That the stares of hostility were motivated as much by envy as by racial antagonism did little to ease my discomfort.
Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe
Exploring Black Europe via travel, Black British journalist and photographer Johny Pitts (*1987) and his “mentor” Caryl Phillips (*1958) push the margins of how “Europeanness” can be defined.[1] As both come from a working-class background and grew up in the British countryside, there are many similarities not only in their biographies but also in their works, especially in their engagement with Europe, which they feel “both of and not of.”[2] In Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2019), Pitts mentions the book’s connection to Phillips’ earlier travelogue The European Tribe (1987). He describes it as “one of the few direct precursors to this book” and praises it for being both “quietly subversive” and a normalization of the Black gaze (116–117). Pondering the question of who and what defines Europe/Europeanness, both Phillips and Pitts passed through Berlin on their travels around Western, Central, and Eastern Europe.
Phillips, in the mid-1980s, first came to West Berlin. At that time, the colorfulness of the city reminded him of the atmosphere of a Walt Disney movie. From there, he continued his journey to East Berlin, then the capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which he in contrast describes as “antiseptically clean” (88). During an evening stroll along the Eastern side of the wall, he not only observes the particular “European tribe” that inhabits East Berlin, but also reflects on his own positionality. In the chapter “A German Interlude,” he demonstrates how borders are significant not only as manifest physical reality, but also as an ideological and racial color line.[3]
Upon entering the GDR by train, this color line is reinforced by the border police. Phillips describes how “[t]he passport man laughed when I said I was not from Africa or Cuba. Britain seemed so unlikely” (88). This interrogation symbolically places Phillips’ Black body outside of Europe and underlines his perceived otherness, making Blackness and Europeanness appear as mutually exclusive. Although the certification of Europeanness—through the British passport—is at hand, it is still met with disbelief. Phillips’ experience mirrors a common scenario of everyday racism in which non-white people are asked “Where are you from?” and “Where are you really from?” Under the guise of a harmless indication of pure interest, these inquiries instead suggest that Black people do not belong to Europe, fortifying the idea of Europe as a homogeneous, white territory. Ironically, it is the “passport man,” a representative of the supposedly raceless GDR, who does not believe in Phillips’ Europeanness. Thus, for Phillips, as for other Black people, the equation of Europeanness with whiteness is in itself “borderless”: It is not limited to Western European countries, in relation to which it has most often been described, but also persists on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall, regardless of the state’s otherwise contrary political ideology and its self-image as “an anti-racist, anti-imperialist state.”[4]
However, Phillips’ account comes with a twist: Upon arriving in East Berlin, he “sensed that being from the West was at least as important, in the eyes of the populace, as the fact that I was [B]lack” (88). The political circumstances of time and place elevate his identity and social status. No longer is Phillips just a Black man; he is also, equally important, a Westerner. This intersection of perceived identity categories adds a sudden privilege to his lifelong experience of racial discrimination and thereby reforms his positionality: “I had the ability to escape – something many of them desired but might never achieve. […] what did I know about having to queue three hours for a train ticket, or buying bruised and already decaying fruit on the black market?” (88) Phillips chooses a potentially paternalistic tone when he pities the East Berliners who “gaze over the wall” on their “nostalgic evening stroll” (89) and miss out on the alleged advantages of the “development in West Berlin” (89). Adopting an ethnographic gaze, Phillips sees them as people who have “a troubled and contradictory sense of self” (89). This observation also reflects his own feelings of (un)belonging. Therefore, Phillips’ statement that “the stares of hostility were motivated as much by envy as by racial antagonism” reveals the fragility of identity concepts and their dependence on the specific context.
Phillips’ multiple positionalities pose an outer conflict as they make him unclassifiable—not only to the white GDR population but also to several Black students[5] he encounters on his evening stroll. Here, borders appear in a more metaphorical and socio-psychological way, as interpersonal rather than physical boundaries. Contrary to the implicit expectation of a connection that is based on their shared Blackness, all his attempts to engage with the students fail: “In the streets of East Berlin I saw a few [B]lack people, usually students, but my casually nodded greetings were often rebuffed” (88). “The Black nod” is a commonly known sign of connection and solidarity between Black individuals who live in white majority contexts. While Phillips explicitly notes how it hurts that his siblings turn their backs, he does not address the possible reasons for this failed act of communication.
