Obermayer Award, Distinguished Service

“The first thing I wanted to do…was to make people aware.”

Katharina Oguntoye brings a powerful voice to Afro-German history and identity.

by Toby Axelrod

Katharina Oguntoye is a historian who has made history.

As an Afro-German scholar and activist, Oguntoye has turned her own experience of being othered into powerful lessons about identity, pride, and mutual respect. Together with other pioneers in the 1980s — the early years of feminism, environmentalism, and minority empowerment in Germany — she broke down barriers, helping mainstream society learn about the experiences of people of color. Finally, members of this important minority group had a chance to tell their stories, to be recognized, and to make a difference together.

This pioneering work has led to ever more community activism, empowering Germans with roots in Africa. The lessons Oguntoye learned about identity and respect have now influenced a generation of Germans, as well as educators internationally.

Born in Zwickau to a German mother and Nigerian father, she faced early on what it means to appear “different” in Germany, where today barely more than one percent of the population are of African descent. 

The public first became aware of Katharina Oguntoye thanks to the groundbreaking 1986 book of interviews of Afro-German women that she coedited with the late poet May Ayim (as May Opitz) and the feminist publishing house Orlanda Verlag (founded by Dagmar Schultz, who is credited on the book cover). Giving voice to an unheard population, the book made waves in academia and on the grassroots level.

Through this work, Oguntoye helped popularize the term Afro-German, and is credited with raising awareness of Black German history and identity, and of the othering that minorities in general face.

“Katharina Oguntoye has become an important symbol of the fight against racism and discrimination,” says Dr. Karlos K. Hill, professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “Katharina was indelibly affected by the racism she experienced while growing up. It propelled her toward a lifetime of service in fighting against discrimination and hatred.”

From Germany to Nigeria and Back

Katharina Oguntoye lives today in Berlin with her longtime partner, author and Holocaust scholar Carolyn Gammon. Their son, Noel Olutunde Gammon Oguntoye, is a chemistry student at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Oguntoye was born in January 1959 in Zwickau, in the former East Germany. She and her younger brother Olatokunbo spent their early years in Leipzig. Their parents, Olusola and Edith Storch-Oguntoye, had met there during their father’s student years. “I liked it in Leipzig,” Oguntoye recalls. “There was quite a big African student community there, which my father was engaged in. So that was very good, and I had Black people in my life then.”

She was still a little girl in 1967, when the family moved to Nigeria, where Oguntoye’s father became a professor or economics.

Moving to Nigeria “was quite something extraordinary,” she recalls. “It became a big adventure. I had two good years there, living in a university town.” That adventure came to a halt in 1969, with the outbreak of the Nigerian–Biafran Civil War. Oguntoye and her mother returned to Germany, this time to Heidelberg in West Germany, where Oguntoye’s aunt lived.

Back in Germany, the family was close and living in a bubble. Though U.S. soldiers, many of them African-American, were stationed in Heidelberg and there were many foreign tourists and students, and even a jazz club, says Oguntoye, “There was not even a handful of black Germans” among the younger generation. “It’s just amazing,” she adds, how little integration there was.

It was during this period that Oguntoye also began to absorb the history of the Holocaust, watching the documentaries and films that came on TV late at night, after others went to bed. “So many people did not see all the [broadcasts about what happened], but I watched everything,” she says. “I was very aware of it, and it influenced my childhood a lot.” 

Showing Our Colors

In Heidelberg, Oguntoye became an activist for the environment and for women’s rights. The time was ripe: the first issue of Germany’s first feminist magazine, Emma, was published in 1977. “I was very excited about that,” she says. Ultimately, she found the environmental movement “so male dominated. I said, ‘Oh, I think that’s nothing for me,’ although I was very into the topic, of course.”

In 1982, Oguntoye moved to West Berlin, where she eventually graduated from high school as the only Black person in her class. She became involved in gender empowerment and came out as a lesbian.

She began studying history at the Technical University Berlin in 1985. A year later, at the urging of the American feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde —who taught in Berlin in the 1980s— Oguntoye coedited the book “Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out” (Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte), published in 1986.

Over two years, she and her coeditors interviewed women whose Black roots went back to German colonial history or who were born after World War II to German mothers and African-American fathers. It was the first book to use the term “Afro-Germans,” and the first to describe the everyday racism they experienced.

