Born in Kerala, the Indian activist Arathil Candeth Narayanan Nambiar dedicated much of his life fighting for the Indian Independence. In the 1920s, Berlin became an important centre of his activism. Initially working together with communists, he fled Germany after being arrested by the National Socialists. However, he returned to the city in 1942, this time working with another activist, who sought to collaborate with fascist Germany and Italy in the fight against British colonialism in India.

The biography of the journalist and later diplomat A.C.N. Nambiar points to the large international networks of anti-colonial activists and also the different political alliances in this field.

This text was written as part of the cooperative exhibition "Stand in Solidarity! Black resistance and global anti-colonialism in Berlin, 1919-1933" by the Decolonial Culture of Remembrance in the City and the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Museum in 2023.

Andrea Jimenez Berroa was born in Hamburg in 1902. Her parents were Margaretha Filter from Hamburg and the Afro-Cuban classical pianist José Manuel "Lico" Jiménez Berroa from Cuba. At the age of 17, she married Alexandre Ndambe Manga Bell, the son of the Duala king Rudolf Manga Bell, who had been executed by the German colonial power in Cameroon a few years earlier. Andrea Manga Bell later worked as a draftswoman and editor for the art magazine Gebrauchsgraphik in Berlin, where she met the writer Joseph Roth. She and Roth went into exile in Nice and Paris in 1933. She lived and worked in France until her death in 1985.

Her story is not very well known in Germany. When the 1968 movement in the Federal Republic of Germany focused on exile literature during the National Socialist era, interest in her was limited to her relationship with Joseph Roth. She was only mentioned as the wife of a Cameroonian politician and the partner of a well-known writer. Very little is known about her achievements as a graphic designer and editor, her influence on Joseph Roth's work and her work in Paris after 1945. Unfortunately, there are only a few statements from her that are publicly available.

The Cameroonian Louis Brody (Bebe M’pessa) was a well-known stage and screen performer during the Weimar and Nazi periods. Although a gifted actor, the range of roles he was offered was increasingly limited and he came to incorporate the figure of the exotic Other for German audiences. At the same time, Brody actively challenged racialised depictions of Black people through his involvement in several Black anti-colonial and anti-racist organisations in Germany, including the African Welfare Association and later the League for the Defence of the Negro Race. His political activism extended to writing and in 1930 he wrote and performed in the revue show Sonnenaufgang im Morgenland, which sought to celebrate Black history and culture. Brody died in Berlin in 1952.

In the few decades of formal German colonialism on the African continent, in the Pacific and in China, the majority of today's ethnological collections ended up in German museums: scientists, military personnel and missionaries came into possession of millions of artifacts, often through fraudulent exchange or violent robbery. In addition, researchers and military personnel also plundered ancestral graves and brought human remains to Germany, where they were misused for pseudo-scientific research and in some cases are still stored in museums today.

Cultural treasures taken to Germany under questionable and often obscure circumstances during the colonial era can still be found in several institutions in Leipzig. Alongside the GRASSI Museum of Ethnology, these include the University and the Leipzig Missionary Society. However, since its foundation in the 19th century, the GRASSI Museum has occupied a highly prominent position in the city's history.

The colonial aspirations of the German Empire at the end of the 19th century promoted academic description, ordering, and mapping of territories, languages, ​​and groups of people.

In this context, within a few decades, the disciplines of African studies, Arabic studies (“Oriental Institute”), ethnology, and geography established themselves as independent institutes at the University of Leipzig. The often prejudiced academic work contributed to the racist construction of the “foreigner”. As stereotypical ideas about “the Orient,” “Africa,” and a racializing classification of human groups became entrenched, the devaluation of non-European culture became the social norm. The findings obtained in the supposedly scientific studies could be used to spread the ideology of “white superiority” and thus justify colonial appropriation.

Despite the critical questioning and reappraisal of the colonial production of knowledge by the disciplines themselves for several years, the legacy of this knowledge tradition continues to have an impact today – including in Leipzig.

There are various traces of colonial history in Bremen's city center, which reflect the interplay of many factors that contributed to the colonial exploitation of Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands and the associated rise of Bremen as a trading city.

The stops on this tour mark the nodes of colonial contexts, which result from the influence of individual merchants, missionary work and the trade in colonial goods. This includes the monument to Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the cotton exchange and Böttcherstrasse, the Hachez & Co. chocolate delicatessen and the headquarters of the North German Missionary Society.

