Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233 Fatima El-Tayeb, ‘“If You Can’t Pronounce My Name, You Can Just Call Me Pride”: Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop’ Gender & History, Vol.15 No.3 November 2003, pp. 460–486. ‘If You Can’t Pronounce My Name, You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop Fatima El-Tayeb it’s strength and positivity / that keep me alive / growing is never easy / but still – I do try / if you have problems with my name / well for you, I’ll be pride / there are spirits who protect me / so you better worry / I’ll surely stay alive.1 In the mid-1990s, amid a resurgence of racist violence in Germany and elsewhere and the continuous tightening of anti-immigration policies within the European Union, the German public rediscovered a new, exiting phenomenon: black Germans. Contrary to the brief but intense focus on ‘coloured occupation children’ in the 1950s, this time the media interest rested on Afro-Germans who had gained a high-profile status. This handful of black German actresses and actors, TV presenters and athletes, were taken as symbols of the new, ‘colourful’, multicultural Germany. Despite the obvious instrumentalisation, the focus on any German ethnic minority in the context of ‘normality’ and entertainment rather than perceived crisis – for example, the presence of (black) occupation forces in post-War Germany – already marked a turn in media representations of ethnic diversity in the Federal Republic. But although these representations were remarkable because of the new and celebratory image of Afro-Germans they conveyed, in-depth articles and features were still few and far between.2 This changed in 2001, when fourteen well-known male Afro-German rappers united in the Hip-Hop project ‘Brothers Keepers’. The group’s first single ‘Adriano/Letzte Warnung’ (Final Call) received wide media attention and started a downright hype around Afro-Germans and Hip Hop. The connection between blacks and music certainly is far from original, but in this case there are a number of unusual features: The young MCs, © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 461 who were highly sought after for interviews, consistently defined themselves as ‘Afro-Deutsch’ (Afro-German), rejecting the usual terms ascribed to black Germans by the white majority (such as ‘coloured’, ‘half-cast’, ‘African’). Thereby, they placed themselves within the context of a black German movement that had coined the term ‘Afro-Deutsch’ twenty years earlier. ‘Afro-German’ is the term used by the majority of black German activists when describing themselves and their community. It refers to persons of African ancestry identifying as German or having spent a significant part of their life in Germany – which is not necessarily the same as being German citizens. According to the jus sanguinis version of citizenship practised in Germany until 2000, persons of non-German descent were legal ‘foreigners’, even if born and raised in Germany.3 Many, though not all, Afro-Germans have one (white) German parent, therefore possessing citizenship. But not all people thus described are happy with the term ‘Afro-German’. Some prefer ‘black German’, some reject all ethnic categorisations, while many use Afro- and black German interchangeably. There is a significant difference between the terms though, a difference that points to an important divide between the Americas and continental Europe: the latter’s black populations originate not in slavery but in colonialism. In this essay I practise a ‘strategic essentialism,’ using the terms ‘Afro-German’/black German’ for those whose primary socialisation and cultural experience is German, who have no other national identity available to them, and whose social experience is largely shaped by being perceived as ‘African’ by a majority of Germans (who usually equate ‘African’ with ‘black’). By claiming an Afro-German identity, ‘Brothers Keepers’ not only challenged dominant German concepts of ethnicity, but also the widespread notion of Hip Hop culture and ‘black consciousness’ as recent US imports without a meaningful German context. The hit song’s title, ‘Adriano’, refers to Alberto Adriano, a thirty-nine year-old father of three, killed by a gang of white German youths solely because he was black. The song threatened violent retaliation, and with its accompanying video (directed by acclaimed Jewish Swiss filmmaker Dani Levy) addressed German racism in a manner unusual for the type of Hip Hop showcased within the field of vision of typical German teenagers on MTV Germany and Viva.4 The average German feature-writer’s purview was quite similar. Numerous media responses to ‘Brothers Keepers’ made it seem as if they were the first ‘migrant’ voice on the Hip Hop scene, which had been dominated by ‘German’, i.e. white, crews. Moreover, mainstream media responded as though ‘Brothers Keepers’ were the first generation of Afro-Germans ever entering the public sphere.5 After 1945, the Federal Republic attempted to establish itself as a ‘colour blind society’. This might have been an understandable and © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 462 Gender and History well-intentioned reaction to the national socialist past, but such a society cannot be achieved by an act of will or a taboo on all discourses around race and racism. If a vexing aspect of the past is simply declared dead and buried without examination, it will likely rise again in unintended manners, as unfortunately was the case here: underneath the post-war silence around race, pseudo-scientific, biologist theories that originated in late nineteenth century lived on in Germany.6 The nation cut itself off from post-colonial discourses, in which minorities became active agents and race was deconstructed as a ‘natural category’. This refusal to deal with the German investment in racist concepts cemented dogmatic claims that Germany never had any ‘race issues’. (Accordingly, anti-Semitism was completely separated from racism.) This denial of the relevance of race meant that the century-long black presence in Germany never found its way into the public consciousness: neither did the last two decades of Afro-German activism. Nevertheless, there have been testimonials of a black German identity throughout the twentieth century, often in reaction to racist state policies, such as the introduction of ‘Anti-miscegenation-laws’ in the colonial period or the prosecution of blacks under National Socialism. But these were either individual responses or part of a black movement that was initiated and dominated by African migrants/‘colonial subjects’ in Germany, a group that showed a high level of organisation as early as the turn of the last century. It was almost a hundred years later, during the mid-1980s, that a movement emerged which both claimed an identity as black and German (a perfect example of an oxymoron to white Germans of that period) and as part of a larger African Diaspora. The interactive relations between black communities worldwide are reflected in the profound influence that African decolonisation struggles and the US black liberation movement had on the development of an Afro-German sense of identity. Audre Lorde, African-American lesbian feminist activist and poet of Caribbean descent, coined the term ‘AfroGerman’ after meeting black German women when teaching in Berlin in 1984. While this moment was not the birth of a black German consciousness, Lorde’s coinage nevertheless symbolises the central role that US activism had for Afro-Germans. The interest was rather one-sided for a long time: although black Germans who struggled against the racism and isolation that they faced were acutely aware of larger struggles in Africa and even more so those in the United States, black populations elsewhere rarely questioned Germany’s (self)representation as a white nation.7 Lorde’s reaching out to a black community that most African Americans assumed to be non-existent is indicative of the important role of women and feminist issues in the first decade of Afro-German activism. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 463 The nascent Afro-German movement soon gained momentum. The 1980s saw the publication of a book that remains the key-text of black Germany, Farbe bekennen (Showing Our Colours: Afro-German Women Speak Out). This was the first publication to express a collective AfroGerman identity and point out the long history of a black presence within the nation. The decade further witnessed the launching of several magazines and the founding of two national organisations, ‘Initiative Schwarze Deutsche’ (ISD), and a women’s association, ‘Afro-deutsche Frauen’ (ADEFRA), the latter of which pushed the debate on racism within the German feminist movement. The first decade of black German activism was successful in generating a debate among Afro-Germans and creating organisational structures. It was a phase that was necessarily introspective and devoted to discovering and building a community; during this period, activists laid important foundations for later attempts to reach out to African migrant communities in Germany and black communities elsewhere. The movement did not succeed, however, in breaking or even lastingly shaking the German majority’s resistance to admitting that ‘German’ does not equal ‘white’ (and ‘Christian’). Today, ethnic concepts of national identity and the restrictive citizenship law lead to a Catch-22 for German minorities: whoever does not conform to a certain physical image of ‘Germanness’ is considered a ‘foreigner’. ‘Foreigners’, in turn, are not regarded as potential citizens; migrants who were brought to Germany by the millions in the 1960s were officially termed ‘guestworkers’, implying that their stay in Germany would be a temporary one. To fully include temporary guests, so the rationale ends, in the nation’s social, cultural, and political structure is unnecessary – if not impossible.8 There are a number of problems with this line of thinking, mainly the fact that the ‘guest’-status is stretched over generations, creating a disenfranchised ‘foreign’ population actually born in Germany.9 Such an anti-assimilationist ideology, which considers ‘foreignness’ a hereditary trait rather than a temporary state, additionally creates naturalised and racialised definitions of Germanness, which put minorities on the defence whether they possess citizenship or not. Until proven otherwise, they are ‘outsiders’ who are expected to be very literally on their (natural) way out of a nation they cannot belong to. This attitude is strikingly reflected by