Dualla Misipo (1901–1973) was a Cameroonian-German-French writer. His novel Der Junge aus Duala is one of the first postcolonial literary texts written in German.[1] It was first published in 1973, but we presume that parts of it were already written during the interwar period. The novel recounts the story of Ekwe Njembele, a young Cameroonian boy born in the port city of Douala during Germany’s colonial rule. After attending Douala’s German government school, he continues his education in Germany at about age ten. Before he even arrives at his “second home”[2]—a small Hessian town where he will live with a foster family—his journey brings him to Frankfurt am Main. Here, his travel companions—a white German teacher from Douala and his foster father—are eager to immediately take him to the famous Frankfurt Zoo.
Only a few paragraphs are dedicated to this visit, but they feature many traits of Misipo’s writing. First, it is noteworthy that the novel never makes explicit why Ekwe’s companions find the zoo so important, why it has to be the very first place the young pupil gets to see. Is it because they are especially proud of Germany’s second oldest zoo (founded in 1858) and its capacity to exhibit “the whole world” in Frankfurt? Is it because of their interest in “exotic” animals? Or do Ekwe’s educators think that the young Black boy, oversaturated by all the new impressions from his long journey, would benefit from seeing some things his companions deem familiar to him, things that supposedly resemble his African home?
Although the novel leaves it to the readers to decide for themselves, much can be drawn from these possibilities. The presumed, proud interest of Ekwe’s travel companions in “exotic” animals connects with two other scenes from the novel. In the first, another German teacher from Douala’s government school, a frenetic hunter and collector of native animals, has transformed his Cameroonian home into some sort of private zoo. In the second, the foster family’s home in Hessen is decorated with a long ivory tusk and stuffed crocodiles. Together, these scenes address the white German characters’ fascination with wild animals, pointing to the entanglements between the looting and collecting of animals, cultural artefacts, and human remains in colonialism.[3]
Even more strikingly, the assumption that the zoo is a possibly homelike, comforting place for a young African boy not only replicates a stereotypical image of “Africa” as a single “country” full of natural beauty and wild animals, it also points to the juxtaposition of Black people and animals in racist discourse, where the colonized are described as animal-like to justify colonial violence. Moreover, this racist imagery is echoed in a popular practice throughout the European continent: The tradition of “human zoos,” which presented non-European protagonists and their supposedly “authentic” lifestyles in derogatory ways. Organized by animal merchant Carl Hagenbeck and others, these exhibitions of human beings often took place at actual European zoos—with more than two dozen at Frankfurt Zoo.[4] To underline the supposed “simplicity” of the displayed people, their show-like presentations emphasized their daily relationships with animals, and Hagenbeck tellingly called them “zoological-anthropological shows.”[5]
While Misipo abstains from explicitly referring to these contexts, he bluntly undermines any such stereotypical expectations, which, in turn, implicitly affirms their presence—if not in Ekwe’s companions, then in the minds of some of his presumed readers. Misipo writes:
We got on a streetcar and went to the zoo. Here I got to see animals that I had never seen before in my life. I admired the king of the animals, the lion, for the first time. I saw him pacing up and down in his iron-barred cage, always along the barrier of iron bars. His glittering eyes, his terrible anger, the bottomless impotence of his paws and his never-ending walk in the narrow cage had a very sad effect on me. It was no different in the tiger cage. I watched everything very attentively and thought of my grandma’s stories at that moment. We walked on and reached the elephant house. When I saw the gray monsters, a tremor ran through my body and sweat trickled down my armpits. I stood frozen in front of this African giant. They were far too powerful for me at the time! Perhaps I was thinking at the same moment about the inauguration of our northern railroad in my home country, I don’t remember exactly today, but in any case I fainted! [6]
In this passage, Ekwe’s reaction to the zoo’s inhabitants is depicted as that of a delicate, upper-class city boy who has never seen such animals before. He has only heard of them in fables and fairy tales that highlighted their foreignness and dangerousness: “I knew that they are predators that are not sympathetic to humans.” (“Ich wusste, dass es Raubtiere sind, die den Menschen nicht wohlwollen,” 119) Rhetorically, Misipo is eager to draw a hard line, separating humans (of all races) from animals. Whereas Hagenbeck’s “ethnological shows” used to cast Black people next to zoo animals and turned them into objects to be gazed at, laughed at, and appropriated for economic success or erotic fantasies, Ekwe comes to the zoo as a visitor. He is the one who “sees” the animals, “admires” the lion, “watches everything very attentively.” In other words: Instead of being looked at, he does all the looking. At least before his fainting, he holds the power that comes with looking at others. Moreover, Ekwe’s unquestionable belonging to civilized humanity is accentuated by the very next scene, where he finds himself in more agreeable, cultivated surroundings. In the zoo director’s apartment, bedded on a chaise longue, he sees “a very appetizing coffee table” (“einen sehr appetitlichen Kaffeetisch,” 56) and is cared for by a friendly woman.