Sunday, November 15, 2020, 2:00 p.m

November 15 marks the 136th anniversary of the start of the Berlin Africa Conference. On the occasion of this date, the Dekoloniale of Memory Culture in the City project convenes the Dekoloniale Berlin Africa Conference. The event will be broadcast live from the project room at Wilhelmstraße 92 in Berlin-Mitte. The project room at Wilhelmstraße 92 is located between the former locations of the Reich Chancellery and the Foreign Office, the scenes of the events at the time. The envoys of the European powers, the USA and the Ottoman Empire met in the Reich Chancellery in 1884 at the invitation of the German Empire and the Republic of France to agree on the rules for the colonial division of the continent and thus also on the exploitation of Africa.

While at the historic Africa Conference 19 white men balanced their colonial interests on the African continent over a period of four months, we would now like to convene an anti-colonial panel consisting of 19 women of African origin. The Dekoloniale Berlin Africa Conference is both the foreword and the start of Dekoloniale of Memory Culture in the City.

With: the team from Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City, Tarik Tesfu and the 19 conference participants.

On Thursday, September 1, 2022, we will open the Dekoloniale Festival 2022 in the south of Berlin and take a closer look at the districts of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Tempelhof-Schöneberg. We start at Mariannenplatz and Studio 1 in the Bethanien art district and approach the emancipatory and resistant potential of [de]colonial migrations with workshops, panel discussions, theater and performance. As in the period between the Berlin Africa Conference in 1884/85 and the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, these Berlin districts are still shaped by numerous networks of actors* of African origin, which, despite their significant influence, are neither anchored in collective memory nor visible in public space are.

On Friday, September 2nd, we will gather with our guests from the former German colonies in Africa on Mariannenplatz for the »Dekoloniale Africa Conference«.

This year's festival focuses in particular on the artistic works and urban interventions of the 3 Dekoloniale Berlin Residents 2022, as well as biographies of significance to colonial migrants and places associated with them, which we will visit as part of a full-day, decolonial city walk on Saturday, September 3rd.

On Sunday, September 4th, we will conclude the Dekoloniale Festival 2022 in exchange with our partners Contemporary And (C&), the Berlin Biennale 12 and the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum.

And: At the end of each festival day there are exciting performances!

The "Dekoloniale Festival" condenses and reflects on the themes associated with the overall "Dekoloniale" project in artistic and discursive contributions. So this year we were on the road in East Berlin: From October 15th to 17th we opened the revised permanent exhibition »Looking Back – The First German Colonial Exhibition of 1896 in Berlin-Treptow« in the Treptow-Köpenick District Museum. We presented the artistic interventions of the three “Dekoloniale Berlin Residency 2021” artists to the public and talked about whether and how a decolonization of the museum is possible.

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If you want to watch the videos with subtitles, you can find them in the lower bar under »CC«, whereupon you get a choice between German, English or no subtitles.

Why are African visitors to Berlin still asking in vain for an adequate place to commemorate the notorius “Berlin Conference”? How far was it from the Deutsche Bank Headquarters to the High Command of the Imperial Protection Force? What is the association between “M-Straße” in Berlin and the concentration camp Sachsenhausen and when did activists of African origin first demand for black representation in German parliament?

In cooperation with interfilm Festival, Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City invites you to a cinematic and digital city walk to investigate these questions more deeply. Incorporating brief historical presentations and short films on selected topics, the city walk can be taken both in digital space and in the actual district Berlin-Mitte.

Gemeinsam mit Vitjitua Ndjiharine (NAM/USA), Maya Alam (D) und Lulu Jemimah (UGA) – den 3 Künstlerinnen der Dekoloniale Berlin Residency 2022 – sowie Historiker*innen und Aktivist*innen besuchten wir bedeutende historische Orte des antikolonialen Widerstands im Berliner Süden. Während die künstlerischen Arbeiten und urbanen Interventionen der Dekoloniale Berlin Residents 2022 im Zentrum des Festivals standen, besichtigten wir im Rahmen unseres dekolonialen Stadtspaziergangs darüber hinaus Orte kolonialmigrantischer Biografien und ordneten diese durch kurze Inputs historisch ein.

Mit: Dr. Kwesi Aikins, Dr. Robbie Aitkens, Anna Yeboah, Christian Kopp, Maya Alam, Lulu Jemimah, Vitjitua Ndijarine, Judith Bauernfeind, Philipp Kojo Metz, Dr. Imani Tafari Ama u.v.m.