the almost complete media and scholarly consensus that Germany might have a growing ‘xenophobia problem’, but no racism whatsoever, even though the victims of ‘xenophobic’ attacks are overwhelmingly people of colour (with or without a German passport). This is not due to an unfamiliarity with the meaning of the term; ‘race’ and ‘racism’ are freely used in connection with the UK, the USA or South Africa, but are proclaimed inappropriate for Germany, where all non-whites are also nonGerman. Therefore, German minorities not only need to fight for © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 464 Gender and History political influence but also for recognition as part of German society at all. Building on the momentum of their success, ‘Brothers Keepers’ try to do both. In addition to promoting an ‘Afro-German’ identity, they have initiated a variety of anti-racist project aimed at empowering black youths, supporting refugees (who independently of their ethnic origin live under deplorable conditions in Germany) and exposing police brutality against African migrants, thus explicitly defining Hip Hop as a political force.10 Their ability to use the group’s publicity to create awareness campaigns is a result in good part of twenty years of Afro-German activism and networking. The possession of a historical consciousness (being aware of and paying respect to those who paved the way) is a central concept within Hip Hop culture. Afro-German rappers honour this concept by positioning themselves within the context of an Afro-German community built by those who came before them. Some traditions have been easier to adopt than others, however. In particular, the strong presence of women – articulate, feminist, often lesbian – in the first decades of the AfroGerman struggle has been hard for young male MCs to stomach, given that they generally model themselves after images of black masculinity that are often deeply sexist and homophobic. In this article, I contextualise current Afro-German Hip-Hop activism within the tradition of two decades of a black German political movement, and the ‘pan-ethnic’ community concept of Hip Hip’s old school. I propose that while these dual origins create some yet unresolved tensions, particularly around issues of gender and sexuality, they also place the black German Hip Hop community in a unique position within current German (and European) identity debates. Issues of migration and ethnicity have acquired centre stage in a unifying Europe. Moving between multicultural utopia and ‘clash of civilisations’ scenarios, these issues are often projected onto gendered images of ethnic Others (and this is even more the case when minority youths are the focus of attention). This development is magnified in Germany, where national reunification – achieved more than a decade ago – has not yet resulted in a united nation. Rather, reunification complicated the already-troubled relationship of Germans towards their own national identity. While it is unclear what ‘German’ actually signifies, insecurities about this matter tend to be externalised by definitions of what is absolutely not German.11 This results in exclusionary tendencies towards all those who are visibly different – including AfroGermans, who are persistently identified as ‘Africans’ or ‘Americans’.12 The explicitly political focus of Afro-German Hip Hop, often revolving around issues of national and ethnic identity, can only be understood against this background and the larger tradition of Afro-German resistance. I will therefore first sketch a brief history of the black presence © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 465 in Germany, followed by a closer look at the origins of the modern AfroGerman movement. By doing so I shall provide the necessary background for the analysis undertaken in the second half of the article, which focuses on the process by which black Germans have adapted and transformed US models of political Hip Hop. Black Germans appropriate these models, make them applicable to their living conditions, and use them for a successful intervention into German discourses regarding national identity. Black German History: An Overview In the course of our research we met Afro-German women who had lived in Germany under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in the Weimar Republic and through National Socialism. Some were immediately willing to meet with us younger ones and recount their lives. Today – several years later – it is difficult to describe how moved and excited we were at these meetings. We suddenly discovered that our history had not begun in 1945.13 It is impossible to say how far back the history of blacks in Germany dates.14 Living dispersed among their white compatriots, blacks in Germany were common enough in the seventeenth and eighteenth century to be repeatedly mentioned in scientific studies of race, literary texts or newspaper accounts.15 This presence of a small black population notwithstanding, the topic of ‘blacks as exotics’ has long played a central role in German discourses on race. Beginning in the seventeenth century, exhibits of ‘savages’ became an increasingly successful mass entertainment in German (and other European) metropoles, reaching a peak with the colonial exhibit of 1896, which attracted an audience of two million. Starting in 1884, Germany’s African possessions included ‘Southwest Africa’ (now Namibia), ‘East Africa’ (parts of today’s Tanzania and Kenya), Togo and Cameroon, while its Pacific empire encompassed Samoa, part of Papua-New Guinea and the Solomon islands. Though this colonial period was over by the outbreak of the First World War, the consequences for both coloniser and colonised were deep and lasting. Resistance against German rule was widespread in all African colonies. The uprising of the Herero and Nama in Germany’s largest and economically most important colony ‘Süwestafrika’ (Southwest Africa) from 1904 to 1907 generated much attention in Germany and the prolonged success of the rebellion was hotly debated. The 1907 elections, which were necessary after the parliament refused to approve a further increase in the colonial war budget (which had exceeded 600 million Reichsmark), were commonly referred to as the ‘Hottentott elections’, after their central subject.16 After the revolt’s brutal suppression – only one quarter of the Herero and not many more of the Nama survived the war – German authorities established © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 466 Gender and History a system of control and oppression with a completeness that was unique in the world, and which later became a model for the South African apartheid system.17 Of particular importance is the fact that within colonial Southwest Africa, German nationality was for the first time legally linked to race. Persons with any trace of ‘native blood’ were excluded from German citizenship, and significantly, this measure was primarily directed against children of German men married to African women. In this context, the Social Darwinist equation of body and society meant that individuals had relevance not as such but only as members of the race. White settlers in relationships with black women therefore were ‘race traitors’ guilty of producing ‘mixed-race’ offspring that had access to German nationality and could therefore irreversibly ‘pollute the nation’s white blood’ – as well as threaten the social and economic apartheid practised in the colony. During the colonial war, the authorities had taken measures against ‘miscegenation’ and from 1905 onwards all marriages between whites and ‘natives’ were declared illegal (including those already in existence). German men married to or living with African women were excluded from all German institutions in the colony, and could not vote, buy land or receive financial support from the government. At the same time, bi-racial children were denied access to schools. Though legitimate children automatically inherited their fathers’ citizenship according to the German legal system, in the colony ‘race’ superseded both family ties and German law, leaving these ‘Afro-Germans’ without any of the rights they would have been entitled to had they been (legally) white.18 Within Germany itself, race remained outside of legal definitions of nationality until 1933, although the category became increasingly important socially. The deep-seated connection between tropes of ‘blood’ and ‘race’ during the 1910s and 1920s made the German status of non-whites a very tentative one. The new nationality law introduced in 1913 eliminated all traces of jus soli, thus strengthening the link between ‘blood’ (that is, ethnicity and race), and Germanness.19 The law granted legitimate children fathered by German men an automatic right to citizenship, including children with black mothers; however, the law’s focus on descent reaffirmed the existing notion that persons of ‘foreign blood’ could not be proper Germans. Additionally, it was almost impossible for Africans from the colonies to enter Germany, and a parliamentary motion to grant citizenship to children of German women married to stateless men (aimed at Danes in Northern Germany) failed out of concern that it would have to include marriages between African men and German women. 