She Spoke German without History

She thought there are Africans who look upon colonisation with nostalgia!

I thought I had heard it all—until, in 2024! We were in Germany as part of the MuseumLab programme, a curated platform that brings together African and European heritage practitioners for dialogue, collaboration, and critique on museums and the heritage sector in both continents. 

During one session, a young African woman spoke proudly of her German heritage. That made me physically wince. However, what followed cut even deeper: she stated that some people in Cameroon recall the German colonial period with nostalgia. The room stiffened with various reactions. Some looked at the floor; others started searching in their bags, as if for lost treasure, while a number stood and headed for the coffee table. The discomfort was palpable. Her words bruised my spirit, as if I had lived through that colonial experience myself. I looked at her for the first time – looked at her.

Many wild thoughts were running through my mind, scrambling around like restless feet on a tin roof. But one kept rising above the noise: I wanted to lock this African somewhere, to isolate her, but to give her light, sunshine, until she could think again. It wasn’t disdain. It was heartbreak. Because what she had just said was not an opinion, it was evidence of brainwashing. Evidence of historical amnesia, of how colonisation not only stole land and bodies but rewrote memory itself.

It was a painful reminder of how deeply manufactured memoryhas burrowed into our consciousness, convincing some among us that the oppressor brought order, when in fact he brought rupture. Romanticizing colonization is not just a travesty, a betrayal of historyandancestors, it is also forgetting oneself, in the quest to be like ‘those others’. It speaks to the danger of a people who no longer recognise the chains that still shackle Africa culturally, economically and socially. Such people have trained their minds to call the chains bracelets.

The speaker came to Germany as a child. It was clear that the country doesn’t teach any African history. Fair enough – until recently, the history that was taught in Kenyan schools was often stripped of its messiness and violence. Children were told of explorers who ‘discovered’ mountains and rivers that Kenyan communities had interacted with for millennia.  But here, the silence felt heavier.

I wondered what takes root in a historical vacuum? How do people, like that speaker, Africans raised in Europe, without the tools to interrogate or process historical facts presented through the lens of someone else?. People who speak with certainty, but from a place of omission. Her nostalgia for German colonization didn’t seem rooted in malice. It sounded almost pitiful, like it came from an emptiness, an absence where something vital should have been.

As she spoke, I watched the room. No one said a word. Not the Germans, not the Africans. There was no applause, no challenge, only a silence so heavy it felt complicit. This was the saddest part. Because silence, in moments like this, is not neutrality – it is endorsement. The presenter, who had spoken of cassettes as if they were some prehistoric discovery, may have walked away thinking she had delivered a successful talk. She may have believed she had represented the African voice with clarity. But the truth was quieter, and more haunting: the Africans in the room decided not to engage. She had gone too far, too far from truth, too far from self, for any meaningful recourse. And we, out of weariness or protection, chose not to waste precious hours trying to bring her back.

We were visiting African heritage practitioners; she was going to remain in Germany. We could not save her, and we knew it. Her mind had already been claimed by another story, one we could not rewrite in a single afternoon. So we chose to save ourselves. The irony is that even the Germans remained silent. The organisers had probably anticipated a spirited resistance, at least some reaction. As for the Germans, I’m still not sure what was expected of them. And I’ve always wondered what, if anything, was said among them once the event ended. If silence held any discomfort. Or if it, too, was just routine.

Colonialism does not simply vanish over time – it mutates, hides in school curricula, reappears in street names, and sometimes, finds voice in those it once oppressed. What happened in that room was not a debate about historical nuance; it was the echo of a violent erasure. And when we fail to teach African children their own histories, whether in Europe or in Africa, we raise generations fluent in the language of their colonisers, but illiterate in the truths of their nations and people.