The stories of women who resisted colonial despotism and subjugation during German colonial rule in Cameroon from 1884 to 1916 are barely documented and are therefore often unknown. This unfamiliarity often leads to the idea that anti-colonial resistance was and is purely male.

In fact, however, there are occasional references to women in oral traditions: They helped their husbands escape forced labour by singing songs or giving speeches to warn them. Women also played leading roles in the resistance, as the case of Adda Nkollo shows. Adda Nkollo was a woman from Mvog-Ada who resisted the German colonial administration so successfully in 1907 that she was eventually banished.

Her story can help to question the widespread invisibility of female resistance fighters under colonialism and further document the history of resistance.

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. At the age of 17 she married Alexandre Ndumbe Manga Bell, the son of the Duala king Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, who had been hanged a few years earlier by the German colonial power in Cameroon.

Andrea Manga Bell later worked as an illustrator and editor at the art magazine Gebrauchsgraphik in Berlin, where she met the Austrian writer Joseph Roth. Together with him she went into exile in Nice and Paris in 1933. She lived and worked in France until her death in 1985.

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

Today, Flensburg is often marketed as a "city of sugar and rum." Sugar and the byproduct of sugar production, cane rum, were obtained from sugarcane cultivation - primarily in the Caribbean - until the cultivation of sugar beet began in Europe. As the third largest port city in the Danish state until 1864, Flensburg benefited from favourable trading conditions with the Danish colonies in the Caribbean, now known as St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John (part of the US Virgin Islands). Sugar production was closely linked to the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economy. After Flensburg ceased to be part of the Danish state in 1864, it became part of Prussian/German colonialism. Changes in tax laws made trade with the Danish colonies in the Caribbean more challenging. Consequently, plain rum for Flensburg's rum production was primarily imported from the British colony of Jamaica.

This article focuses on Flensburg's involvement as part of the Danish state. Using the colonial commodity of sugar as an example, the colonial relationships between Osu Castle in Ghana, the plantation economy in St. Croix in the Caribbean, and the city of Flensburg are examined. In all three locations, the history of exploitation has left visible marks on urban structures and landscapes.

The extent to which Flensburg merchants were involved in and benefited from trade is exemplified by the Christiansen family. The romanticised self-image of "capable merchants and sailors" often presents a one-sided narrative. It overlooks the fact that the unpaid labour of enslaved people in the Caribbean was a cornerstone of the merchants' prosperity in Flensburg.

The Chinese woman Hu Lanqi was a political activist who lived in Berlin between 1929 and 1933. She was active in communist circles in Berlin and fought against Japanese imperialism in China. Due to her political activities, she was arrested by the National Socialists in 1933 and imprisoned in a Berlin women's prison. She wrote numerous articles about her stay and became known in communist and literary circles.

Once back in China, Hu was appointed China's first female general and organized a women's corps. However, after the communists seized power in 1957, she was classified as a "rightist" and was only rehabilitated in the 1970s. Hu died in her hometown of Chengdu in 1994.

As an anti-colonial activist, student and communist, Hu lived a transnational life and worked with key actors in the anti-imperialist, communist networks of the interwar period.

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.

Ngonnso represents the identity, culture, and history of the Nso people in Cameroon and in the diaspora: She is the foundress of the Nso dynasty; a wooden statue was carved in her memory after her death. When German colonial troops invaded the Nso Fondom, they looted the wooden statue of Ngonnso from the palace in Kumbo along with other royal regalia and took her to the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

Since the Nso gained information about her whereabouts, they have been trying to bring her back home. After decades of diplomatic and activist work, Ngonnso is now finally set for restitution. However, the long-awaited return to Cameroon is yet to come because negotiations between Germany and Cameroon at government level are dragging on.

The story of Ngonnso bears witness to the theft and abduction of cultural belongings during the German colonial era. It also shows how communities affected by colonial robbery fight for the return of their spiritual und cultural goods—and how lengthy restitution processes can be.

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 the 1960s, the GDR began recruiting contract workers from so-called socialist brother states such as Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Angola, Poland, Bulgaria, and Mozambique to meet an increasing demand for labor. In 1979, a treaty with Mozambique created the conditions for employing around 20,000 Mozambicans in various GDR companies, mostly in production.

“Real existing socialism” was primarily concerned with labor: supposedly unproductive bodies could be obliged to return to their home countries. People who were unable to work due to mental illness, serious injury, or pregnancy were expelled. This not only corresponded to a capitalist logic in which bodies only acquire value through their productivity but also presented itself as a colonial and patriarchal relationship in which the bodies of racialized people, especially those of racialized women, were subjected to ruthless measures to enforce productivity.

The following tour is about their story. It is based on extracts from various conversations and interviews with Mozambican activists Ana Raquel Masoio, Ana Manganhela, Julia Simbine, Leia, Augusta José Macandua and Judite Armando, from the Associação das Mulheres Feministas Mocambicanas Regressadas da Alemanha (AMFMRA - Association of feminist Mozambican women returning from Germany). They show how patriarchal-racist structures in Mozambique and the GDR still determine the lives of these women today - and how they are fighting back.

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.

In 1999, the Namibian Post honoured a woman with a stamp who had made a significant contribution to the writing of the Herero language over a hundred years earlier: Johanna Gertze - born Urieta Kazahendike - was significantly involved in the translation work of a missionary from the Rhenish Missionary Society (RMG), who translated the New Testament and other Christian texts from German into Otjiherero.

There are two different perspectives on her life. The retired missionary Heinrich Vedder published two tract-like booklets about her life in 1936, which were primarily aimed at RMG donors. The first booklet focuses on Urieta Kazahendike's baptism as the culmination of the missionary work in Hereroland. The second booklet portrays her life as pious and pleasing to God - in keeping with the social role that the mission accorded African women.

Brigitta Lau, the first director of the Namibian State Archives after independence, takes a different view, deconstructing Vedder's account and characterising Johanna Gertze as a self-confident woman. She makes it clear that the success of the missionary Carl Hugo Hahn in translating biblical and theological texts is primarily due to Johanna Gertze.

This article traces her biography. In the years before her baptism, she was called by her birth name Urieta Kazahendike, then by her adopted Christian first name Johanna. After her marriage to Samuel Gertze, the surname Gertze is used.

Black people and people of color are rarely mentioned in the official historiography of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Yet, the GDR was far from being a homogeneous, white society.

In addition to Black GDR citizens born in the "first workers' and peasants' state on German soil", major migration movements shaped GDR society from its founding onwards. Migrants came to the GDR through various channels, most notably from Vietnam, Mozambique, Cuba, Poland, and Angola.

The following tour focuses on the contract workers and students from the post-colonial states of Angola and Mozambique. Their stories reveal the contradiction between the GDR's self-proclaimed anti-fascist, anti-racist identity and the lived experience of comrades of color, which were often marked by racism and paternalism. At the same time, their experiences bear witness to persistent efforts and acts of resistance against restrictive migration policies and systemic racism - both in the GDR as well as in reunified Germany.

This contribution is deeply personal: My father came to the GDR from Angola in 1989 to pursue his studies. Perspectives from conversations with him, as well as with acquaintances and activists in Angola, Germany and Mozambique, resonate throughout this tour in form of quotes and audio recordings.