After decades of criticism from Black/African actors and solidarity organizations, Nachtigalplatz and Lüderitzstraße in Berlin's “African Quarter” were renamed on December 2, 2022. The film documentary "Uhuru Amani Umoja" by B'net Rahal interviews five activists about the history of the district, the culture of remembrance in Germany and the significance of renaming streets in the sense of a critical remembrance of German colonial history. She reports on the African resistance against the Germans and captures the ceremonial renaming ceremonies in the “African Quarter” on camera.

Note : The film consists of three parts, which are presented at different locations in the “African Quarter”. If you are interested, the complete documentary is also available in its full version for viewing and forwarding at the following Vimeo link:

Full version: Uhuru Amani Umoja

Im 19. Jahrhundert gab es zwischen Hamburg und dem 1821 unabhängig gewordenen Peru Handelsbeziehungen, die entscheidend zu Hamburgs Wohlstand beitrugen. Der Rohstoff Guano spielte dabei eine besondere Rolle. Er ist ein organischer Dünger, der aus sonnengetrockneten Exkrementen von Seevögeln, deren Knochen und Eierschalen besteht. Millionen von Seevögeln nisten auf den kleinen, nah an der Küste liegenden Guano-Inseln. Ihre Nahrung finden sie in dem großen Fischreichtum des kalten Humboldt-Stromes. Der Begriff Guano (huanu) stammt aus der Quechua-Sprache und bedeutet „Dung“ oder „Mist“.

Es war der Forschungsreisende Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859), der 1802 während seines Aufenthaltes in Peru erste Guano-Proben von den Chincha-Inseln zur Analyse nach Europa schickte. Die Untersuchung ergab, dass sie besonders viel Stickstoff enthielten, mehr als jeglicher bislang in Europa bekannte Dünger.

Die im 19. Jahrhundert beginnende Industrialisierung Europas erforderte steigende Erträge in der Landwirtschaft für die Ernährung der wachsenden Bevölkerung in den Städten. Die Inhaltsstoffe des Peru-Guano – Kalium, Stickstoff- und Phosphorsalze – entsprachen der empfohlenen Düngung der Äcker. Die ab 1840 einsetzende große Nachfrage des Peru-Guanos im globalen Handel führte zum vollständigen Abbau der Guano-Vorräte auf den drei größten Inseln, den Chincha-Inseln, innerhalb von vier Jahrzehnten.

The life story of the Cameroonian Heinrich Sam Dibonge demonstrates the continued impact that colonialism and its aftermath had on the lives of Black men and women who moved between colonial Africa and Germany. Born into an elite family in Douala, Cameroon during the time of German colonisation. Dibonge, like many of his generation was educated by the colonisers before entering the service of a German trader. This brought him to Germany on several occasions, including in the months immediately before the outbreak of the First World War. At the war’s end Dibonge was effectively stranded in Hamburg – he never returned to Douala and he never saw his Cameroonian wife and young family again.

A German colonial subject, not a citizen pre-1914, in post-war Germany, which no longer possessed an overseas empire, Dibonge was now effectively stateless. In increasingly difficult circumstances he fought to create a life in Germany. In the war’s aftermath he found success as a skilled worker with Theodor Zeise, married again, and was connected to the wider Black community in Germany. At the same time, he served a prison sentence and was excluded from German citizenship. Following the Nazi seizure of power Dibonge’s situation and that of his German wife deteriorated rapidly and the couple was subjected to marginalisation and violence.

The life stories of the Cameroonian Jacob N’dumbe and his Berlin-born daughter Martha, demonstrate the significant challenges that Black men and women faced in creating lives in pre-1945 Germany. Jacob originally arrived in Germany as part of the Cameroonian group participating at 1896 Berlin Colonial Exhibition. While many of his contemporaries returned home at the exhibition’s end, he chose to remain in Berlin and eventually settle there. He trained as a blacksmith, married, and started a family. Daughter Martha was born in 1902.

Economic instability and increasing social and political exclusion marked both their lives: Jacob was denied German citizenship during the Kaiserreich, he struggled to find stable employment and his marriage fell apart. All of which impacted on his mental health. Martha too, struggled to make a living and turned to petty crime and prostitution. Under the Nazis she was deemed to an ‘Asocial’ and eventually she would be incarcerated in the concentration camp Ravensbrück, where she died in February 1945.