20 For those Africans who were able to move from the colonies to Germany, their status was that of ‘colonial subjects’; after Germany lost her colonies, they © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 467 were handed ‘foreigners’ passports,’ which left them – and their families – in effect without nationality. Despite these restrictions, African migrants in Imperial Germany developed strong informal and formal networks, from the conservative Deutscher Afrikanerbund (German Union of Africans) to the radical Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerrasse (League for the Defence of the Negro Race).21 These organisational ties proved to be even more necessary during the Weimar democracy, which followed the Empire’s collapse at the end of World War I. The loss of the colonies did as little to improve the status of blacks as did the newly installed socialist government. On the contrary, the early years of the Weimar Republic saw a racist campaign that far exceeded the one against intermarriage in the colonies. For a Germany still in shock about the lost war, the presence of several thousand African soldiers among the French troops occupying the Rhineland became the symbol of a world turned upside down. Germans of all classes and political affiliations saw black troops as a tremendous provocation. The socialist government initiated a campaign against them, which was largely financed by heavy industry and soon rested on a broad public alliance of political parties (with the exception of the Communists), nationalist groups, professional organisations, women’s groups and churches.22 Numerous propaganda materials – multi-lingual pamphlets, posters, postcards, novels, plays and even two movies – indulged in detailed descriptions of alleged acts of sexual violence perpetrated by black soldiers against white German women, giving the campaign a distinct pornographic tinge. The focus on this most powerful racist image succeeded in creating a racial solidarity that overcame deep national and political antagonisms. From an aggressor responsible for the first ‘world war’, Germany was turned into a helpless victim of black aggression, in need of international white solidarity.23 Government propaganda excluded the subject of ‘mongrelisation’, since a survey among women who had borne children by African soldiers revealed that only one of them had been raped, a fact that seemed better left unpublished.24 Nevertheless, non-government organisations within and outside Germany emphasised miscegenation from the beginning, exploiting stereotypes that had been successfully activated at least a decade before, and now found widespread resonance. For example, in 1920, the medical journal Ärztliche Rundschau declared: ‘Shall we silently endure that in future days not the light songs of white, beautiful, well-built, intelligent, agile, healthy Germans will ring on the shores of the Rhine, but the croaking sounds of greyish, low-browed, broad-muzzled, plump, bestial, syphilitic mulattos?’25 Within the Social Darwinist system of logic, the mere existence of black Germans was a threat. They were invested with an enormous power: even though they were few, they could destroy the German nation by tainting © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 468 Gender and History its still ‘pure blood’. This topic had already dominated the discourse around the colonial ‘mongrel-race’, but grew even more important now that the enemy within, ‘the mongrel’, had penetrated the heart of the national body and was about to poison it. The propaganda against the African troops in the Rhineland had made the image of the ‘syphilitic mulatto’ commonplace. In connection with the discourse on degeneration, s/he became the symbol for the conjunction of the ‘inner and outer fight for survival’ as well as for the menace that inner and outer ‘race enemies’ posed to the German people. This perception of black Germans as the vanguard of the deadly threat that the nation faced in the constant onslaught of ‘inferior races’ on its pure blood explains why the tiny group of an estimated 800 Afro-German children in the Rhineland was seen as a serious danger to a population of 80 million. There is no doubt that the danger was indeed perceived as real. In 1923, the Weimar government began a list of all Afro-German children in the Rhineland, and not only those fathered by soldiers; while it was not clear what should be done with these children, government officials did not doubt that a ‘solution’ had to be found. Several possibilities were discussed and rejected as impracticable, among them the plans to send all the children to Africa or to sterilise them so that they could not further ‘poison the German nation’. In the end, though, no measures beyond registration were taken. While the national and international accountability of the Weimar democracy had protected the black children in the Rhineland, the situation changed radically with National Socialist accession. The ‘mongrelisation of the German nation’, a stable topic for decades, now became one of the ‘Third Reich’s racial problems’. The forced and secret sterilisation of Afro-Germans registered on the Weimar-era list began in 1937. Apart from this measure, which explicitly singled out black Germans, they were affected by a number of laws aimed at ‘Jews and other foreign elements’, such as expatriation or reduction to a limited status of citizenship. Nazi racist policies generally focused on Jews and Gypsies (the Sinti and Roma); blacks were left relatively unharmed in some areas of the country. In other regions, however, blacks were not only excluded from schools, public spaces and most professions, but also sent to concentration camps.26 Black Germans have never been officially recognised as victims of Nazi persecution. Rather, after the Second World War ended, all memory of their treatment during National Socialism seemed to vanish as completely from public memory as did Germany’s colonial past. Despite the fundamental differences in political systems and the GDR’s official commitment to anti-racism, neither socialist East Germany nor the democratic West had any use for their black citizens. This mentality underscores the point that the perceptions of white Germans were based on concepts © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 469 predating 1945 that were obviously never significantly challenged within either the socialist or the Western democrat mode of thinking.27 Since the existence of a population that was not white but still German was as unthinkable after 1945 as it was before, history was both ignored and repeated. Old positions continued to guide discussions about non-white Germans, and this time in the West, Germans of colour were referred to as ‘occupation babies’. While the vast majority of German children fathered by American GIs were white, in the public mind all ‘occupation babies’ were black and all black children were fathered by GIs.28 Simultaneously, scientific ‘race studies’ revived within academia. Using materials gathered during the preparation of forced sterilisations (with little reflection about their origin), studies assessed the chances of integrating ‘Mulatto children’ into the Federal Republic.29 Thus, not surprisingly, during the 1950s black Germans once again were defined as unnatural, a product of extraordinary circumstances. The public again viewed black soldiers foremost as potential rapists, white women in relationships with them as whores and their children as mistakes of nature.30 Again, removal of the children to a more appropriate surrounding – namely Africa or the USA – was seen as the preferable solution. After all, as a 1952 parliamentary debate on the issue concluded, ‘the climate in this country does not suit them’.31 Instead of accepting the existence of a black population, and one that was quickly growing, the majority of white Germany opted to deny its existence by defining black Germans as inherently ‘foreign’. White Germans remained surprisingly consistent in their attitude towards their black compatriots: from the beginning of the twentieth century to the post-World War II period, black Germans symbolised sexual and racial transgressions committed by ‘real’ Germans. Their outsider status prevented their social and ideological, if not legal, inclusion into the national community of citizens, depriving them of a voice even in public debates where they were the subject. Unlike African migrants who faced many of the same prejudices but repeatedly challenged their marginalisation, Afro-Germans’s very Germanness paradoxically stopped them from doing the same. There was no black community AfroGermans could fall back on – unless they created it themselves. The Beginning of a Movement: Afro-German Women Showing Their Colours In the spring of 1984, I spent three months at the Free University in Berlin teaching a course on Black American women poets and a poetry workshop in English, for German students. One of my goals on this trip was to meet Black German women, for I had been told there were quite a few in Berlin. (Audre Lorde)32 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 470 Gender and History Audre Lorde’s visit to Berlin in the spring of 1984 served as a catalyst for events that would radically change Afro-German history. Lorde was relatively well known in Germany because a small Berlin-based feminist publisher, Orlanda, had issued an edited volume containing texts by Lorde and Adrienne Rich, Macht und Sinnlichkeit (Power and Sensuality) – the first German language publication on the US debate on racism within the feminist movement. A number of key texts from the US women’s movement had previously been translated into German, but did not include works by black authors or works addressing racism among women. While living in the United States, Orlanda founder Dagmar Schultz had become aware of this omission but she did not yet connect it to the situation of black Germans: My realisation that racism was only rarely called by its name in Germany, even in the woman’s [sic] movement, led me to publish the book Power and Sensuality, with texts by Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. But it was not until I worked on this book [Showing Our Colours] that I became aware of the racism that Afro-Germans have experienced and continue to experience.33 Power and Sensuality offered insights into a debate that was of particular interest to black German women and accordingly, many took the chance to meet Lorde in person when she came to Berlin. It is indicative of the German silence around race and racism Schultz described – and of the identification of the ‘race problem’ with the USA – that it took the presence of an African American to create a platform for black Germans to address their situation. Many were still struggling to develop a black identity vis-à-vis a society, which considered the terms ‘black’ and ‘German’ mutually exclusive and doubted black Germans’ justification to claim either identity. Lorde acknowledged these women as part of a worldwide black Diaspora. Such recognition validated their experiences in a way previously unknown to black German women and facilitated the new process of collectively exploring their similarities rather than being defined through their ‘Otherness’ in a white society: As Afro-German women almost all of us between the ages of twenty and thirty were accustomed to dealing with our background and our identity in isolation. Few of us had any significant contact with other Afro-Germans and if we attempted to discuss our thoughts and problems with friends, it was always possible that we would alienate someone or be accused of being ‘too sensitive’. Meeting each other as AfroGermans and becoming involved with each other has been a totally new experience.34 The new sense of community was empowering and became even more so as an admired African American poet and activist took on a mentor role, providing