Berlin renames streets honouring colonialists

Campaigners who have fought for Germany to confront its colonial past celebrated the renaming of a square and a street in Berlin yesterday.

Manga-Bell-Platz in the multicultural Wedding district was renamed in memory of Rudolf and Emily Duala Manga Bell, a king and queen of Douala in Cameroon, who fought against German colonialism. The king, who had been educated in Germany, was executed by German authorities in August 1914 after a sham trial.

The square was previously Nachtigalplatz, after Gustav Nachtigal, the German empire’s commissioner for West Africa who had a key role in the colonisation of Togo, Cameroon and Namibia in the 1870s. Nearby Lüderitzstrasse, named after the colonialist Adolf Lüderitz, the founder of the German South West Africa colony – now Namibia – becomes Cornelius-Frederiks-Strasse, after a resistance fighter from the Nama people.

The ceremony was attended by the ambassadors of Cameroon and Namibia, and King Eboumbou of Douala. Kate Connolly Berlin