In 2020, I sat down to write in an attempt to bridge the analytical gap between German colonial history, which I have given numerous lectures about, and contemporary conjunctures of racism, which. As a historian of Africa, I have had the privilege to evade the German specifics to some extent, but as a historian of the African diaspora I had missed some of the crucial homework, and only caught up in the past years.

Today, there are quite a few very dense works that deal with specific questions on the national plane like Minu Haschemi Yekani’s dissertation “Koloniale Arbeit in Tansania” or Jürgen Zimmerer’s still relevant work on Namibia, next to timely publications like Henning Melber’s “The Long Shadow of German Colonialism.” The implications of disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, and geography have been well established, and a growing number of studies deals with museum and university collections, as well as German colonialism in global perspective. Still, some myths persist in public perception: the relative short-livedness, the supposed benevolence, and the comparatively small geographic scope of the German colonial empire. On top of that, these days everyone on the right wing, from outright fascists to moderate conservatives, is invested in apologetic colonial revisionism. A half-century of mostly western sponsored puppet regimes, coups, and developmental aid or investment schemes requiring ardent privatization of state businesses and the sellout of public services seem to have convinced the west yet again, that Africa is irredeemably lost and Africans unable to govern themselves—ignorant of the fact that most African leaders are products of the same bourgeois elite education and ideologies as their Euro-American counterparts. A modern nation state by any means necessary.

Colonialism, be it German or otherwise, did not suddenly emerge at the Berlin conference in 1884. There are centuries of ‘exploration’, exploitation, and economic profiteering well before—in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas—of which German states and merchants have been part. German capitalists knew well enough how to make use of the tensions between other colonial powers to position themselves and take control of their share of the market. During one of the more stable enterprises between 1683 and 1717, the state of Brandenburg-Prussia sold an estimate of 15,000 Africans, and shipped them to the United States—all via the colony Großfriedrichsburg on the coast of today’s Ghana. During this time, African children were taken to Europe to be ‘educated’ and ‘civilized’ as proof of the capabilities of European educational methods, only to live in conditions between slavery and domestic serfdom. Through beneficial circumstances, Anton Wilhem Amo not only survived the route from Ghana to Germany, but was eventually able to study law and philosophy in Halle, where he graduated with a thesis about the legal status of Black people in Europe, contesting the circulating myths of African inferiority and confronting legal discrimination. While Amo’s career was only about to begin at the end of the colony Großfriedrichsburg, which was sold to the Netherlands in 1717, the merchant Jan Kwaw had taken control of the fort. Kwaw had become wealthy and influential through his role as a middleman, selling maize to the German fort, and crucially assisting in its defense against Dutch and British raids. In reality, he was probably less of a subservient ally to the Germans, but a local power they had to reckon with, if they wanted to have their interests protected. Kwaw eventually took over Großfriedrichsburg in 1716, laid off all white staff, and when the Germans sold it to the Dutch a year later, he didn’t recognize the deal and continued to view it as his own. Kwaw resisted Dutch military campaigns and held the fort until 1724, when they were eventually strong enough to force him to flee. Although those two biographies are not directly connected, they intersect at portraying both ideological and material resistance to colonial propaganda. Africans were neither passive objects of a history external to them, nor unable to comprehend and critique the implications of colonial rule.

Amo experienced the consequences of colonial subjugation and alienation even after his return to Ghana due to being met by an increase in racist abuse and hostility. As a materialist philosopher, he contributed to a school of thought fundamental to an analysis of racism. As an African, his works have long been ignored and disregarded. After Hegel and Haiti and Marx and Haiti, the relationship of radical German philosophy is still in need of a critical engagement of Hegel and Marx vis-à-vis Amo. At least in terms of one of Marx’s contemporaries, Frederick Douglass, a debate has been initiated by German and US-American scholars.

