Katharina Oguntoye

Katharina Oguntoye (born January 1959 in Zwickau, East Germany) is an Afro-German writer, historian, activist, and poet.

She founded the nonprofit intercultural association Joliba in Germany and is perhaps best known for co-editing the book Farbe bekennen with May Ayim (then May Opitz) and Dagmar Schultz.

The English translation of this book was entitled Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out.

Oguntoye has played an important role in the Afro-German Movement.

Katharina Oguntoye grew up in Leipzig, Heidelberg and in Nigeria.

According to statements from Oguntoye her mother met her father at the University of Leipzig, where he was studying with the help of a scholarship from the German Democratic Republic.

Oguntoye’s father returned to Nigeria in 1965 to take up a professorship.

Her mother joined him a year later with Oguntoye and her younger brother and they lived on the university campus.

Oguntoye got to know her father’s side of the family there.

Two years later, in 1967, the Biafran War broke out so Oguntoye returned with her mother to her aunt’s hometown of Heidelberg in Germany.

Oguntoye’s brother stayed with their father.

Oguntoye describes her youth in Heidelberg as not easy as few other Afro-Germans lived there.

Her previous time in Nigeria was essential for her to distinguish between foreign external ascriptions and her own images.

At the same time, Oguntoye began to be politically engaged in the emerging environmental movement, and later also in the women’s movement.

She was the only black person in her class in the 1980s.

She says at the same time the setting of a self-organized school gave her the opportunity to empower herself and become visible in mixed-gendered discussions with other women.

It was also during this time that she came out as lesbian.

She is in a civil union with her life partner, author and translator, Carolyn Gammon.

Katharina Oguntoye moved to Berlin in 1982 to get her Abitur (the high school diploma in Germany qualifying students for university) at the Kreuzberg School for Adult Education.

In 1984 Oguntoye attended seminars from the American poet and activist Audre Lorde who, amongst other things, was a visiting lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin.

Lorde was offered to publish a book with Orlanda Publishing, but instead asked May Ayim, then 22, and Oguntoye, 24, to publish a work about and for Afro-Germans in Germany: Stellt euch einander und der Welt vor [Introduce Yourselves to Each Other and the World].

Oguntoye began studying history at the Technical University in 1985.

In 1986 Farbe bekennen [Showing our Colors] was published by Oguntoye, Ayim and Dagmar Schultz.

Farbe Bekennen was the first book to describe racist everyday encounters of Afro-Germans in Germany.

The book is said to be (one of) the reason(s) of a politicization of the Afro-German movement.

For the first time, black people in Germany came into contact with each other and became politicized.

Contrary to today, there was little acknowledgement from white feministic communities, said journalist Laura Freisberg during a broadcast by BR-Zündfunk.

Her thesis, which was published in 1997 with the title, “Eine Afro-Deutsche Geschichte: Zur Lebensituation von Afrikanern und Afro-Deutschen in Deutschland von 1884 to 1950” (An Afro-German Story: About the Living Situations of Africans and Afro-Germans in Germany from 1884 to 1950), was again published in a new edition in 2020 by the Orlanda Publishing.

In this historic work she focused on black people in Germany with an emphasis on the realities of life and the perspective of Africans and Afro-Germans beyond the perspective of the German majority.

Oguntoye was a co-founder of the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) [Initiative of black people in Germany] and the Afro-German women’s group ADEFRA.

She also founded the intercultural network Joliba e. V. in 1997 which primarily offers services to families of African, Afro-German and African American descent.

In addition to children’s festivals and parent-child groups, the association organizes exhibitions, readings and seminars.

Oguntoye explains her motivation for her engagement above all else with the fact that black people in Germany continue to be invisible and don’t have equal rights.

She has also led the association as project manager and managing director since its founding.

In a 2019 interview with L-Mag, Oguntoye recalled, “Our coming out as black Germans made white feminists reflect more and realize: These are privileges.

White Germans had the ‘check-card of privileges’: right to work, right to settle, freedom of movement.

We as Afro-Germans have these rights to a certain extent with our German passports, but we are continuously denied them.”

2020 Prize for Lesbian Visibility in the State of Berlin