OT: German identification with/appropriation of civil rights movement/Black power movement

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/27/2012 10:30 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>On Apr 27, 2012, at 9:53 AM, Amy West wrote:
>
> > On 4/27/12 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> >> Date:    Thu, 26 Apr 2012 21:21:26 -0400
> >> From:    Wilson Gray<hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> >> Subject: Re: antedating banjo (UNCLASSIFIED)
> >>
> >> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 4:38 PM, Cohen, Gerald
> Leonard<gcohen at mst.edu>  wrote:
> >>> >  Lumumba, Mobutu, and Kasavubu
> >> Used by Germans as terms of opprobrium for black GI's, back in the
> >> day. This kind of demonstration of antipathy was rare, though. The
> >> typical reaction of the German_strasse_  to black people was one of
> >> "really intense curiosity*, as though we were some kind of life-form
> >> so totally alien that they couldn't quite wrap their minds around what
> >> they were seeing. And I'm talking about the streets of Frankfurt,
> >> Stuttgart, Koeln, and Berlin and not those of some tiny, Black Forest
> >> village.
> >>
> >> It was this kind of reaction that caused the former expatriate black
> >> author, James Baldwin, to return to The World and to comment that he
> >> had more in common with the most ignorant, racist "Mississippi
> >> wool-hat" than he had with any European. Of course, Baldwin, like
> >> Steve Buscemi, was "kinda funny-lookin'." But, still...
> > Wilson, in the fall I heard an *excellent* presentation by a German
> > prof. from Uni Hamburg about Germans, and esp. German youth, in the '70s
> > identifying with the US civil rights and Black Power movement: holding
> > protests, wearing afros, reading and identifying with activists like MLK
> > and Audre Lourde. It explained to me why I came across an MLK Strasse in
> > Kassel when I was there in 1989. A lot of it was admiration for the
> > resistance and also an air of superiority -- "we're not that rotten" --
> > according to the presenter. She also went on to argue that Germans have
> > this amnesia about their own colonial and African slavery history
> > (quick: who remembers which African nation is a former German colony?)
>
>I do! I do!  Tanganyika!  (Now folded into Tanzania, and later
>wrested from Germany by the British, maybe as a result of WWI.  And
>no, I don't remember about this from my childhood, but from my years
>studying Swahili at UCLA.)
>
>LH

I did too, probably from my childhood -- but I forgot its name.  The
colony in which Rosie's brother was an Anglican missionary, until the
Germans destroyed the native village and killed him, and skipper
Allnutt returned on the African Queen.

But I now learn that German East Africa comprised three present-day
countries, Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania.  And there was German South
West Africa, now Namibia.  And in West Africa, a colony that that I'm
incapable of identifying with present-day countries without
overlaying two maps.  [Wikipedia: German colonial empire.]

Joel

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