In the mid 1980s, several German women collaborated on a writing project evolving from their commitment to discover and embrace their full identities as Germans, Blacks, and females living in a society that is often racist and sexist.  The completed project was developed into a monograph entitled Farbe Bekennen (“Showing Our Colors”) and published in Berlin in 1986.  Well received, Farbe Bekennen was influential in promoting a metamorphosis of identity consciousness among black people living in Germany; it thereby helped to revolutionize the nascent Black German Movement two to three years before  German reunification took place in 1990.  One of the authors of Farbe Bekennen, Katharina Oguntoye, described that work as the medium through which she and her fellow authors were able to “emerge from the isolation in which we were living and name ourselves Afro-Germans or Black Germans . . . and we Black Germans began the search for our identity.”

A graduate student of history, Oguntoye recognized the need to address this problem and, in her own words, “accepted the challenge to discover and develop sources for researching the history of Africans and Afro-Germans in Germany.”  She wrote an intriguing, powerful and innovative master’s thesis entitled Eine Afro-Deutsche Geschichte: Zur Lebenssituationen von Afrikanern und Afro-Deutschen in Deutschland von 1884 bis 1950 (An Afro-German History: Circumstances of the Lives of Africans and Afro Germans in Germany from 1884-1950). 

Vernessa White-Jackson was born and reared in Washington, DC, where she matriculated at Howard University, and earned a bachelor’s degree in German. At the State University of New York (Binghamton), she earned the master’s and doctoral degrees in Comparative Literature and Translation. After working two years at the Library of Congress (1976-1978), she joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught various courses in German Studies, Humanities and Women’s Studies, until retiring in 2018. Among her research interests are Black German and Black European Studies, the novellas of Arthur Schnitzler, and, of course, translation. Completing the first English translation of Eine Afro-Deutsche Geschichte is the fulfillment of one of many of her ‘retirement goals.’

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History/AFRICA