"Decolonization does not happen by changing a few street names," the political scientist and human rights activist Joshua Kwesi Aikins told DW after it was announced that a central city street with a name that many regard as racist would honor Anton Wilhelm Amo, a Black German Enlightenment philosopher who in 1734 became the first scholar born in Africa to receive a doctorate from a university in Europe. 

That was in 2020. At the time, the district council of Berlin-Mitte had approved the renaming, but, before it was implemented, residents filed a lawsuit against it.

The Higher Administrative Court of Berlin-Brandenburg has now upheld a decision by the Berlin Administrative Court stating that residents have no basis to take legal action against the name change.

Several civil society groups have lobbied for decades to change the name of Mohren or "Moor" Street (respectfully referred to as M-Strasse), and the U-Bahn station of the same name.

Moor, in its Greek roots, means dark or black, but also "stupid or primitive," Aikins said.

Dividing up Africa from Berlin

M-Strasse runs through the old quarter of the former Prussian city, steps away from the rebuilt Berlin Palace, which oversaw colonial forays into Africa, and near the former chancellor's residence and venue for the 1884 Berlin Conference.

In the words of Berlin-based British-Ugandan writer Musa Okwonga, the major European colonial powers that gathered for the conference "discussed how they might divide up Africa." The conference kick-started Germany's genocidal colonial rule in Namibia.   

The M-word's overt racist connotations further derive from the 18th-century practice of bringing enslaved Africans to Germany as "court moors" to work as servants or entertain the Brandenburg electors and Prussian kings as musicians. "The street name given at the beginning of the 18th century transports this racist experience of violence against Black people in Berlin to the present day," wrote historian Christian Kopp, of Decolonize Berlin-Mitte.

These slaves were mostly brought from the Brandenburg-Prussian colony in current-day Ghana (then known as the Brandenburger Gold Coast), which existed from 1682 to 1721.  

Anton Wilhelm Amo himself is believed to have been enslaved in Ghana as a boy, and was ultimately gifted to the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel in 1707, the year M-Strasse was named. Despite his displacement, he embraced his German identity while never forgetting his African heritage.

Amo's thesis in law at the University of Halle is lost but was titled "The Rights of Blacks in Europe." He learned six languages and later wrote a doctoral thesis that weighed in on Rene Descartes' mind-body duality. Yet this Black German trailblazer has been largely erased from European intellectual history. 

The long journey to Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Strasse

The M-Strasse subway station was itself the product of a renaming in 1991, in the wake of reunification, having been previously called Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse after a GDR politician.

The use of the racist name was called out at the time by the pioneering Black German activist May Ayim, a poet of Ghanaian descent who co-founded the Initiative of Black People in Germany in 1986 and edited the defining book "Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out." 

Ayim pursued her efforts to reveal the coded racism in reunified Germany. In the 1990s, she was outspoken in her opposition to the street name, which in her view stood for the fact that Germany's Black community was not included in the country's essentially white reunification process after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 2010, a Kreuzberg riverfront was renamed after Ayim, who died in 1996. It was one of the first acts of decolonization, the shore having been named after Otto Friedrich von der Groeben, who in the late 17th century founded the Brandenburg-Prussian colony in Ghana.

This is an updated and shortened version of an article that was first published on August 28, 2020.