Construction engineer, war veteran, singer, dancer, film and theatre performer, anti-colonial and anti-racist activist, Pan-Africanist, and Communist – the Cameroonian Joseph Ekwe Bilé was all these things and more. Without doubt Bilé was one of the most important German-based Black political activists of the Weimar era. His active involvement in the intersecting transnational networks of the Communist International and Pan-Africanism give a voice to Germany’s Black community. He cooperated with prominent and influential Black activists such George Padmore, Tiemoko Garan Kouyate, James Ford and Jomo Kenyatta, publicly denouncing the violence of European empires and demanding equal rights for Black people worldwide. At the same time, a skilled performer, he shared the theatrical stage with global Black stars Josephine Baker in Vienna and Paul Robeson in Berlin.

Street names are used for orientation in the urban space, but they also fulfill political commemorative tasks: By naming streets after people, places or events, these are honored and anchored in the collective memory of the city population. They are therefore always an expression of historiography from the point of view of those who had or have the power to decide on street names.

For decades there have been controversies initiated by civil society about street names that honor colonial-racist actors or deeds. As a rule, a critical contextualization (e.g. by means of explanatory signs) and, in extreme cases, a renaming are required for these, because colonial violence and contempt for human beings should not be glorified in the cityscape.

This also applies to Leipzig, because here too there are numerous street names that illustrate the city's involvement in colonial racism. In contrast to West German cities, many streets with a colonial background were already renamed during the GDR era. Since traces were quietly removed, a comprehensive historical review of colonialism was not carried out in East Germany either.

In the case of street renaming, there is also an opportunity to change perspectives from the perpetrators to the formerly colonized, thereby making resistance to colonial rule and colonial ideologies visible. The colonial-historical reference of the name is preserved, but previously neglected actors and invisible stories come into public awareness. An alternative name for the Ernst-Pinkert-Strasse dedicated to the founder of the Leipzig Zoo would be Hassan Essahas, who died of pneumonia in 1906 during a "people show" in the Leipzig Zoo.

Mangi Meli was a chief of the Chagga in today's Old Moshi at Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. Unlike his father Mangi Rindi Mandara, Meli opposed the German claim to power. At first he successfully fought against the so-called "Schutztruppe", but in the end he had to surrender to the colonial force. Thus (Old) Moshi became the German power centre on Kilimanjaro.

In 1900, Mangi Meli and other chiefs and leaders were hanged for allegedly conspiring against the Germans. The trauma of the execution still resonates in songs and stories that have been handed down.

Melis' death, however, did not bring an end to the cruelty: his head is said to have been cut off and sent to Germany, so Melis' wife told her grandson Isaria. To this day Isaria is trying to ensure that Mangi Meli's head returns to Old Moshi.

In fact, archival documents prove that several ancestral remains from Moshi had been sent to the Ethnological Museum in Berlin for the purpose of racist research. Despite intensive efforts, Meli's head has not yet been identified. Since 2019, an exhibition by Flinn Works and a donor-funded memorial in Old Moshi commemorate Mangi Meli.

His story is exemplary for the local resistance against colonialism in German East Africa as well as for the brutality of German rule. It also bears witness to the ongoing injustice of trafficking of ancestral remains in the name of science.

The Cameroonian Quane a Dibobe, better known as Martin Dibobe, was one of the foremost African political activists in Germany in the pre-1945 period. He arrived in Germany in 1896 as a participant at the First German Colonial Exhibition – effectively a human zoo, settled in Berlin, and enjoyed a long-career working for the city’s transport system.

Although much about his life remains unclear, Dibobe’s activism is best evidenced by the remarkable 1919 32-point petition he initiated and handed to the German authorities. While Dibobe and his fellow petitioners pledged loyalty to the new Republic they called for a complete overhaul of the colonial relationship between Germany and Cameroon and they demanded equality for Africans in both Africa and Germany.

In the former port areas of Überseestadt, the colonial past is visible in various places and continues to this day through injustices in global trade in goods. But Bremen's self-image as a traditional trading city has so far hardly been associated with the colonial foundation of its wealth - historical and ongoing conditions of exploitation often go unmentioned. The advantage that colonialism and the colonial infrastructure represented for Bremen's trade in colonial goods becomes clear in the following tour of Bremen's Überseestadt.

Regina Bruce / Savi de Tové was born in Wuppertal in 1900 as the daughter of Togolese colonial migrants. As a toddler, she traveled all over Europe with her family and her show business. She spent her childhood and youth with foster parents in northern Germany. In Hamburg she finally trained as a teacher and worked in a children's home. Here she was part of the black community that fought against anti-black racism in the Weimar Republic. In the mid 1920s she left Germany with her two sisters and moved to Togo, where she died in 1991 after a long life.