“The first thing we wanted to do with the book ‘Showing Our Colors’ was to make people aware,” Oguntoye says. “Because they would say, ‘Oh, we don't have black people in Germany.’ Every one of us would be confronted with 'How come you speak such good German?’ or ‘Don't you want to go home to your father’s country?’ It’s like sending you away. I mean, that's pretty rough. And people did not realize how insensitive this is.”

In the foreword to their book, the editors explained why the term “Afro-German” was needed. “There had previously been only negative terms, like the N-word, so we wanted to coin a term with which we could identify positively,” says Oguntoye, whose 1986 university thesis — “An Afro-German Story: About the Living Situations of Africans and Afro-Germans in Germany from 1884 to 1950” — was first published in 1997 and again in 2022.

“I was quite lucky to have such a strong base of intercultural heritage,” says Oguntoye. In addition to Nigeria, her family has roots in the U.K. and former Czechoslovakia. As a child, she used the term Afro-European for herself, she says, “because it was my reality. But other people who were very alone with their experience… [and] had quite a rough time to figure out ‘Who am I and how do I fit in?’”

Creating Community

One aim of “Showing Our Colors” was to change society. Another was to empower people of African and Afro-German heritage to say, “This is my place, I have a right to be here in Germany.”

As the groundbreaking book came out, Oguntoye was cofounding the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland [Initiative of Black People in Germany]. In 1992, Oguntoye started the Afro-German women’s group Adefra, and in 1997 she founded the intercultural association Joliba, which serves families from many cultural backgrounds, with an emphasis on those from the African diaspora.

“The organization has benefited thousands of families, creating opportunities and offering vital resources for their well-being,” says the intercultural psychologist Alina Winkler, a member of the Joliba team. “Katharina's vision and dedication have paved the way for the organization to carry forward her mission, ensuring that her impact endures for generations to come.”

One of the connections that grew out of Joliba was with the Berlin-based, British-Caribbean artist Satch Hoyt, who discussed with Oguntoye his idea for a memorial to “Black Survivors  of Colonialism, the Holocaust, and Racism." Called “The Shrine for the forgotten Souls,” the multimedia memorial would be constructed of glass bottles filled with different amounts of water, which can be struck to emit different notes. Sitting inside the structure, an observer would hear the testimony of descendants of African survivors in their own voices.

The memorial has still not overcome the hurdles of bureaucracy. But Oguntoye and Hoyt hope that it will eventually be realized.

“It's only very recently that the Germans are even kind of dusting off the amnesia that they bury themselves in, in regard to their colonial conquests,” says Hoyt, who brought the idea of the memorial to Oguntoye some ten years ago. “She loved the idea. At that point, there was no memorials to Africans,” he says.

Today, there is a handful of small memorials, including Stolpersteine, brass-plated stumbling stones, dedicated to Afro-Germans. And moves have been made to change street names that are stuck in a racist colonial mindset.

“Katharina Oguntoye is a true pioneering sister–disciple of Audre Lorde, who has kept the torch burning for the Afro-Deutsch community and the transnational African diaspora for decades,” says Hoyt.

“Her unconditional selfless dedication as chronicler and architect of the relatively new German Black community pivots around numerous creative projects, often but not solely hatched at Joliba, her grassroots organization.” He adds, “I am truly honored to have collaborated on a number of them.”

In 2020, Oguntoye received the Lesbian Visibility Award for Berlin, in appreciation for her life’s work against sexism, racism, and homophobia. In 2022, she was awarded Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit, and in 2023, the Rosa Courage (Pink Courage) Prize of the city of Osnabrück for LGBTQ activists in Germany.

But still: “Not enough people know about how much she has worked tirelessly to make society equitable and just for all,” says Tiffany N. Florvil, associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico, who helped nominate Oguntoye for an Obermayer award. 

Florvil, who encountered the book “Showing Our Colors” 20 years ago, describes Oguntoye as “the embodiment of courage, kindness, and strength,” who “has made significant sacrifices for many communities without expecting anything in return.”

Margaret Hampton, professor emerita of German at Earlham College in Indiana, says her students got to know Oguntoye while studying in Berlin, and some even interned at Joliba. “As a historian, Katharina introduced my students, as well the teachers, to parts of the past about which most of them knew very little. As a dedicated and caring activist, she helped them address lingering, often painful issues of the past in ways that were productive and less threatening, while at the same time in ways that remained truthful to the past and hopeful for a better future.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2024