experience, advice and support. That the newfound energy © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 471 could be transformed into a book, which is now the Afro-German key text, was again due to Lorde’s intervention. She convinced Orlanda to take on this daring project rather than publishing texts by Lorde herself as Schultz had planned. After two years of research, Showing Our Colours was published in 1986 and edited by Schultz along with Afro-German activists Katharina Oguntoye and May Opitz (later Ayim). Ayim had devoted her thesis in sociology to the history of black Germans and provided background information that ranged from twelfth-century paintings of Africans in Germany to racist representations in contemporary schoolbooks. Additionally, the volume presented life stories of fourteen Afro-German women between the ages of seventeen and seventy. Showing Our Colours thus provided factual information on a part of German history deemed non-existent by society, politics and academia alike. Through the interview collection the anthology also contextualised experiences that had been perceived as aberrant and individual, pointing them out as collective traits in the life of a part of the population that up until that point was neither perceived nor had defined itself as a community – black Germans.35 The two years’ research preceding the publication of Showing Our Colours was a major step in creating this community. The project had an effect way beyond the Berlin group of black women, influencing the first national meeting of black Germans, which took place in Wiesbaden in 1985. The meeting resulted in the founding of the Initiative Schwarze Deutsche (Initiative of Black Germans, later changed to Blacks in Germany). From the beginning, the group consisted of largely autonomous local chapters, although activists all over Germany – only a handful in the beginning – remained in close contact. Indeed, the statement of goals published by the ISD Rhein-Main in 1989 can be considered representative for the organisation’s goals in general: We would like to contribute to a change in the general appreciation of German history – all aspects of it. This includes dealing with Afro-German (Afro-European) history, which to a great extent must be compiled and recorded for the first time. This means that we should concern ourselves with our own biographies as a basis for a special, black-identified identity. We demand that white society put an end to prejudice, discrimination, racism and sexism, perpetrated against us Black Germans/ Afro-Germans and against all other social groupings with a similar plight … We demand that racist stereotypes and discriminatory expressions, terms, illustrations and race-slanted reports disappear from the media … An important aspect of our work is to cooperate with groups from Black world movements, with people doing anti-racism work and other solidarity groups. 36 In the years following the first meeting in 1985, a network of ISD chapters emerged throughout Germany.37 Activities were wide-ranging, including an annual national community meeting (which has been attended by hundreds in recent years); Black History Month in Berlin; the publication © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 472 Gender and History of a magazine (Afro Look, preceded by the short-lived Onkel Toms Faust); and cooperative projects with other minorities.38 The translation of Showing Our Colours into English in 1993 by the University of Massachusetts Press and Orlanda’s publishing of May Ayim’s poetry and essays, resonated with US German Studies struggling to distinguish itself from the traditional ‘Germanistik’. Ethnic diversity is still not part of German universities’ curricula: History, Sociology and Germanistik for the most part still assume a clear division between (implicitly white) Germans and ‘foreigners’. This approach leaves no space for the study of German minorities, which, of course, not only include blacks, but also Turkish Germans, Sinti and Roma, and German Jews; and programmes like ‘Ethnic Studies’, not to mention ‘Black Studies’, are non-existent. Though British and US German Studies have been instrumental in creating an awareness of Germany’s inclusion in a Western discourse on race, in the current context Afro-Germans appear only as one of several German minorities, not as one of several black Diaspora communities. Despite the links made between Audre Lorde and black German feminists in the 1980s, US and British Africana Studies still for the most part restrict Diaspora Studies to the Americas and the Caribbean. This focus was a logical and necessary first step in systematically analysing the displacement of African populations through slavery, but it is important to keep in mind that the black Diaspora experience is not identical with the black presence in the Americas. To assume this ignores the interaction of Diaspora communities across the Atlantic. Going beyond the triangle of sub-Saharan Africa, Britain and the Americas that Paul Gilroy sketched in The Black Atlantic as the close geographical proximity of Europe and Africa means acknowledging a continuing cultural exchange (including the exchange of humans).39 Whether within the African diaspora or not, political movements – progressive and reactionary – are usually dominated by men, if not in the rank and files then certainly at the level of decision-making. In many ways similar in its structure to typical male-dominated emancipation organisations, the black German movement went a different way due to its specific history. The genesis of Showing Our Colours, unlike many other political projects, was inextricably linked to feminism in general and US black feminists in particular. Audre Lorde’s commitment to black feminism made her seek out her German sisters in the first place; for these black German women who had been told again and again that their experiences were marginal, unimportant and shameful, the support of a black woman widely recognised among German as well as US feminists was invaluable. And, following publication of Showing Our Colours when some of the editors and contributors did a reading/racism awareness © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 473 workshop tour, feminist venues provided spaces.40 As a result, AfroGerman women, at least if they had some affinity to feminism, had access to this new movement in a way that men did not. In 1986, the black German women’s association ADEFRA (Afro-Deutsche Frauen) was founded in Bremen. Similar to the ISD, with which it works closely, ADEFRA consists of affiliated but independent local groups. For several years, the organisation published its own magazine, Afrekete, in addition to providing a number of women-oriented activities and participating in international exchanges of women of colour. ADEFRA brought an explicitly feminist agenda and strong lesbian presence into Afro-German activism. Many in the ISD, male and female, felt uncomfortable with this development; debates on the supposed priority of racism over sexism or the ‘lavender menace’ that ADEFRA introduced to the movement lead to tensions not yet resolved.41 That women nevertheless continued to strongly affect if not dominate Afro-German activism was partly due to the fact that the feminist network which increasingly debated racism provided a platform that had no male pendent.42 Accordingly, publications exploring the black experience in Germany often appeared in a feminist context. Sometimes this was a conscious choice as with another Orlanda publication, Entfernte Verbindungen (i), which was an exploration of anti-Semitism, racism and class oppression that grew out of feminist discourses, or Aufbrüche (Departures), documenting cultural productions of black, Jewish and migrant women.43 At other times, though, the focus on women was a result of a failure of Afro-German men to contribute. This seems to be especially true for literary projects such as Talking Home: Heimat aus unserer eigenen Feder, an anthology by German gays of colour, or a soon-to-be published anthology of Afro-German poetry.44 One can only speculate as to why black German men have long been largely absent from Afro-German publications. The feminist context might have been intimidating; there could also be a relation to the content of the early works. While Showing Our Colours provided historical background to the black German experience, at its core were personal testimonies that often displayed a sense of isolation, insecurity, self-hate and confusion as well as pride and an insuppressible, fighting spirit. While they obviously resonated with the community as a whole, public admittance of such emotions might have been harder on male than female egos45 – and this especially so, since the sense of isolation and traumatic experiences of most Afro-Germans growing up in the 1950s and 1960s likely remained much stronger among male activists. Feminism gave women the chance to contextualise their experiences on interrelating levels of class, race, gender and sexual orientation. How important this context and sense of community are to public artistic expression is revealed by the © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 474 Gender and History complete switch in ‘gender visibility’ that came with the advent of Hip Hop in Germany. Brothers Keepers – Sisters Weepers? Afro-German Hip Hop and Gender Possibly our emerging visibility will also clear a path for those who are children today so that they can grow up feeling less isolated, marginal and exceptional than we did.46 Afro-German activists in the 1980s and 1990s achieved mixed results regarding the group’s goal to influence media representations of black Germans. The founding of the ISD and the publication of Showing Our Colours generated some media interest. Newspaper articles and a number of TV documentaries reported on the fate of the grown-up ‘coloured occupation babies’. Naming was a central issue from the beginning: none of the articles’ authors used the terms ‘black’ or ‘Afro-German’, so clearly favoured by the subjects of their reports. Not all went as far as reviving the ‘occupation baby’ as did the left-liberal Frankfurter Rundschau, but clearly, all journalists felt that it was up to them – and not black Germans themselves – to determine how they would be called (most settled, and still do, on ‘coloured’).47 By and large though, the ISD has not become the envisioned pressure group, able to expose racism in the media and in politics. This seems less due to strategic mistakes on the part of the ISD than to the continuous German myth that all non-whites