Yet, the passage about the zoo reveals even more. After all, Ekwe is not only described as someone who exercises power by looking, but also as someone who loses control as he faints. Moreover, the depiction of the lion—reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous poem “Der Panther. Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris” (1903)—also demands a closer look. In the German original, the lion’s condition and Ekwe’s fainting are described with the same term: “Ohnmacht” (here translated as “impotence” in the first and “fainting” in the second case). Both Ekwe and the lion experience a loss of control and agency, though Ekwe does so only temporarily. While the lion’s impotence—just like that of Rilke’s panther—is due to his living in captivity, the reasons behind Ekwe’s fainting are more ambivalent. On the one hand, they are connected to the shock of seeing an elephant, which Ekwe perceives as a dangerous, wild animal, and thus emphasize Ekwe’s urbanity and his almost aristocratic sensibility. On the other hand, the elephant is metaphorically related to the uncanniness of civilization and long-distance travel via the reference to Cameroon’s northern railroad. Later in the novel, an oncoming train is described as “a mighty and dark monster” and its movement as “hissing and groaning, crunching and blowing” (“Fauchend und stöhnend, knirschend und pustend, näherte sich langsam ein mächtiges und dunkles Ungetüm unserem Standort,” 125).
If the elephant represents an uncanny, natural, or artificial “other,” the lion converges with Ekwe through their shared “Ohnmacht,” and also through Ekwe’s compassion for the animal whose condition “had a very sad effect on me.” Therefore, I will reevaluate my earlier claim about Misipo drawing a line between humans and animals. While this line is figured as hard and impermeable in the sense that the colonialist equation of Black people and animals is emphatically rejected, it is nevertheless also blurred and permeable. The parallels between the lion and Ekwe show that there is something comparable in the conditions of humans and animals “in the diaspora,” that they share experiences of suffering, loss of agency, and alienation. The resonance with Rilke’s poem accentuates this similarity—not only because of the many anthropomorphic readings of the panther, which interpreted him as an allegory to every human’s existential solitude, the limitations of freedom, or the precarious state of the artist, but also due to the poem’s similarity to another one: Rilke’s poem “Die Aschanti” about an ethnic show in another Parisian park, written half a year after the panther poem, critically reflects on the differences between exhibiting humans and animals.[7]
To conclude, Misipo’s rhetoric rendering of the line between humans and animals differs depending on its intentions. When the line is blurred to degrade and dehumanize Black people, Misipo is keen to condemn this practice. However, when the blurring serves to evoke empathy, allow identification, or address the ambivalences of being a colonial migrant in Europe, Misipo uses it to his advantage. In this regard, his perspective on the zoo is reminiscent of John Berger’s classic essay Why Look at Animals? (1977), in which Berger writes:
All sites of enforced marginalisation—ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps—have something in common with zoos. But it is both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol.[8]
Gianna Zocco is a comparative literature scholar and principal investigator of the ERC project “Black Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation: Constructing Afropean Worlds, Questioning European Foundations” (AFROPEA).
[1] Within our ERC project, we conduct a major case study on Dualla Misipo and his writing. His novel Der Junge aus Duala was the subject of a workshop held at the ZfL from 13 to 15 November 2024, “Dualla Misipo: ‘Der Junge aus Duala’. Literaturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf ein frühes Werk der Schwarzen deutschen Literatur.” A special issue of the journal literatur für leser:innen focusing on Misipo’s novel is currently in preparation. Edited by Sandra Folie and Gianna Zocco, the issue will include an expanded version of this blog post that considers the role of animals in the novel more broadly.
[2] “in meiner zweiten Heimat”; Dualla Misipo: Der Junge aus Duala. Ein Regierungsschüler erzählt…, ed. by Jürg Schneider. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe 2022, 47. Quotations from Misipo’s novel are referenced directly in the text; all the translations are my own.
[3] Cf. Bénédicte Savoy and Albert Gouaffo: “Das Projekt”, in: Mikaél Assilkinga et al.: Atlas der Abwesenheit: Kameruns Kulturerbe in Deutschland. Heidelberg: Reimer 2023, 8–26 (11, 14).
[4] Cf. “Völkerschauen im Zoo Frankfurt – Eine Distanzierung.”
[5] Hilde Thode-Arora: “Hagenbeck’s European Tours: The Development of the Human Zoo”, in: Pascal Blanchard et al. (eds.): Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2008, 165–173 (170).
[6] Misipo: Der Junge aus Duala (cf. note 2), p. 53: “Wir stiegen in eine Straßenbahn und fuhren nach dem Zoo. Hier bekam ich Tiere zu sehen, die ich in meinem Leben noch nie gesehen hatte. Ich bewunderte zum ersten Mal den König der Tiere, den Löwen. Ich sah ihn in seinem eisenumgitterten Käfig auf und abschreiten, immer an der Barriere der eisernen Stangen entlang. Sein funkelndes Auge, sein furchtbarer Zorn, die bodenlose Ohnmacht seiner Pranken und sein nie enden wollender Spaziergang in dem engen Käfig, wirkten sehr traurig auf mich. Im Tigerkäfig war es nicht anders. Ich beobachtete alles sehr aufmerksam und dachte in diesem Augenblick an die Erzählungen meiner Oma. Wir schritten weiter und gelangten zum Elefantenhaus. Als ich der grauen Ungetüme ansichtig wurde, lief ein Zittern durch meinen Körper und Schweiß rieselte mir unter die Achselhöhlen. Wie erstarrt blieb ich vor diesem afrikanischen Riesen stehen. Für meine damaligen Begriffe waren sie ja viel zu mächtig! Vielleicht dachte ich im selben Moment an die Einweihung unserer Nordbahn in meiner Heimat, heute weiß ich es nicht mehr genau, jedenfalls wurde ich ohnmächtig!”
[7] Cf. Erich Unglaub: Panther und Aschanti. Rilke-Gedichte in kulturwissenschaftlicher Sicht. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2005, 36–37, 105–106.
[8] John Berger: “Why Look at Animals?”, in: About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books 1980, 1–26 (24).
