AN EVENING OF DISCUSSION ON THE SUPER COMMEMORATIVE YEAR 2014

ADEFRA Berlin activists discuss Black Feminist perspectives on the significance of the years 1884, 1904 and 1914. A conversation in three rounds.

2014 marks the anniversary of no less than three fundamental and momentous historical events in German history. Compared to the omnipresent public debate on the centennial jubilee of World War I, the two groundbreaking events in German colonial history seem to get less public attention. But it was precisely the Africa Conference in Berlin (1884) and the onset of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia (1904) that influenced Germany‘s participation in World War I and subsequently the country’s role in the realignment of Europe in the 20^th century.

In an interactive dialogue, four ADEFRA activists take a closer look at coloniality as an invisible norm in Germany’s landscape of remembrance. Maisha Eggers, Katja Kinder, Peggy Piesche and Deborah Moses-Sanks address how our remembering respectively dis-remembering of colonial experience is shaped by the normalization of coloniality. Poems and autobiographical notes by Black activists provide the point of departure under the three headings, Forget Enslavement ‒ Historical Erasures, Lost in White Memories, and Decolonize Your Soul. This leads to the objective of considering coloniality a as an experience of dominance and of subjugation at the point of intersection of cultures of remembrance and relating them to one another. The majority of the poems are in English, the discussion will take place in German.۝