Two possible interpretations come to mind: Their refusal to engage could be an attempt to draw a line between themselves and other Black subjects in order to merge into the white-dominated, supposedly raceless society of the GDR in which they strive for acknowledgement. This could be due to a fear that their brittle, hard-earned status could be questioned if they associate with others marked as outsiders. They thus draw a boundary between the self and other Black individuals, hoping to support the struggle for survival in the face of everyday racism.
But the students’ behavior can also be read in a more empowering way. Their disengagement with Phillips as a tourist could be their way of refuting the stereotype that all Black people know each other, insisting instead on the uniqueness and individuality of Black people (in Europe) and acknowledging the difference in their social status. In any case, it was much easier for Phillips to connect with Europe’s marginalized populations in West Berlin. When he writes about his visit to the Ankara Café in Berlin Kreuzberg—only a few kilometers away from his evening stroll— he notes how he had felt “quite comfortable” (87) there. Some 30 years later, Johny Pitts finds himself strolling through a very different East Berlin. After arriving at the same train station that Phillips once traveled through, he spends most of his time in the eastern part of the city. In the chapter “Germaica” of his book, he interviews a German-Israeli couple who have adopted a daughter from Kenya. In terms of diversity, they see Berlin as a place that is radically different from the rest of Germany. Characterizing the city through its divided history, they use the term “underdeveloped” that is usually appointed to places outside Europe:
Berlin still feels a little underdeveloped for a big city … and that allows capacity for change and the possibility for us to take part in shaping it. (204)
During his stay, Pitts regularly visits the Sudanese food stall “Nil” where he discusses politics and African history with other Afrodiasporic men. His way then leads him to the “Young African Art Market” (YAAM), an important venue for Afro-descendent people that to this day showcases Afro-Caribbean music and offers African foods. Here, Pitts finds “a piece of Afropea shining in the darkness of Friedrichshain” (217). Despite these hopeful glimpses, the overall impression of Pitts’ Berlin chapter is one of being lost, of not knowing where to go and whom to speak to.
Pitts ends the chapter by addressing German reunification and its aftermath. He cites an excerpt from the 1990 poem “borderless and brazen – a poem against the German u-not-y” (“grenzenlos und unverschämt – ein gedicht gegen die deutsche sch-einheit”) by Afro-German feminist writer and scholar May Ayim:
i will be African
even if you want me to be german
and i will be german
even if my blackness does not suit you (204)
By concluding with Ayim’s poem, Pitts establishes a historical perspective. Not only does he point to a writer that Phillips could have (but probably has not) met in the streets of West Berlin, but also to an experience reminiscent of Phillips’ encounter with the East German border police. His reference to Ayim highlights how the fall of the Berlin Wall had an immense impact on Black Germans during the 1990s with the skyrocketing of right-wing violence and killings of “immigrants.” The historical opening of the physical “iron curtain” led to the reinforcement of a strong color line that continues to equate “Germanness” with whiteness,[6] leaving the current generation of Afro-Germans with “new walls that are sprouting up” which they “will have to tear down” (204). For this ongoing endeavor, the narratives of Phillips and Pitts stand as both valuable reflections on Black life in Europe as well as identification frames for Afropeans today.
Jenaba Samura is a research team member in the ERC-project Black Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation: Constructing Afropean Worlds, Questioning European Foundations at ZfL.
[1] Caryl Phillips: The European Tribe. London: Faber and Faber 1987; Johny Pitts: Afropean. Notes from Black Europe. London: Penguin 2019. Quotations from the two travelogues are referenced directly in the text.
[2] Johny Pitts: “Daffodils: A Meeting with Caryl Phillips”, in: Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 48.3–4 (2017), 37–47 (37).
[3] The concept of “color line” refers to a racialized segregation of space via social, economic, and ideological as well as legal barriers.
[4] Sara Pugach: African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2022, 2.
[5] Presumably from so-called “socialist brother states” in Africa, such as Angola, Mozambique, Ghana, and others, cf. ibid.
[6] May Ayim: “Das Jahr 1990. Heimat und Einheit aus afro-deutscher Perspektive”, in: Ika Hügel et al. (eds.): Entfernte Verbindungen. Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdrückung. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag 1993, 206–220.
VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Jenaba Samura: Walking the Line / Crossing Borders: Caryl Philipps’ Evening Stroll through East Berlin, in: ZfL Blog, 2.9.2025, [https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2025/09/02/jenaba-samura-walking-the-line-crossing-borders-caryl-phillips-evening-stroll-through-east-berlin/].
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13151/zfl-blog/20250902-01
