Learning Berlin

by Sada Malumfashi (Nigeria)

Making a local connection Germany

Learning Berlin There is rice, stew and chicken in a pot. The walls are decorated with black and white photographs, paintings and collage of art works like splash of colors. We sit on a sofa, plates and cutleries on a table as hands grab them and scrap rice and chicken to clanking sounds. Wine is making rounds as long shelves of books complement art works and stare at us. »Us« is four black men speaking and laughing at the top of our voices: it is a rapid mixture of Cameroonian pidgin while I join the conversation in my Northern Nigerian accented English. The only white person here is a German – a foreigner to the conversation and he watches our tongues spew a language in stories we are familiar with, and he is learning and nodding – surprised mostly. We dissect Africa – through philosophy, religion and tricks of conmen selling money-doubling machines to the government – through chicken bones and African stew. But we are not in Kaduna, Douala, Limbe, or Lagos – we are in Berlin, and we have colonized the space, detached it from the cold winter of Europe and made it a black continent. We are at SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas waiting for Pa Tanka and an apartment key. Savvy is a crematorium turned arts space. From housing corpses and dead memories to housing books, history, art, colors and blend of a borderless people. There is an ongoing exhibition and we descend into the former crematorium like ghosts returning. The place puts the thought of ghosts in my mind. But then art is ghostly anyways, and a crematorium is a perfect place for an art space. Pa Tanka arrives. He is an older man spotting a hat and a pair of Apple Airpods popping all white from his dark earlobes. He has a set of musical instruments like armory strapped to his back. Pa Tanka would be providing us with the key to the apartment. And that is how we come to be in this Berlin, strangers Nkiacha and I in Johann’s country, Pa Tanka’s country, Bonaventure’s country, in this apartment colonizing spaces. This was supposed to be a short conversation. We talk, introduce each other, get the key and move back into Berlin’s chilly night. Bonaventure is wearing a pink pullover and a dark blue hat and has an Mboma-esque physique common with the Cameroonian football national team. At first, he seems to be a man with a German stoicism, but soon that stoicism and directness is peeled off, layer by layer as the apartment transforms from a white land to a black continent. Our conversations are unending. From publishing and writing and the politics of it all. To Europe, to Africa, to a homeland and a foreign land. We are this squad of five, munching rice and chicken, talking, about our contemporaries, those before us and those to come after. We talk of a continent like it is the belly of an elephant that held us and expunged us to various points on the globe, representing blackness. We are black bodies and now a white continent is trying to shape us, build us, yet the rivers Kaduna, Douala, Limbe are a still a force claiming us from drowning in the Mediterranean. Johann is a whole mood having experienced a culture shock in his own cultural home as we baptize him in our stories, in brown muddy rivers where natives wash their dirty clothing, all together, smiling in unison. He finds in this apartment, at this moment, a black continent, and a continent is not a country. Our stories are diverse, yet cohesive. We are children of Africa, and there is rice, stew and chicken. And there is energy. We wear our shoes, tie our laces and hang our backpacks. We started in Sylt in the morning and arrived Berlin, but right now here we are, five people standing at the doorway, in unending conversations, unable to say goodnight. Maybe uttering it five times or more but yet springing a new topic always. We are soon leaving, learning Berlin and shaping it with a black perspective.