{"id":3828,"date":"2025-10-08T14:46:40","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T12:46:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/?p=3828"},"modified":"2025-10-09T10:24:01","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T08:24:01","slug":"gianna-zocco-agency-and-powerlessness-in-an-early-postcolonial-novel-in-german","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2025\/10\/08\/gianna-zocco-agency-and-powerlessness-in-an-early-postcolonial-novel-in-german\/","title":{"rendered":"Gianna Zocco: AGENCY AND POWERLESSNESS IN AN EARLY POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL IN GERMAN"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dualla Misipo (1901\u20131973) was a Cameroonian-German-French writer. His novel Der Junge aus Duala <\/em>is one of the first postcolonial literary texts written in German.[1]<\/a> 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\u2019s colonial rule. After attending Douala\u2019s German government school, he continues his education in Germany at about age ten. Before he even arrives at his \u201csecond home\u201d[2]<\/a>\u2014a small Hessian town where he will live with a foster family\u2014his journey brings him to Frankfurt am Main. Here, his travel companions\u2014a white <\/em>German teacher from Douala and his foster father\u2014are eager to immediately take him to the famous Frankfurt Zoo.<\/span><\/p>\n

Only a few paragraphs are dedicated to this visit, but they feature many traits of Misipo\u2019s writing. First, it is noteworthy that the novel never makes explicit why Ekwe\u2019s 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\u2019s second oldest zoo (founded in 1858) and its capacity to exhibit \u201cthe whole world\u201d in Frankfurt? Is it because of their interest in \u201cexotic\u201d animals? Or do Ekwe\u2019s educators think that the young Black boy, oversaturated by all the new impressions from his long jour\u00adney, would benefit from seeing some things his companions deem familiar to him, things that supposedly resemble his African home?<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s travel companions in \u201cexotic\u201d animals connects with two other scenes from the novel. In the first, another German teacher from Douala\u2019s 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\u2019s home in Hessen is decorated with a long ivory tusk and stuffed croco\u00addiles. Together, these scenes address the white <\/em>German characters\u2019 fascina\u00adtion with wild animals, pointing to the entanglements between the looting and collecting of animals, cultural artefacts, and human remains in colonialism.[3]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cAfrica\u201d as a single \u201ccountry\u201d 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 Eu\u00adropean continent: The tradition of \u201chuman zoos,\u201d which presented non-European protagonists and their supposedly \u201cauthentic\u201d lifestyles in derogatory ways. Organized by animal merchant Carl Hagenbeck and others, these exhibitions of human beings often took place at actual European zoos\u2014with more than two dozen at Frankfurt Zoo.[4]<\/a> To underline the supposed \u201csimplicity\u201d of the displayed people, their show-like presentations emphasized their daily relationships with animals, and Hagen\u00adbeck tellingly called them \u201czoological-anthropological shows.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

While Misipo abstains from explicitly referring to these contexts, he bluntly undermines any such stereotypical expectations, which, in turn, implicitly affirms their presence\u2014if not in Ekwe\u2019s companions, then in the minds of some of his presumed readers. Misipo writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

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 ad\u00admired the king of the animals, the lion, for the first time. I saw him pacing up and down in his iron-barred cage, al\u00adways 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\u2019s 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\u2019t remember exactly today, but in any case I fainted! [6]<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this passage, Ekwe\u2019s reaction to the zoo\u2019s 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 foreign\u00adness and dangerousness: \u201cI knew that they are predators that are not sympa\u00adthetic to humans.\u201d (\u201cIch wusste, dass es Raubtiere sind, die den Menschen nicht wohlwollen,\u201d 119) Rhetorically, Misipo is eager to draw a hard line, separating humans (of all races) from animals. Whereas Hagenbeck\u2019s \u201cethno\u00adlogical shows\u201d 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 \u201csees\u201d the animals, \u201cadmires\u201d the lion, \u201cwatches everything very attentively.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s apartment, bedded on a chaise longue, he sees \u201ca very appetizing coffee table\u201d (\u201ceinen sehr appetitlichen Kaffeetisch,\u201d 56) and is cared for by a friendly woman.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke\u2019s famous poem \u201cDer Panther. Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris\u201d (1903)\u2014also demands a closer look. In the German original, the lion\u2019s condition and Ekwe\u2019s fainting are described with the same term: \u201cOhn\u00admacht\u201d (here translated as \u201cimpotence\u201d in the first and \u201cfainting\u201d 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\u2019s impotence\u2014just like that of Rilke\u2019s panther\u2014is due to his living in captivity, the reasons behind Ekwe\u2019s 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\u2019s urbanity and his almost aristocratic sen\u00adsibility. On the other hand, the elephant is metaphorically related to the uncan\u00adniness of civilization and long-distance travel via the reference to Cameroon\u2019s northern railroad. Later in the novel, an oncoming train is described as \u201ca mighty and dark monster\u201d and its movement as \u201chissing and groaning, crunching and blowing\u201d (\u201cFauchend und st\u00f6hnend, knirschend und pustend, n\u00e4herte sich langsam ein m\u00e4chtiges und dunkles Unget\u00fcm unserem Standort,\u201d 125).<\/span><\/p>\n