must be ‘foreigners’ and therefore are not entitled to a voice in public discourses. If minorities do enter the public discourse, it is usually filtered through the majority perspective.48 Until recently, this meant a nearly unanimous focus on their ‘foreignness’, presenting it either as constituting a social, economic and political threat to Germany’s stability or as marker of their victimisation by an intolerant society. But the distinction between implicitly white, Christian Germans and foreigners is increasingly hard to maintain. Afro-Germans, Sinti and Jewish Germans have long embodied supposedly contradictory identities. In recent decades, they have been joined by far more than a million German-born ‘foreigners’: the sons and daughters (and increasingly granddaughters and grandsons) of the ‘guestworkers’ brought to the country in the 1950s and 1960s. The first generation of young migrants organised along ethnic lines and within traditional political structures. Unions played a central role, as did (feminist) grassroots activism in migrant neighbourhoods. The situation of the second and third generation is profoundly different: employment opportunities are slim, traditional forms of organising do not respond to their situation, and their parent’s country of origin – perceived as their home-country by parents © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 475 as well as by German society – is largely foreign to them. Meanwhile the Germany they have been born into continues to define them as ‘foreigners’ on their way out. This disparity continues to grow within a Germany whose urban population is increasingly made up of people who might have spent their life – or a substantial part of it – in that country, but are not necessarily white, German and Christian. Within German discourses, urban centres are usually portrayed as sights of ethnic conflict and social decay; they have localised common fears around economic decline and cultural change. These are also places, though, where a new discourse on identity originated. It is a discourse that can be called authentically ‘German’ in that it does relate to one’s predecessors’ countries of origin or to other Diaspora communities. Yet focusing explicitly on the German situation, it constructs a national identity which includes hundred of thousands of Afro-Germans, more than one million ‘Turks’ born in Germany, and the 70,000 German Sinti, to name just a few of those usually not thought of when ‘German’ is defined. It is a discourse which finds its congenial expression in Hip Hop. Created by African American, Caribbean and Latino youths, Hip Hop has long spread around the world. In Europe, minority and migrant teenagers were the first to pick up this culture, as they easily identified with Hip Hop’s message. Kutlu, a Turkish German MC from Cologne remembers: ‘When we saw the movies Wild Style and Beat Street, Turks and Italians and so on could immediately identify with the Puerto Ricans and Afro-Germans with the blacks. Somehow, everybody realised that right away.’49 Meli, Skillz en Masse’s female MC recalls a similar awakening: In Germany it starts when you enter the first institution, be it kindergarten or school – you are confronted with rejection, being different, being black. And then I heard Public Enemy, got the T-Shirts – that was a liberation for me, an outlet, to rap the lyrics, feel the energy, that just touched me. These were people 9,000 miles away from me and they said things that were relevant for my life here in Germany.50 Not surprisingly, then, Fresh Familee’s 1990 ‘Ahmed Gündüz’, the first rap song ever recorded in German, was the creation of ‘foreigners’.51 ‘Ahmed Gündüz’ reflected on the experiences of first generation migrants, thus introducing a decidedly Turkish-German point of view. During most of the 1980s, German Hip Hop crews rapped exclusively in English, and it is probably the Afro-Italian-German crew Advanced Chemistry who can be credited with first introducing German language rap in 1989. However, Fresh Familee’s ‘Ahmed Gündüz’ was the first published and thus the most widely available rap song in German. The nation’s mainstream audience discovered Hip Hop two years later, when the (white) Die Fantastischen Vier (The Fantastic Four), who © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 476 Gender and History had rapped in German since 1989, published their ‘Die da?!’. The song initiated enormous media hype and most accounts of Hip Hop in Germany falsely call Die Fantastischen Vier the ‘inventors of German rap’, completely ignoring the contribution of migrants and minorities.52 The creativity of youth of colour, which had been central to the birth of German Hip Hop, was thus doubly marginalised: though disproportionately present within the scene since the 1980s, migrant and minority crews did not profit from the first German Hip Hop hype in the early 1990s. Instead, record deals and TV appearances went almost exclusively to white groups. And when the mainstream finally recognised their presence, rappers of colour were presented as latecomers to an established movement. Fresh Familee’s Tachi, author of ‘Ahmed Gündüz’, recalls the beginnings of Hip Hop in Germany quite differently: ‘I think, as a migrant from a poor neighbourhood, you automatically identified with Hip Hop. Just from hearing rap’s rhythm and realising, someone’s getting something off his chest here. You heard that immediately, for example, with “The Message”, even if you couldn’t understand a word’.53 While mainstream audiences long associated German Hip Hop only with its ‘whitewashed’, commercially successful version, a vibrant subculture continued to exist outside the media hype, its centres often close to US army bases where the newest imports could be heard – and where traditionally a large black German population lived.54 Heidelberg-based Advanced Chemistry, founded in the mid-1980s as one of the first German crews, and probably the first to rap in German, were the most important proponents of a version of Hip Hop that went beyond apolitical, fun messages transported by groups such as Die Fantastischen Vier or Fettes Brot. In 1992, Advanced Chemistry’s ‘Fremd im eigenen Land’ (Stranger in My Own Country) first proclaimed an identity which was completely ignored by mainstream society. This particular identity fit a growing part of the German population under twenty five: that of ‘non-traditional’ Germans with an African, Arab, Turkish, Bosnian or Asian background – ‘strangers in their own country’, indeed. Emerging from the everyday experiences of Germans of African and migrant descent in a post-Unification Germany that did not welcome them into the new community of citizens, the song remains one of the sharpest on the situation of Germans of colour to date. The very act of listening to ‘Fremd im eigenen Land’ appears recurrently in narratives by young rappers of colour as a moment of awakening and of inspiration for their own careers.55 The tide of racist violence that swept Germany after Unification politicised many young people of colour, who could not relate to the politics of traditional migrant and anti-racist groups. For many of them ‘Fremd im eigenen Land’ showed that rap could be a form of political activism, and one that perfectly fit their situation. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 477 Hip Hop, for the first time, created a broad forum of expression and exchange between marginalised communities, fostering interactions between minorities becoming aware of their similar situation. Advanced Chemistry explicitly refers to this syncretic potential. Based on African American cultural traditions of resistance, Hip Hop was created by interaction of different communities of colour, creative reaction to the inner cities’ increasing pauperisation – a trend, which in Europe, too, disproportionately affects migrants and communities of colour.56 Advanced Chemistry’s Linguist applies the concept to Germany: In Germany you have minorities. There are minorities with a German passport. That’s me for example, a black German. There are minorities in this country without a German passport. Those are Turkish Germans for example – I consciously say Turkish Germans – those are Yugoslavian Germans, Moroccan Germans, whoever. But we all belong together. We are all confronted with racism, not xenophobia. I am confronted with racism, but I am lucky, because I cannot be thrown out of the country. On the other hand there are no laws protecting my rights as a member of a minority.57 The new meta-ethnic identity created within Hip Hop culture is explored, shaped, and problematised through musical dialogue.58 It is in this discourse – and on more than an artistic level – that the German Hip Hop scene, or rather part of it, emancipates itself from the US model through exploration of issues originating in specifically German conditions. In constructing an open, inclusive group identity based on common interests and experiences rather than shared ethnic origin, the repossession of a suppressed past is instrumental, a sense of history necessary to offensively oppose marginalisation and stereotyping by the majority. In the cover text of their second single released in 1993, ‘Welcher Pfad führt zur Geschichte’ (‘Which Path Leads to History’), Advanced Chemistry explicitly connects with an urban US Diaspora tradition to which they add new members: Each and every activist of contemporary Hip Hop, whether in Bremerhaven or Brooklyn, acts in the tradition of the Zulu Nation, no matter if he or she admits this or not … In New York, this culture was initiated primarily by African Americans, Jamaicans, Haitians, Puerto Ricans … It is no coincidence but due to its rebellious contents that in Germany many black Germans, Turks and Kurds, Yugoslavians, Roma and Sinti feel attracted to this culture and practice Hip Hop … The message should be clear: … We’re going our own way!59 While placing themselves within an international movement of artists and activists of colour and promoting inter-ethnic solidarity in Germany, Advanced Chemistry were well aware that their generation was not the first working on constructing an identity that is both black and German. Significantly, their reference to male and female Hip Hop activists in the © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 478 Gender and History above quote displays a sensibility towards gender representation certainly unusual for the Hip Hop community and might well be a sign of their Afro-German activism background. The ISD and especially their annual General Meeting were important in creating a sense