Her remarkable biography is part of German-Togolese colonial and migration history. Regina Bruce / Savi de Tové's life also tells of the possibilities and limits of action for a black woman in the 20th century.

When she was born, Regina Bruce / Savi de Tové was given several unknown Ewe first names. Since she speaks about herself as Regina in the audio recordings, I'll use that first name here.

Over 120 years after Regina Bruce / Savi de Tové's birth, I am trying to understand her biography. What she felt and thought herself could often not be found in the sources. Shortly after completing her life story, I came across audio recordings in which she, at the age of 75, talked about her life up until around 1930. This recording created a new image; I could insert quotes from her and put her perspective in the foreground.

Nevertheless, it is essential to show from which perspective I write Regina Bruce / Savi de Tové's biography: As a white German woman, I have been shaped by colonial history. Even though I take a feminist perspective that is critical of racism, much of my knowledge comes from Eurocentric archives. With a different background of knowledge and experience, Regina Bruce's / Savi de Tové's story could certainly be told differently.

In this second edition of the Dekoloniale [Re]visionen Denkwerkstatt we devote ourselves to the long history and new present of restitution claims. How do contemporary African cultures of remembrance shape themselves in the absence of their cultural/sacred objects and human bones from colonial contexts? How (radically) does the museum as an institution have to be rethought? How can this ›New African Museum‹ become a lively place of polylogue, commemoration and exhibition – with the participation of civil society?

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), headquartered in Wedding, is now a federal agency for infectious and non-communicable diseases. As a public health facility, it has become known to a broad majority of the population, especially since the Corona pandemic of 2020.

The institute is named after Robert Koch (1843-1910), who, along with Louis Pasteur, is considered the most essential founder of scientific bacteriology. The physician, microbiologist, and hygienist rose to world fame with his anthrax research, the discovery of the cholera pathogen, and especially, the discovery of the pathogen that causes tuberculosis.

Less well-known is Robert Koch's involvement in (German) colonialism. The scientist, also considered the founder of tropical medicine and hygiene in Germany, repeatedly pointed out that the fight against tropical diseases - especially malaria - "would be equivalent to the peaceful conquest of the most beautiful and fertile countries on earth." In his view, bacteriology and colonialism shared a common dream: "mastering" diseases such as "tropical fever."

This text is an edited excerpt from the book “Berlin. Eine postkoloniale Metropole.”

In Potsdam, the reconstruction of the tower of the Garrison Church is in progress: a project that has been fought over for thirty years, since the church stands for the connection between church and military history like no other in Germany. In spring 2020, the Garrison Church Foundation presented a concept for a permanent exhibition. Whether the foundation's activities do justice to the burdened legacy of the church is the subject of heated debate.

Part of this legacy is the work of two pastors in the garrison church in connection with the suppression of the Yìhétuán Yùndòng - the "Movement of Associations for Justice and Harmony" - in the so-called Boxer War in China and during the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama in "German- Southwest Africa", today's Namibia.

The two clergymen were contemporaries. Johannes Kessler , born in 1865, was court chaplain and garrison chaplain in Potsdam from 1893. Max Schmidt, who was one year older, replaced him as garrison chaplain in 1906 and as court chaplain in 1908.

This article was created in close cooperation with "Lernort Garrison Church", who did further research on the colonial legacy of the Garrison Church and the "Day of Potsdam".

The Eulenburg Expedition to East Asia (1859–1862), named after its leader Friedrich Albrecht zu Eulenburg (1815-1881), seconded by Prussia and representing the German Customs Union, is considered to be the beginning of modern German-East Asian relations.

The expedition aimed to establish diplomatic and commercial relations between East-Asia and the German states, marking Germany’s entry into the Asian political and colonial scene. The expedition visited Japan, China, and Siam. To this end, diplomatic treaties were concluded with the above countries which were, however, unequal – a commonality of Western interactions with Asian countries during the high age of imperialism and colonialism.

The importance of this expedition cannot be understated. The establishment of diplomatic relations between Germany and East Asia had multifaceted consequences in both regional and world history, related to the history of German imperialism, and the history of modernization in Japan and China.

Up to his death in 1950 the Togolese man Amemenjong, later known as Joseph Garber, lived in Berlin for almost five decades. His life and that of his Berlin-born children illustrate the ways in which the lives of Black Germans were shaped by colonialism and its legacies and later by the racial policies of the Nazis.