In their recent publication, Hund and his former PhD students Egger and Lösing follow the line of their previous work and suggest that Marx and Engels developed the instruments for a historical materialist theory of racism without ever applying them, and note numerous instances of thinkers or theories with which both of them must have been familiar or at least cognizant of, but chose not to further examine the matter. The authors argue that while Marx and Engels both in their private and political life staunchly opposed racial discrimination, they still fell into the trap of race-thinking and never questioned the existence of biological races as such, even though they understood the importance of social and economic relations that made the Negro a slave and in turn gave slavery the color Black. Both groups of authors, though, note that Marx’s and Engels’s comrades in arms who were now trying to establish communism as a movement led by exiles in the United States were largely informed and expressed their views and criticism of the color line undoubtedly clear, while fighting alongside former slaves and Black workers. Assessing the potential of political participation of Black abolitionists, the analysis of Douglass’s own writings shows how much even his actions were limited by the views of the ruling class. Since the Lincoln administration did not view him or other Blacks in the North as people, they were barred from enlisting and fighting in the South, waiting in vain for their government to call them to action. Two years went by after Douglass had voiced his hope, until Lincoln finally secured victory for the Union through arming the Black proletariat. Up to this point, Marx had made a few remarks about abolition and its meaning for the working class. If anything, August Nimtz argues, he was overestimating the potential for Black liberation at various times. Unfortunately, both groups of authors don’t engage in any significant form of debate. Hund briefly remarks that Nimtz’s position on his Marx quote takes its contribution to the analysis of race at face value, ignoring Marx’s own use of the racist category of race as a marker of people. In Hund’s reading of Marx, while he correctly observes that a Black person turns to a slave only in certain social conditions and is not one by the law of nature, they still remain a member of a biologically different race, subjected to the use of derogatory terms. Following Nimtz further, who extensively addresses Hund’s criticism, we can explain their opposite views as resulting from two different notions of Marxism. For Nimtz, the Marxist standpoint emerges in the sweat of the battlefield, through the actions in which Marx, Engels and their contemporaries were involved as revolutionary activists and on which further generations built, while also drawing on the experiences of Douglass and other abolitionists. For Hund apparently, the exact opposite is true. While Marx and Engels actively opposed racial discrimination, they did much less so in their theoretical work and thus the arsenal of Marxist theory in regard of a materialist history of racism has remained underdeveloped, with significant effects on the wider labor movement. In reality, Hund overemphasizes the history of ideas and fails to take other factors into account, that Marx, Engels, and after them Lenin and Trotsky had analyzed. For them, the corruption of the imperial working classes through a share in colonial commodities and nationalist co-option was evident, expressed in the concept of the labor aristocracy, which both the first and the third communist international addressed through different means. That is to say, the prevalence of racist ideas and discrimination within the nationally framed working class movements was strategically confronted by positioning the movement as an international one, replacing allegiance to the nation with the international, in which leaders belonging to national minorities and oppressed groups played crucial roles, and requiring a steadfast opposition to colonialism and imperial politics from every national member section. The existence of racism nonetheless needs to be accounted for, but can only be analyzed and understood through the material conditions the movement, in this case in the United States, had to face. This, if anything other than a question that was answered more conclusive in practice than in theory, “was one of the main reasons for the development of a separate black nationalism and internationalism and for the slogan ‘Race First’”, as Hund claims. And even while the sentiment vocalized by Hubert Harrison and many others can be understood as a response to the racism faced by white labor, Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism both precede the communist movement, but are still deeply connected to it in their modern form and were to a certain extent even promoted by the third international, which Hund omits. As Nimtz makes clear, Leon Trotsky, who was steadfast in his analysis of the national question, always made a strong case for supporting Black political movements, and even their attempts to form a separate political entity, if so desired. He was of course drawing on the multifaceted experiences of the many communist leaders from oppressed nations among the Bolsheviki, but their stance was in the end derived from the position Marx and Engels had developed in regards to both the Irish question and the emancipation of Black labor.

Literature

August H. Nimtz und Kyle A. Edwards (2024). The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time.

Wulf D. Hund (2023). Marx and Haiti: Towards a Historical Materialist Theory of Racism.

Wulf D. Hund, Lukas Egger und Felix Lösing (2025). Marx, Engels & der Rassismus ihrer Zeit.