If the elephant represents an uncanny, natural, or artificial \u201cother,\u201d the lion converges with Ekwe through their shared \u201cOhnmacht,\u201d and also through Ekwe\u2019s compassion for the animal whose condition \u201chad a very sad effect on me.\u201d 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 \u201cin the diaspora,\u201d that they share experiences of suffering, loss of agency, and alienation. The resonance with Rilke\u2019s poem accentuates this similarity\u2014not only because of the many anthropo\u00admorphic readings of the panther, which interpreted him as an allegory to every human\u2019s existential solitude, the limitations of freedom, or the precarious state of the artist, but also due to the poem\u2019s similarity to another one: Rilke\u2019s poem \u201cDie Aschanti\u201d 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]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

To conclude, Misipo\u2019s 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 perspec\u00adtive on the zoo is reminiscent of John Berger\u2019s classic essay Why Look at Animals? <\/em>(1977), in which Berger writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

All sites of enforced marginalisation\u2014ghet\u00adtos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps\u2014have something in common with zoos. But it is both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol.[8]<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Gianna Zocco<\/a> is a comparative literature scholar and principal investigator of the ERC project \u201cBlack Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation: Constructing Afropean Worlds, Questioning European Foundations<\/a>\u201d (AFROPEA).\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Within our ERC project, we conduct a major case study on Dualla Misipo and his writing. His novel Der Junge aus Duala <\/em>was the subject of a workshop held at the ZfL from 13 to 15 November 2024, \u201cDualla Misipo:\u00a0\u2018Der Junge aus Duala\u2019. Literaturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf ein fr\u00fches Werk der Schwarzen deutschen Literatur<\/a>.\u201d A special issue of the journal literatur f\u00fcr leser:innen<\/em> focusing on Misipo\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> \u201cin meiner zweiten Heimat\u201d; Dualla Misipo: Der Junge aus Duala. Ein Regie\u00adrungssch\u00fcler erz\u00e4hlt…<\/em>, ed. by J\u00fcrg Schneider. K\u00f6ln: R\u00fcdiger K\u00f6ppe 2022, 47. Quotations from Misi\u00adpo\u2019s novel are referenced directly in the text; all the translations are my own.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Cf. B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte Savoy and Albert Gouaffo: \u201cDas Projekt\u201d, in: Mika\u00e9l Assilkinga et al.: Atlas der Abwesenheit: Kameruns Kultur\u00aderbe in Deutschland<\/em>.<\/a> Heidelberg: Reimer 2023, 8\u201326 (11, 14).<\/span><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Cf. \u201cV\u00f6lkerschauen im Zoo Frankfurt \u2013 Eine Distanzierung<\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Hilde Thode-Arora: \u201cHagenbeck\u2019s European Tours: The Development of the Human Zoo\u201d, in: Pascal Blanchard et al. (eds.): Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires<\/em>. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2008, 165\u2013173 (170).<\/span><\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Misipo: Der Junge aus Duala <\/em>(cf. note 2), p. 53: <\/em>\u201cWir stiegen in eine Stra\u00dfenbahn 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 K\u00f6nig der Tiere, den L\u00f6wen. Ich sah ihn in seinem eisenumgitterten K\u00e4fig 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 K\u00e4fig, wirkten sehr traurig auf mich. Im Tigerk\u00e4fig war es nicht anders. Ich beobachtete alles sehr aufmerksam und dachte in diesem Augenblick an die Erz\u00e4hlungen meiner Oma. Wir schritten weiter und gelangten zum Elefantenhaus. Als ich der grauen Unget\u00fcme ansichtig wurde, lief ein Zittern durch meinen K\u00f6rper und Schwei\u00df rieselte mir unter die Achselh\u00f6hlen. Wie erstarrt blieb ich vor diesem afrikanischen Riesen stehen. F\u00fcr meine damaligen Begriffe waren sie ja viel zu m\u00e4chtig! Vielleicht dachte ich im selben Moment an die Einweihung unserer Nordbahn in meiner Heimat, heute wei\u00df ich es nicht mehr genau, jedenfalls wurde ich ohnm\u00e4chtig!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Cf. Erich Unglaub: Panther und Aschanti. Rilke-Gedichte in kulturwissenschaftlicher Sicht.<\/em> Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2005, 36\u201337, 105\u2013106.<\/span><\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> John Berger: \u201cWhy Look at Animals?\u201d, in: About Looking<\/em>. New York: Pantheon Books 1980, 1\u201326 (24).<\/span><\/p>\n

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VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Gianna Zocco: Agency and Powerlessness in an Early Postcolonial Novel in German, in: ZfL Blog, 8.10.2025, [https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2025\/10\/08\/gianna-zocco-agency-and-powerlessness-in-an-early-postcolonial-novel-in-german\/<\/a>].<\/span>
\nDOI: <\/span>https:\/\/doi.org\/10.13151\/zfl-blog\/20251008-01<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n