“Decolonization does not happen by changing a few street names,” political scientist and human rights activist Joshua Kwesi Aikins told DW after it was announced on Friday that a central Berlin street will not have its racist name changed after all. The road had been slated to be renamed in honor of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a Black German Enlightenment philosopher, who in 1734 became the first Africa-born scholar to receive a European doctorate.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.But five years later, in July this year, the Higher Administrative Court of Berlin-Brandenburg upheld a decision by the Berlin Administrative Court stating that residents have no basis to take legal action against the name change.Signs had already been installed, and the change was to be officialized through a symbolic unveiling on Saturday, August 23, which also marks International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. Though the group “Pro Mohrenstraße” made a last-ditch legal attempt to block the name change, the Berlin-Brandenburg court again upheld its ruling to allow for the name change.
Dividing up Africa from Berlin
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.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 1884-1885 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 kickstarted 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.
Who was Anton Wilhelm Amo?
Anton Wilhelm Amo himself was enslaved as a boy in Ghana and taken to Amsterdam around 1703. He was then gifted to the German Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel in 1707, the year M-Strasse was named.Encouraged to study by the Duke, who paid for his education, Amo went on to become the first African-born scholar in Europe to complete a PhD in 1734.Despite Amo’s 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,” which looked at the legal rights of People of Color in the continent.It is said that Amo learned six languages. He later wrote a second doctoral thesis in philosophy that weighed in on philosopher Rene Descartes and his ideas about the duality between mind and body. He also taught classes at the universities in Halle and nearby Jena, but made a meager living before returning to Ghana in 1747. The date of his death is unknown.Amo is remembered as the first philosopher of African origin in Germany, yet this trailblazer has been largely erased from European intellectual history.The naming of Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Strasse demands a greater appreciation of the scholar’s work “as a philosopher and legal scholar, and the professional context in which he worked,” wrote Anna Orinsky in the online journal, EUIdeas. “German and international historians, philosophers and scholars of many other disciplines are called upon to analyse Amo’s work,” she added. But the renaming is also in honor of a symbol of Black resistance, says Andrea-Vicky Amankwaa-Birago, a Berlin-based cultural scientist focused on decolonization across Germany and Ghana.“This renaming signals a change in how we remember — placing Black history, achievement, and resilience at the center,” she wrote in August 2025 for internet publication, Medium.
The long journey to Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Strasse
The M-Strasse subway station was itself renamed in 1991, in the wake of reunification. It had previously been 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.
