good girl" because I was so interested in what the grown-ups were saying that I would sit quietly and listen. I was always acknowledged as a person there. That was my experience, but I know it was not that way for everyone, including my father. He was a foreign student finishing his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg, but he was an African man, and my mother said that when he would go to a restaurant, people would look at him like they were happy to see that he could eat with a fork and a knife. (laughter) So then they could acknowledge him as a civilized being. We were targets of racism, of course, but we were lucky enough to be in a situation where we didn't experience much ostracization. But even though my experience there was good, I did...