of community for young Afro-German Hip Hop artists and in many ways laid the foundation for the latter’s ‘Brothers Keepers’ project. As its initiator Adé recalls: There [at the General Meeting] you came together for three days, watched movies together, held workshops and discussions. At these meetings, I first met people like Torch or Ebony. Many of those people I might have seen at a jam before. But in the context of the ISD-meetings, you were free of the role of ‘rapper’ and could really talk about yourself. You talked differently with each other in this Afro-German context.60 Ten years after ‘Fremd im eigenen Land’, ‘Brothers Keepers’ with their ‘Adriano’ raised similar issues. This time, however, the reception went beyond the Hip Hop community into mainstream society. ‘Brothers Keepers’ managed to break the strict division between a cultural hybrid hype around minority artists on the one side and continued political and social marginalisation of minorities on the other. ‘Adriano’ explicitly addresses racism in Germany, still a taboo subject in public discourse, and does so from the points of view of those under attack. This in itself is not new; numerous crews have done so since the Turkish German Fresh Familee published ‘Ahmed Gündüz’ in 1990. It was a new development, however, that ‘Brothers Keepers’ emerged explicitly as a pressure group, using the participating MCs’ popularity for an Afro-German intervention into the political debate. While they have published a successful CD, members of the collective also engage in a variety of other activities, from visits to schools in East Germany and concerts for interned refugees to publicly exposing police brutality against Africans.61 It is also new that the concept worked: media reactions went way beyond the usual interest in political Hip Hop. But while the feedback was enormous, it was not always positive, particularly in progressive circles. Advanced Chemistry had discovered early on that the self-assured intervention of the objects of the German debate on ‘foreigners’ did not receive unambigiously positive reactions from white German proponents of multiculturalism. While their ‘Stranger in My Own Country’ had worked as a wake-up call for many young Germans of colour, the group was severely criticised for exactly this claim on being part of Germany. In the mid-1990s, Advanced Chemistry’s Linguist stated: The crazy thing is that we are criticised, naturally, by people ideologically opposed to us, conservatives. Of course, they can’t stand seeing a black guy holding up his green passport, stating offensively that he’s German. On the other hand, and this is © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 479 the crazy thing, people considering themselves progressive believe that we wanted to distance ourselves from those minorities in Germany without the green passport. That accusation came very often. Criticism of ‘Brothers Keepers’ was again caused by the rappers’ insistence that they were German: failing to reflect on the privileges of uncontested national belonging that come with being white, a large part of the German left rejects any such statements as reactionary. The notoriously troubled relationship of Germans to their national identity has thus been ironically transferred unto a group whose very Germanness is continuously questioned.62 Black Germans’ attempt to make their country their home by creating a space for themselves on its imaginary map – a step which, if successful, would mean a dramatic reconfiguration of ‘Germanness’ – is held against them by exactly those white Germans who most decry the nation’s anachronistic and exclusionary concept of identity. ‘Brothers Keepers’ not only face criticism for being too German, but also for being too black. That white German liberals and progressives accused the project of being exclusive, ‘anti-multicultural’ or even ‘racist’ might not come as a surprise. But criticism also came from within the Hip Hop community: Microphone Mafia’s Kutla for example claimed that a Turkish ‘Brothers Keepers’ would have resulted in a public outcry, while the ‘slavery bonus’ allowed blacks to initiate such projects without provoking similar reactions, a point disproven by media reactions. 63 Skillz en Masse’s Meli, participating in ‘Brothers Keeper’s’ female version, ‘Sisters Keepers’, responded to the criticism: This project did not only raise an Afro-German voice. It raised a German, a Turkish, a Greek voice, because these were all people supporting this thing … Everybody who supported this is part of it and these are the people, too, for whom it was done … If Brothers Keepers had been multicultural from the beginning, that would have been a huge message, of course. But blacks are the most undermined, disadvantaged group in Germany. I don’t know, if Brothers Keepers would have totally flopped, if there hadn’t been stylish MCs involved, then people wouldn’t say now that they would have liked to be part of it … I think there absolutely should be a continuation. It should be extended to MCs from different cultures who want to spread this message. But blacks in Germany don’t really have a community. They meet maybe once a year in Frankfurt. The Turks for example have their people going, anyway. We are the smallest minority in Germany and the ones most threatened by racism.64 The criticism from all sides points to the strange, overdetermined position of black Germans: they are probably the most completely assimilated ethnic minority, growing up in largely white neighbourhoods, often in white families. At the same time, their blackness codes them as completely ‘alien’, they are hyper-visible, their mere presence a sore spot in Germany’s perception of itself, constantly reduced to their colour and © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 480 Gender and History simultaneously made completely invisible, that is, ‘non-German’, under a constant demand to explain, justify, re-define their existence, expected to be something they are not and not allowed to be what they are, since what they are exceeds acceptable notions of Germanness. It takes more than a successful Hip Hop project to alter notions of identity going back for more than a century. But in contemporary Germany, minorities increasingly question illusionary notions of unambiguous, pure and inalterable national identities. A number of recent developments, such as European Unification, the Social Democrat/Green government, and the new citizenship law, might work together to create an increasing receptiveness for these voices within mainstream society. Since ‘Brothers Keepers’ success, it seems that Hip Hop has the potential not only to mobilise those minorities not usually granted a voice, but also to motivate the majority to listen. This development cannot be overestimated: it fundamentally changed German public discourse, which can no longer unquestioningly cast minorities as mute objects, whether as scapegoats or victims. Hip Hop also fosters a dialogue among minorities, a necessary prerequisite for a concerted reaction to the Europe-wide boom of racist and xenophobic movements. The Hip Hop collective takes on the position of an Afro-German (and potentially multi-ethnic) pressure group, formerly non-existent because of the invisibility of minorities in public discourses in and about Germany. Conclusion The impressive success story of Afro-German Hip Hop does have its dangers too. Postmodern entertainment culture excessively borrows from subcultures, which long have become the epitome of hipness. This pseudoopenness re-establishes the mainstream as the measure of all things, while members of the fashionable subcultures are still defined as deficient: subcultural chic is an accessory only for those not belonging to it, after all; otherwise it is titillating, but less glamorous ‘authenticity’. Subversive potentials can thus be domesticated into a mere sales argument. Members of minorities for the first time are massively present in Germany’s mainstream cultural marketplace, with some influence on their work’s content. This presence is still largely restricted to the entertainment sector though, traditionally forcing artists of colour to perform a tightrope-walk between a rare chance to express their point of view and being used to re-enforce racist stereotypes. Tyron Ricketts, actor and rapper, speaks from experience when he states: ‘Fuck the slaveship – Now, I’m having a career / do the Carl Lewis runner, Eddie Murphy Imitator / play the drug dealer, basketball and football player … / The positive racism master uses clichés in his advantage, makes them his style’.65 This strategy has its setbacks, not © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 481 the least of them a state in which clichés are not used and subverted anymore but taken as the truth – and not only by the audience but by those supposedly subverting them. Afro-German MCs selling homophobia and sexism as authentic ghetto culture – not only in their songs but on their political agenda – is as far from subverting stereotypes about black machismo as possible. Such an attitude, rampant in today’s Hip Hop scene (though certainly not only among black rappers) is especially frustrating in the context of Afro-German activism, which had a strong feminist component since its beginning in the early 1980s. The blatant sexism of popular MCs like Samy de Luxe or Moses Pelham, who do see themselves as advocates of the black German community at large, is a betrayal of a tradition of AfroGerman resistance. This tradition would have been impossible without the work of feminists and lesbians, two of the most popular objects of ridicule in German Hip Hop. The female rappers of ‘Sisters Keepers’, themselves an afterthought added to the successful ‘Brothers Keepers’ project, represent a new image of black German femininity: subdued sidekicks, usually staying in background; their song on the ‘Brothers Keepers’ CD, is entitled ‘Liebe und Verstand’ (Love and Sensibility). This is, to put it mildly, a problematic contribution. As Aziza A., one of the most profiled female MCs, observed: ‘The guys show up like: I kick your ass, I’m the toughest. In contrast, the women appear totally clichéd. The women then offer their hand and their love. The explanation, that you always hear, that you need to listen to the songs together, doesn’t make the thing any better for me.’66 This image indeed seems too far for comfort from the unruly, self-confident and feminist attitude of their sisters fifteen years earlier. Cheap attacks on ‘women’s raps’ like those of ‘Brothers Keepers’’ Samy de Luxe certainly contribute to