This article first appeared on Spiegel.de in February 2017.
The African, who is later considered an icon, is initially degraded to an object. He was "tall, strong, well-fed", his hair "shiny brown-black, almost completely arranged in small tight spirals", the lower lip "somewhat reddish". This is how an official report records him after an anthropologist examined the man from overseas. "No. 76" is emblazoned above the note, illustrated with photographs of his head, from the side, from the front. Prussian pedantry.
In the summer of 1896, Martin Dibobe, son of a Duala chief in Cameroon, is supposed to settle a human zoo in Treptow Park with about a hundred other Africans. The 19-year-old was shipped to Berlin on a steamer of the Woermann Line, whose colossi travel between the empire and the colonies.
His fellow sufferers were also summoned from protected areas conquered by the Prussian military, from Cameroon, Togo, Tanzania and Namibia. Among them are Swahili, Maasai and Ewe, Herero and Nama. They are greeted with body searches in the service of racial research.
The Berlin Völkerschau is called the "German Colonial Exhibition" and is intended to put the Germans into imperialist fever. The belated nation is mightily proud of its colonies and wants to measure its strength against prosperous great powers such as Great Britain or France. After all, a good seven million visitors gawk at "Schauneger", who live in a village of huts made of wood and straw and stage "caravans" during the day.
"No. 76" also has to simulate African everyday life, misused as an exotic exhibit of a freak show. It is Martin Dibobe's initiation experience - after which he takes an extraordinary path. The "Schauneger" takes root. In the capital of the racist empire, he developed into a personality who is now celebrated as a pioneer of black self-empowerment.
Quick ascent to 1st class train driver
Martin Dibobe rises through the ranks, both professionally and socially. He first became a craftsman, then a train driver of the Berlin subway. Later, as a political avant-gardist, he fought for the emancipation of his homeland and married a German woman in between. Katharina Oguntoye, a Berlin historian and activist who researches African migration, praises him as a "role model and inspiration".
His life's journey: a discovery. In the meantime, the inventory of the colonial past has become a trend in historical science. For example, an exhibition at the German Historical Museum is currently commemorating the crimes of German colonial rulers, such as the genocide of the Herero and Nama, with hippopotamus whip and machine gun as memorials. The descendants of these two peoples in present-day Namibia have sued the German government for compensation payments because of the massacres in 1904.
When Dibobe arrived in the empire of Wilhelm II in 1896, he had already learned to read and write in a missionary school in his homeland. A pastor baptized him, and instead of Quane by first name, he is now called Martin.
A report in the »Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung«, published in 1902, registers confidence after the Völkerschau in Treptow: »He liked it so much in Berlin that he asked to be allowed to stay here, and so he was apprenticed to a locksmith.« The ambiguous headline: "Dark Existences - From the Professional Life of Berlin Negroes." A taste of everyday racism in the authoritarian state.
Kafkaesque scenes at the initiation of marriage
At the turn of the century, the metropolis of Berlin was in a state of upheaval towards modernity, with myriads of lanterns and glowing shop windows, with bars and cinemas. Meanwhile, blacks from the colonies are rare, everywhere in the Empire. They go to school to be trained as missionaries in their home countries; they assist African researchers as language assistants. The Africans who stay after the Berlin Völkerschau go into the trades, just like Martin Dibobe did at first.
He worked as a locksmith at the Siemens factory, lived near Rosenthaler Platz and fell in love with the landlord's daughter. The initiation of the marriage with Helene becomes Kafkaesque: the registry office, the colonial office, the foreign office refuse to marry the undocumented person.
Finally, the Basel Mission in Cameroon, whose priest had once lifted him out of the baptismal water, serves as a matchmaker. It certifies Dibobe's identity. The supplicant is now the bridegroom; he is said to have had two children with his wife.
Not everything in Dibobe's biography is precisely documented. One thing is clear: outside the family cocoon, he becomes a symbolic figure of technological progress. The Siemens worker was promoted to a driver of the U1, the first underground railway in the German Empire; The line had taken more than five years to build.
"Through diligence and impeccable conduct, I have acquired a position of trust and have been working as a 1902st class platoon commander since 1 in an undismissed position," Dibobe later noted. His position is as up-to-date as that of an IT specialist in a start-up today. Willpower, skill, luck and the courage of his bosses make the up-and-coming fairy tale come true.
Social Democrats in Berlin, rebels in Africa
Wearing a train driver's cap and coat, the black Prussian is a model migrant. But not a well-behaved subject: on a trip to the valleys of his homeland, he becomes an exporter of revolutionary ideas. In 1907, according to historians, Martin Dibobe, sent by the Reich government, helped build a railway line in northern Cameroon. Locals cut aisles through the primeval forests – under hair-raising conditions.
Dibobe opens the Chiefs' eyes to "the power of socialism." In a meeting, he preached self-determination, as he later recalled in a letter. The rebel, inflamed by the workers' movement in red Berlin, carries the class struggle into the jungle.
He also maintains the spirit of contradiction in his adopted country. Dibobe's Legacy is a petition from June 1919, early Weimar Republic. Together with 17 other German Cameroonians, he slammed them onto the tables of Reich President Ebert, the National Assembly, and the Reich Colonial Office.
On behalf of the signatories, Dibobe assures Germany of "unbreakable, firm loyalty" and opposes "the robbery of the colonies", probably out of fear that things could get worse among the English or French. Otherwise, the petition reads like a best-of of African liberation rhetoric. First and most important point: "The natives demand independence and equality."
In Liberia, his trace is lost
This is followed by 31 other demands, such as an end to corporal punishment and forced labour, abuse and insults; as well as fair wages, compulsory education, the right to study and marriage between natives and whites. Point 31: A "permanent representative of our race" was to enter the Reichstag or the National Assembly – namely "our dual man Martin Dibobe, who is known to us as prudent and prudent".
Comrades-in-arms from the Afro-German scene sign. The manifesto is one of the most important political documents of African migrants in the first half of the twentieth century. Dibobe longs for a social democratic utopia in the former German West Africa, co-established by the Ebert government. But his cries fade away. The colonies, wrested from the victorious powers after the First World War, are no longer an issue for those in power.
Meanwhile, in the subway, Dibobe is knocked off the goat. He is considered too rebellious; his job will probably cost him his participation in a workers' demonstration. In 1922 he took off without his family on a steamer to Cameroon. In front of the port of Douala, French refuse to allow him to enter. The new colonial occupiers fear that he could instigate a revolt. Dibobe travels on to Liberia, where his trace is lost. He will probably die there.
Since last autumn, a memorial plaque has commemorated Martin Dibobe, at Kuglerstraße 44 in Prenzlauer Berg, his address in 1918, a white, well-kept old building. It honors a citizen of the world who anticipated the black struggle for independence in the early 20th century – as probably the first Afro-German social democrat in history.