Imani Tafari-Ama | Decolonising Flensburg, Germany’s rum city

Denmark and Germany are not usually among the Empires considered when colonial accountability is being reckoned. Those star roles are invariably reserved for Britain, France, The Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. And although the Pope divided the “New World” between Spain and Portugal to start the colonial conquest balls rolling, the role of the Catholic Church is absent from mainstream critiques of colonial responsibility.

The United States of America (USA) is also not included in history lessons as a colonial empire. Curricula will address the slavery (sic) that happened in the USA without naming it as among the past and current colonisers in the Caribbean despite their continued rule over Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands of the United States (VIUS), or Guantanamo Bay. This kind of cognitive dissonance is widespread around the globe because those who benefit/ted from the colonial spoils that galvanised the Industrial Revolution and the World Economic System have a vested interest in maintaining the veil of silence. Those who were/are victims are divorced from the facts through miseducation malpractices.

In 1864, Denmark and Germany fought a border war, which resulted in vast swaths of formerly Danish territory becoming German. This included Flensburg, which was second only to Copenhagen in the heyday of the Danish Empire. After 250 years of colonial control, in 1917 – 69 years after Emancipation – Denmark sold the land and the people of the three islands of St Croix, St Thomas, and St John (then known as the Danish West Indies) to the USA for $25 million in gold ($530 million in today’s money). The islands became known as the VIUS because of this transfer.

With the VIUS, the USA acquired a convenient route to the Panama Canal on the eve of its entry into the First World War. A century plus five years later, under the Insular Cases arrangement, the people of the VIUS are still in a state of settler colonialism, with hurricane disasters revealing that the tri-island state was denied full citizenship rights because they were home to people predominantly of African descent.

THRUST INTO VORTEX

I was thrust into the vortex of this history in 2016 when I was selected as one of 17 International Fellows/Curators to participate in the year-long Fellow-Me! Mobile Academy ( http://fellow-me.de/fellows/imani-tafari-ama/). I was head-hunted for this 18-month assignment by the Flensburg Maritime Museum (FMM), which aimed to provide a critical African-Caribbean perspective to refute popular Eurocentric narratives prevalent in Flensburg about the city’s colonial history.

My response was to curate the Rum, Sweat and Tears (RST) exhibition ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Emy_1J7zAg), which was housed in the building that used to be the warehouse that received and distributed the sugar and the rum end-products of the colonial project. The installation interrogated the annual Rum Regatta as a prominent example of colonial nostalgia and denial, which act as barriers to the realisation of a reparations agenda. The project also questioned the popular refrain that Flensburg was bringing the sugar and the rum but was not involved in slavery. On the contrary, this port city was central to Denmark’s participation in the Maafa, the Swahili word for complete disaster.

The 2017 Centennial of the Transfer provided an important opportunity to decolonise the history of Flensburg and the merchant houses that brokered its success. The focal point of the RST installation was the artistic rendition of dehumanised African bodies painted on the floor in a space that was measured to replicate the size of an enslavement ship. The imagined boughs were painted in the courtyard below.

The body outlines also represented a virtual crime scene, which many visitors found troubling to cross. Walking on the virtual bodies showed that the wealth of Europe and the USA was garnered on the backs of the enslaved Africans. The imagery of lynching was evoked with the visual hangings from the roof. The oppositional Eurocentric and African-Caribbean perspectives were shown, for example, with the representation of a white Jesus on one side of the poster and the image of Marcus Garvey on the other. As tour guide, I would explain that this design was intended to catalyse critically reflective responses, leading to improved consciousness in the visitors as advocated by the conscientisation model developed by Paulo Freire.

PLACED ON THE FLOOR

To further encourage this active participation, all the objects were placed on the floor. These artefacts included the video documentaries I made from recorded interviews, which provided the talking heads for the virtual ancestors. Kneeling to access the information also provided an embodied trope of reverence and active involvement. This was designed to hint at the discomfort that dehumanised Africans experienced on the enslavement ships and plantations in the countries that were constructed as complete enslavement societies.

In formulating a Transatlantic Trialogue among the histories of Flensburg, Ghana (which Denmark occupied for 200 years before selling to their cousins - the British - in 1850) and the VIUS, I used the work of the late Neville Hall, who wrote Slave Society in The Danish West Indies; Joy Degruy ( Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome); Anna Julia Heywood Cooper (A View from the South); The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey compiled by Amy Jacques Garvey, among many other rich resources to support the data shared in interviews, roundtable and focus group discussions, and participant observation. Kudos to then Senator Myron Jackson and his office managed by Ayesha Morris for tremendous facilitation of this process in the VIUS.

I was shocked to learn that after the 1917 transfer, Jamaica became the source of the raw rum that made Flensburg Germany’s wealthy rum city. The rum was liberally diluted and spiced to create the product known as Rum Verschnict or rum blend. Brand Jamaica is represented in several of the rum labels that formed a time capsule collage at the exhibition entrance, where the colonial amnesia and nostalgia concepts are explained. Some labels misrepresent people drinking rum under coconut trees, a stereotype that sanitises the blood, sweat and tears that constituted the reality of plantation society.

Christian Petersen and Frank Heddergott, two old timers who represented rum companies back in the day, contacted me to share some fantastic stories about their involvement. One of the most compelling tales still circulating in Flensburg was about Dudley Williams. In 1956, on behalf of the Pott rum company, Frank came to Jamaica to bodily take Dudley with him back to Germany to work as the “authentic” black man to serve patrons of rum parties. The Pan-American airline refused him passage through the USA (on racist grounds). Frank therefore booked their flight on KLM, travelling through the Dutch Caribbean to Germany. According to Frank, Dudley served in this scandalous role for years and attracted several eager women, with whom he is alleged to have fathered several children. According to this legend, the company materially discouraged this racialised hypersexualisation. As Frank recalled, when he visited Dudley in later years, he had reportedly become a Christian after returning to Jamaica. I am curious to know what happened to him afterwards. But that is another story.

Dr Imani Tafari-Ama is a research fellow at The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS-RCO), at The University of the West Indies. Send feedback to imani.tafariama@uwimona.edu.jm.