an atmosphere in which sexism and homophobia become acceptable, thoughtless forms of ‘dissing’. But it would be too easy to put the blame on the Hip Hop community alone, a community whose gender models are not far from what is presented in mainstream culture media and ads. Indicative is the story of Tic Tac Toe, a kind of Afro-German Salt ‘n’ Pepa and with almost three million CDs sold the most successful German rappers ever. Their rise to teenage stardom generated massive media attention in the mid-1990s. This attention soon focused on one members past stint with drugs and prostitution though – and in stark contrast to the way male MCs were treated, this past did not enhance Lee’s ‘realness’ and authenticity, but rather led to very traditional moral condemnations paired with voyeuristic curiosity. There is no doubt that Tic Tac Toe were musical lightweights, but this does not quite explain their near absence from Hip Hop histories, sexism on the part of the mostly male authors seems to play a part here, too. The group was a media product to a certain extent, with little connection to the © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 482 Gender and History underground Hip Hop scene. But what makes Tic Tac Toe noteworthy is their focus, which differed dramatically from those of their male colleagues. Their lyrics, while not always brilliant, introduced a severely underrepresented point of view into Hip Hop: that of (black) teenage girls, dealing with issues ranging from dating through racism to sexual abuse.67 Mirroring mainstream ideology of course is not what Hip Hop was supposed to be about – nor is it what Afro-German activism aspired to.68 But in spite of Hip Hop’s problematic structures, structures which are even more problematic when they become part of political agendas such as ‘Brothers Keepers’, Hip Hop represents the central means of articulation for ‘ethnic Outsiders’ in contemporary Germany. It articulates a distinctive position that is not defined by ethnic difference but allowed to name it, thereby successfully challenging dominant divisions between ‘proper Germans’ and ‘foreign outsiders’. Hip Hop culture is the only area so far where the essentialisation, ethnic stereotyping and marginalisation of non-white Germans has been successfully challenged. Against many odds, Afro-German Hip Hop activists have achieved a prominent position in contemporary Germany, opening up possibilities for their communities at large. It is to be hoped that they do not waste this well-deserved chance by subscribing to conservative ideologies that serve only mainstream interests in the long run. Instead, hopefully they shall honour one of Hip Hop’s central traditions by paying respect to those who paved the way and remembering the subversive and complex tradition they come from. Notes 1. ‘Beauty’, in Olumide Popoola and Beldan Sezen (eds) Talking Home: Heimat aus unserer eigenen Feder (Amsterdam: Blue Moon Press, 1999). 2. See, for example, ‘“Wir sind schwer im Kommen”: Schwarze Deutsche zwischen Erfolg und Rassismus’, Stern 38 (1997); [Cover] ‘Fremd und deutsch. Warum die Integration von Ausländern Unsinn ist’, Spiegel Reporter 2 (2000). 3. Turks born or residing in Germany have an equally troubled but different relationship to ‘citizenship’, due to separate histories of migration. 4. This is not to say that these issues went unaddressed, at least by artists of colour, who rarely appeared on German TV until ‘Brothers Keepers’. See, for example, Hannes Loh and Murat Güngör (ed.), Fear of a Kanak Planet: Hiphop zwischen Weltkultur und Nazi-Rap (Vienna: Hannibal-Verlag, 2002), p. 128. 5. For a selection of articles on ‘Brothers Keepers’ see their website: <www.brotherskeepers.de>. 6. For a more detailed discussion of German post-war discourses on race see: Leslie Adelson, Making Bodies Making History. Feminism and German Identity (Lilncoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, Susanne Zantop (eds), The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Uli Linke, German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler (New York: Routledge, 1999). 7. Autobiographical texts by Afro-Germans, such as those collected in Farbe bekennen, almost unanimously speak of an identification with African Americans as the only visible blacks in German media, children’s books, films etc. See also Ika Hügel-Marshall, Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany (New York: Continuum, 2001). © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 483 8. For an overview of the history of ‘foreign workers’ in Germany see Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers, Forced Laborers, Guest Workers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 9. The new Social Democrat/Green Party government in 1999 radically changed the law’s exclusive jus sanguinis focus by granting citizenship to all persons born in Germany of parents legally living there for a certain period of time. The accompanying concept of dual citizenship had to be abandoned after mass protests, though. See Fatima El-Tayeb, ‘Germans, Foreigners, and German Foreigners’, in Salah Hassan and Ifikhar Dadi (eds), Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (Rotterdam: NAI, 2001), pp. 72–81. 10. For an update on ‘Brothers Keepers’ current projects see: www.brotherskeepers.de 11. See the recent, rather symptomatic debate on a German Leitkultur, leading culture. For collected articles on the topic see: http://home.t-online.de/home/family.graetsch/ rgmuku2b.htm 12. See, for example, Jeanine Kantara, ‘Schwarz. Und deutsch’, Die Zeit, 7:9 (2000); Olumide Popoola and Beldan Sezen, Talking Home: Heimat aus unserer eigen Feder (Amsterdam: Blue Moon Press, 1998); Cathy Gelbin, Kader Konuk and Peggy Piesche (eds), AufBrüche: Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und jüdischen Frauen in Deutschland (Königstein: Ulrike Helmer, 1999); Oguntoye, Opitz, and Schultz (Hg.), Farbe bekennen. 13. Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz and Dagmar Schultz (eds), Showing Our Colours: AfroGerman Women Speak Out (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), p. xxii. 14. The crusades brought a number of blacks to Europe, often as servants at the numerous royal courts. Later black military drummers and pipers became increasingly fashionable among European royalty (Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Bewußtsein und Geschichte der Deutschen (Hamburg: Junius, 1993), p. 133). 15. Oguntoye et al., Farbe bekennen; Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren. 16. A derogatory name in the early twentieth century for Namibia’s Nama population, Germans still use the expression ‘like the Hottentotts’ to characterise inappropriate behaviour, apparently with no awareness of the word’s entrance into German culture. On German rule in Namibia see Helmut Bley, South-West Africa under German Rule 1894–1914 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), and Horst Drechsler Süwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1966). 17. See Bley, South-West Africa; Drechsler, Süwestafrika. 18. See El-Tayeb, ‘Germans, Foreigners, and German Foreigners’, pp. 92–118. 19. With the exception of the national socialist period, the law remained effective throughout the twentieth century, until the revised law of 2000 added jus soli elements, thereby for the first time granting certain persons of ‘non-German blood’ the right to citizenship. On the question of non-ethnic Germans of Jewish, Polish, African, or Turkish ancestry see e.g. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) and Zafer Senocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 20. See BAB, R 1001, 61 Kol DKG 1077/1, 230; BAB, RKA-4457/7, 64; Katharina Oguntoye, Eine afro-deutsche Geschichte. Zur Lebenssituation von Afrikanern und Afro-Deutschen in Deutschland von 1884 bis 1950 (Berlin: Hoho, 1997), pp. 56–60. 21. The interesting topic of African migrant organization cannot be detailed here. See Paulette Reed-Anderson, Eine Geschichte von mehr als 100 Jahren: Die Anfänge der afrikanischen Diaspora in Berlin (Berlin: Die Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats, 1995), pp. 38–40; Oguntoye, Eine afro-deutsche Geschichte, pp. 76–101. 22. See C. Fidel, Die Widerlegung des Beschuldigungsfeldzuges gegen die farbigen französischen Truppen im besetzten rheinishcen Gebiet (o.O., 1921). Internationally the campaign was also supported by British feminists, French socialists, the Pope, and the anti-colonial activist E. D. Morel. See Robert C. Reinders, ‘Racialism on the Left: E. D. Morel and the “Black Horror on the Rhine,”’ International Review of Social History 13 (1968), pp. 1–28 and Fidel, Die Widerlegung des Beschuldigungfeldzuges. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 484 Gender and History 23. An inquiry conducted by the British Foreign Office in 1920, showed the vast majority of the accusations against the black soldiers were unfounded, but did not have any influence on the continuous propaganda. See Fidel, Die Widerlegung des Beschuldigungfeldzuges, p. 10. 24. Reiner Pommerin, ‘Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde’: Das Schicksal einer fargingen deutschen Minderheit, 1918–1937 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1979), p. 23. 25. Artzliche Rundschau 47 (1920) quoted in Heinrich Diestler, Das deutsche Leid am Rhein: Ein Buch der Anklage gegen die Schanderherrschaft des französischen Militarismus (Minden: Koehler, 1921), p. 56. 26. See Pommerin, Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde; Robert W. Kesting, ‘Forgotten Victims: Blacks in the Holocaust’, Journal of Negro History 77 (1992), pp. 30–33; Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, Afro-Europeans, African Americans, and Africans during the Nazi Era (New York: Routledge, 2002). Often, ‘Negermischlinge’ (‘Negro-mongrels’) were included in Nazi measures against Roma and Sinti; see Romani Rose (Hg.), Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma (Heidelberg, 1995). 27. I will concentrate on the developments in West Germany. For the situation in the East see Jan C. Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger, Patrice G. Poutrus (eds), Fremde und Fremd-Sein in der DDR. Zu historischen Ursachen der Fremdenfeindlichkeit in Ostdeutschland (Potsdam: Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, 2002); and Peggy Piesche, ‘Black and German? East German Adolescents before 1989, A Retrospective View of a “Non-Existent” Issue in the GDR’, in Leslie Adelson (ed.), The Cultural Afterlife of the GDR: New Transnational Perspectives (Washington DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2002). 