It was the empire which brought Garber to Germany. First in 1891 he came for educational reasons and then in 1896 he came to be put on display as part of a human zoo staged at the First German Colonial Exhibition in Berlin-Treptow. At the exhibition’s end he decided to stay, trained as a tailor, and made military jackets for the German army during World War, before being called up to fight. In Berlin-Neukölln he married in 1910, started a family, and ran a successful men’s tailors up until the Great Depression.

Never a German citizen, only a German colonial subject, the end of the German Empire left Joseph and his children effectively stateless. This lack of legal protection rendered the family increasingly vulnerable once the Nazis came to power. Like all Black residents, Joseph and his now grown-up children were marginalised and subjected to increasing levels of discrimination. Joseph was arrested several times because of a lack of identity papers, while his children had little option but to scrape a living through performing in exotic shows and Nazi propaganda films glorifying the colonial past.

Joseph and his children survived the Nazi regime. In the post-1945 period all four Garber siblings left Germany and sought to build new lives elsewhere.

This tour uncovers colonial street names like Kiautschoustraße, Pekingerplatz, and Samoastraße in Berlin-Wedding, tracing the legacy of German colonialism in Qingdao, Beijing, and Apia.

Although short-lived and largely confined, German colonial ambition in China had a profound impact. It hastened the downfall of the Chinese Empire and sparked a student movement that changed China’s trajectory.

The aftermath of the Eight Allied Nations’ suppression of the Yihetuan Movement (1900-1901) also remains tangible in German museums, where a considerable number of valuable artefacts looted from China are housed.

This tour will also explore the interconnectedness between Germany’s spheres of influence in China and Samoa, delving into the exploitation of natural resources and cheap labor that fueled German capitalist gains.

How did Deutsche Bank artistically depict its involvement in the colonial project? Since when has the colonial racist image of people of African descent willing to serve white Europeans been cultivated in Berlin? Where was the world's largest collection of looted ancestors/human remains? How did colonial migrants from Cameroon and East Africa look back on 35 years of German colonial rule in 1919?

Our UNEXPECTED LESSONS Walk leads through Berlin's old and new government quarter, from where European and German colonialism received decisive impulses. Activists and experts from Namibia, Tanzania, the USA and Germany living in Berlin talk about the German colonizers will to exterminate, Berlin's racist traditions, unscrupulous collecting mania and anti-colonial resistance at prominent but hardly noticed places.

The epitome of a transnational revolutionary, Virendranath Chattophadyaya, or ‘Chatto’, dedicated his entire adult life to the cause of Indian nationalism and the fight against British colonialism. His revolutionary fervour led him from his studies in London across Europe – in search of support and a willing audience for the global campaign against the British Raj.

The central node of his European Odyssey was Berlin. Here he cofounded the Berlin Committee, later known as the Indian Independence Committee (Indisches Unabhängigkeitskomite), an organisation that forged an alliance with Germany during the First World War to aid Indian sedition.

During and after the war from bases in Berlin and Stockholm, Chatto travelled to conferences and built personal connections to other socialist and anti-imperial radicals and government figures, securing vital funding and cooperation across Europe. He brought such further afield colonial locations as Singapore, Constantinople and Afghanistan into a global network, spreading anti-British propaganda to fellow Indians displaced across the globe by the military and labour needs of the empire.

Chatto’s life shines a light on Berlin as an anti-imperial hub and gives insight into the life of the cosmopolitan revolutionary, being forced to migrate for personal safety and in the service of the anti-colonial cause. At once intellectually stimulated and put in acute danger by his life work, Chatto also underwent political disappointments and transformations as his revolutionary journey pulled him further to the left ideologically and to the east spatially. As Communism developed after the Russian Revolution, he saw the far left as the only true ally to the anti-colonial cause. He moved to Moscow, where he would eventually meet his end at the hands of Stalin, leaving behind a legacy of great admiration in anti-imperial circles.

Windhoek, the capital of Namibia was first founded in 1840 by Oorlam Chief Jonker Afrikaner, who named it after the Winterhoek Mountains in Tulbagh, South Africa, where he grew up.Yet in 1890, history was rewritten to say that it was founded by Germany’s Imperial Commissioner Curt von François, who occupied the place and founded the fortress Alte Feste. This historical inaccuracy would later, in 1965, be cemented by the erection of his statue hailing François as the founder of Windhoek.

This incident is a strong reminder of the fact that Windhoek’s monuments are reflecting the world views of those commissioning or accepting them. This tour describes various colonial and anti-colonial monuments in Windhoek.