In Berlin, not many but some places remind us of the imperial regime over the colony “Deutsch-Ostafrika” and more recently also of the victims and opponents of colonial racial injustice. In the garrison cemetery at Columbiadamm, for example, there is an approximately 3-meter-high gravestone that not only commemorates Captain Erich Kling, who fell ill in Togo and was buried here in 1892. The stone also commemorates three colonial officers who died in East Africa. It honours Captain Eugen Krenzler, who in 1885 joined the notorious “Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft” (German East African Society) for a year and in 1889/90, as artillery chief of Reich Commissioner Hermann Wissmann, played a decisive role in suppressing the resistance of the Swahili coastal population. In addition, the memory of Leutnant Hans Joseph Günthers (actually Güntter) is commemorated, who drowned in the Juba River during a colonial political reconnaissance on the coast of Somalia. And finally the stone pays tribute to Lieutenant Freiherr Varnbüler von und zu Hemmingen, who died of fever during a subjugation campaign against resistant East Africans* at the Catholic mission station Tununguo in 1892. “Fearless and faithful”, as the glorifying gravestone and memorial stone reads, “they sacrificed their lives in the service of the empire”.

Victims or opponents* of colonial racism are remembered less often in Berlin, and if they are, it is usually on the initiative of civil society. For example, the grave of Bayume Mohamed Husen (actually Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed Hussein) can be found in the Berlin-Reinickendorf cemetery.

During the First World War Husen served the Germans as a child soldier. To claim his pay he came to Germany at the end of the 1920s, got married and made a living as a waiter, actor and language teacher. Due to a denunciation because of an extramarital relationship with a white German, he was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1941, where he was murdered in November 1944. On the initiative of the Cologne African Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst of the association KopfWelten – gegen Rassismus und Intoleranz, a “stumbling stone” was laid at his last place of residence in Brunnenstraße 193 in 2007, the first for a black victim of National Socialism in Berlin.

Since 2019, the site of the former Reichskolonialamt at Wilhelmstraße 152 (formerly 162) in Berlin has also been home to an information and commemorative plaque of the Senate, initiated by Berlin Postkolonial and the historian Paulette Reed-Anderson. It pays tribute to the 18 signatories from Cameroon and East Africa of the so-called Dibobe Petition, which was presented here in June 1919 by Martin Quane á Dibobe. It can be regarded as the political founding manifesto of the Black Community in Berlin. Among the signatories was Mdachi bin Sharifu, a language teacher from “Deutsch-Ostafrika. In the autumn of 1919, he brought the complaints and demands of the suppressed petition to the public during political lectures of the pacifist federation New Fatherland. Berlin Postkolonial has dedicated the touring exhibition “Breaking the Silence I – The Wrath of Mdachi bin Sharifu” to him.