28. In 1955, of 66,730 children registered as fathered by allied soldiers, only 4,776 were black. Klaus Eyferth, Ursula Brandt, and Wolfgang Hawel, Farbige Kinder in Deutschland und die Aufgaben ihrer Eingliederung (München: Juventa, 1960), p. 12. 29. ‘Expertise’ was centred in the former Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for anthropology, founded 1926 in the Weimar republic and headed for sixteen years by Eugen Fischer, an anthropologist who had built his reputation on ‘bastard-studies’ conducted in German Southwest Africa. Despite its central role in Nazi racism, the institute was one of the few German scientific centres that was not closed down by the Allies. Seven years after the end of the war, the institute published a study on ‘mixed-race children’ based on research on children selected for sterilisation in the 1930s. It ended with the conclusion that ‘[e]specially the children’s strong animalism will surely cause certain problems’. See Walter Kirchner, ‘Untersuchung somatischer und psychischer Entwicklung bei Europäer-Neger-Mischlingen im Kleinkindalter unter Berücksichtigung der sozialen Verhältnisse’, quoted in Benno MüllerHill, Murderous Science. Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others, Germany 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 115. 30. Several studies conducted in the 1950’s reveal negative attitudes towards ‘the “niggerlovers” and their bastards’: Luise Frankenstein, Uneheliche Kinder von ausländischen Soldaten mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Mischlinge (Geneva, 1953), p. 29; see also Eyferth et al., Farbige Kinder in Deutschland und die Aufgaben ihrer Eingliederung, pp. 74–78. Magazine articles and stories of the 1950’s had a less aggressive attitude towards the children, rather portraying them as ‘tragic mulattos’, but presented their fathers in ‘Black Horror’-tradition as drunken, animal-like rapists. See Lester, in Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (eds), Blacks and German Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 122–128. 31. Gisela Fremgen, Und wenn du dazu noch schwarz bist: Berichte schwarzer Frauen in der Bundesrepublik (Bremen: Edition Con, 1984), p. 98. 32. Katharina Oguntoye, et al., Farbe bekennen, p. vii. 33. Schultz, ‘Introduction’, Showing Our Colours, p. xxiii. 34. Oguntoye and Opitz, ‘Introduction’, Showing Our Colours, p. xxi. 35. At least not positively, as one of course could argue that colonial and national socialist policies directed specifically against persons who were both German and black did construct them as a group with common, identifiable traits. 36. ‘Get to knows us. I.S.D. The Black German Initiative’, 1989, original in English. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop 485 37. As of 2002 there were ten regional chapters (in Berlin, Cologne, Gießen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hannover, Mannheim, Munich, Nürnberg and Stuttgart). 38. In the 1990s, ISD and ADEFRA have transformed themselves into organizations aimed at representing all blacks living in Germany. See www.isdonline.de and www.cybernomads.net. 39. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 40. The ensuing debate on racism within the German women’s movement was often irritating and painful to black women who were reduced to ‘racism experts’ by white women, expected to educate them and absolve them of their guilt. Nevertheless, white feminists/lesbians probably were the only segment of German society sincerely attempting to confront their own racism. 41. See Leory T. Hopkins (ed.), Who Is a German? Historical and Modern Perspectives on Africans in Germany (Washington DC: The American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 1999), pp. 18f. 42. The German/European left and the gay male movement only much later and with a lot more reluctance confronted the issue of racism. See Fatima El-Tayeb, ‘Begrenzte Horizonte: Queer Identity in der Festung Europa’, in Nina Zimmik and Mechthild Nagel (eds), Postkolonialer Feminismus: Ein Reader (forthcoming, 2003). 43. Ika Hügel, Chris Lange and May Ayim (eds), Entfernte Verbindungen. Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdrückung (Berlin: Orlanda, 1993); Cathy Gelbin, Kader Konouk and Peggy Piesche (eds), Aufbrüche: Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und jüdischen Frauen in Deutschland (Königsberg/Th: Ulrike Helmer, 1999). 44. Olumide Popoola and Beldan Sezen (eds), Talking Home: Heimat aus unserer eigenen Feder (Amsterdam: Blue Moon Press, 1999), Bibl. Angaben. Incidently, Gisela Fremgen’s ‘… und wenn du dazu noch schwarz bist’ (‘… and if you’re black, too, on top of that’), published 1984, chronicling the experiences of African and African American migrants (and one Afro-German) also only included women’s experiences. 45. As the editors reveal, this was not easy for the contributing women either: ‘A major portion of our teamwork consisted of encouraging the authors to write and discussing their texts with them. For some it was easier to reveal their experiences in conversations, which we then reworked into a narrative form (at the request of one author, a pseudonym was used)’. See Showing Our Colours, p. xxv. 46. ‘Introduction’, Showing Our Colours, p. xxii. 47. ‘Die farbigen Besatzungskinder feiern in diesem Jahr ihren 40. Geburtstag. Was macht Toxi heute?’, Frankfurter Rundschau (2 August 1986), p. ZB 5. Apparently, many white Germans – not the least those concerned with the plight of oppressed minorities – would much rather have hundreds of thousands isolated ‘tragic Mulattos’ in need of white support than a vocal, self-reliant black community. For a compelling example of white Germans’ patronizing attitude towards black German self-definition, see Hügel-Marshall, Invisible Woman, p. 122. 48. Members of ethnic minorities are severely under-represented in journalism, regional and national parliaments and public bodies supposed to reflect society’s structure (e.g. the ‘Rundfunkrat’, advisory board for public television and radio). See for example, Christoph Butterwegge et al., Medien und multikulturelle Gesellschaft (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1999); and Ralf Koch, ‘Medien mögen’s weiß’: Rassismus im Nachrichtengeschäft; Erfahrungen von Journalisten in Deutschland und den USA (München: Dt. Taschenbuch-Verl., 1996). 49. Loh and Güngör, Fear of a Kanak Planet, p. 23. 50. Loh and Güngör, Fear of a Kanak Planet, p. 103. 51. The dominant perception of ethnic minorities as ‘foreign’ rather than German often expresses itself in discourses about language. The unwillingness or inability of (Germanborn) ‘foreigners’ to master the German language is a common argument against immigration. The dominant role of migrant and minority artists within the German-language Hip Hop scene sheds an interesting light on these claims. 52. For a more balanced and reliable history of German Hip Hop see: Hannes Loh and Sascha Verlan, 20 Jahre HipHop in Deutschland (Wien: Hannibal, 2000). 53. Loh and Güngör, Fear of a Kanak Planet, p. 92. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 486 Gender and History 54. For example Hamburg, Stuttgart and Frankfurt, but interestingly, not Berlin. 55. See the collection of interviews by Loh and Güngör published in Fear of a Kanak Planet (the title an obvious homage to Public Enemy’s ‘Fear of a Black Planet’). 56. Since the end of state socialism in Europe, migration patterns are increasingly structured by the disparity between rich West and poor East. Eastern Europeans are by now the largest migrant group in Western Europe. Discourses on migration focus on the ‘visible Other’, though – Africans and Arab and Turkish Muslims. To include Eastern Europeans in the concept of ‘people of color’ would therefore distort differences in perception and treatment due to Eastern Europeans status as ‘white’ and ‘European’ (with the important exception of Roma). This notwithstanding, migrants from the East of Europe are subject to – sometimes racialised – patterns of discrimination in the West. 57. ‘“Schwarz” verstehen wir politisch. Die afrodeutsche Hip Hop-Gruppe Advanced Chemistry über ihre Erfahrungen mit alltäglichem Rassismus’, die tageszeitung (25 März 1993), p. 16. 58. I am concerned here with the interaction of Hip Hop culture and new models of black (post-ethnic) identity in Germany, not with Hip Hop as an art form. The artists I am focusing on exemplify the new discourse, but are not necessarily ‘better’ artists than others not mentioned. 59. Founded in 1973 as a youth self-help organisation in New York’s South Bronx, the Zulu Nation has by now become an internationally active group, trying to create an awareness among contemporary Hip Hop fans of the culture’s history and political message (as they perceive it). For the German version see www.zulu-family.de 60. See Hannes Loh, ‘20 Jahre Afro-deutsch’, www.brotherskeepers.de 61. The CD’s title Lightkultur (‘light culture’), was an ironic reference to the then-raging debate about a German Leitkultur, or ‘leading culture’, supposedly threatened by multiculturalism. 62. On the naïvité of the groups critics on their own uncontested white Germanness see Bakri Bakhit, ‘Brothers Keepers, Sisters Keepers. Ich bin kein Rassist, meine Frau ist doch Jugoslawin’ (30 November 2001). See also: www.inro.de/magazin/magazin&einzelartikel. htm or Hartwig Vens in konkret 4/01 for a symptomatic differentiation between (good) ‘migrant’ Hip Hop and the (assimilationist) ‘so called Afro-German’ ‘Brothers Keepers’ project. 63. Loh and Güngör, Fear of a Kanak Planet, p. 265. 64. Loh and Güngör, Fear of a Kanak Planet, p. 268. 65. Tyron Ricketts, ‘Afro-deutsch’, 2000. 66. Loh and Güngör, Fear of a Kanak Planet, p. 271. 67. See ‘Allers verscheissender Gören-Rap’, biwidus (15 April 1996); ‘Tic Tac Toe – Die ganze Wahrheit’, biwidus (11 April 1997); ‘… Tic Tac Toe am Scheideweg’, Rhein Zeitung (21 November 1997); www.laut.de/wortlaut.artists/t/tic_tac_toe/biographie/index.htm 68. The idealisation of juvenile machismo also means compliance in the instrumentalisation of minorities, which in public discourses, culturally, politically and socially are inscribed with certain backwards traits or customs (misogyny, homophobia, nationalism), which then are classified as ‘ethnic’ rather than as part of a general conservative backlash. A projection that not only works to reaffirm the majority’s cultural superiority but also allows the exclusions of ‘backwards’ minorities from full participation in modern, democratic societies. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003.