Berlin's African Quarter

Over ten years ago, a dispute started over Berlin's African Quarter, rather, its street names. Recently the city decided to change the names and stop honouring people who were responsible for genocides (Die Zeit).

Afrikanisches Viertel, or “African quarter”—refers not to its sizable population with African heritage, but to its street names, all of which in some way reflect on Germany’s little-discussed but especially brutal colonial involvement in Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For years, activists have been trying to get these names changed.

Prior to the First World War, the area abutted the site of a zoo planned by animal importer Carl Hagenbeck, who traded animals to P. T. Barnum’s circus and planned to set up the zoo as a showcase for animals from Germany’s African possessions. Following the template of Hagenbeck’s existing park in Hamburg, the site would likely have also featured a human zoo in which non-European peoples were exhibited as if they were a form of wildlife. That zoo never opened, but its planing was reflected in the names of nearby streets. Still today, you can find yourself walking down Togostrasse, crossing Kamerunerstrasse (Cameroon Street) and hitting the little park on Kongostrasse.

Under German rule in what is now Namibia, for example, the country’s forces pursued a campaign of wholesale land grabs, enslavement, forced labor, and rape. Facing organized resistance from indigenous people, the Germans quashed opposition by pursuing genocide against the region’s Herero and Namaqua people.

Many thousands more died of disease, starvation, and violence in concentration camps, where mortality rates reached as high as 74 percent. This created an overall death toll of between 34,000 and 110,000 deaths, and a system of murder that—with its concentration camps and medical experiments on prisoners—clearly foreshadowed the Holocaust.

Three people involved in this process are still commemorated in Berlin’s African Quarter. Adolf Lüderitz and Gustav Nachtigal, who first acquired the land for Germany’s southwest African colony on a fraudulent contract, still have a street and a square apiece. Around the corner is an avenue commemorating Carl Peters, a notoriously brutal colonist in East Africa who committed psychopathic acts of violence and was known by locals as “Mkono Wa Damu”—bloody hands.

(excerpts via/for whole article see CityLab)

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photograph via Tagesspiegel