In these times of global crises we are witnessing an intensification of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles in Africa. Daniel Bendix and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, the authors put into conversation in this article, address some of these struggles, including movements for decolonised learning spaces such as Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa, efforts to dismantle financial imperial institutions such as the anti-CFA1 mobilisations in West Africa, and the deepening colonial efforts of ‘population control’ in connection with Northern economic interests. Other struggles include the resurgent calls for pan-African unity, spearheaded for example by the South African Economic Freedom Fighters party, ongoing imperial military interventions from Libya to Mali and Somalia, and Indigenous struggles for self-determination and land, such as the resistance of pastoralists against colonial conservationism in Tanzania.2 These processes and developments are deeply entangled with colonial histories and relations of power which require analyses and frameworks that can support the advancement of anti-colonial struggles for liberation and decolonisation.
This review article brings Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s Decolonization, development and knowledge in Africa: turning over a new leaf and Bendix’s Global development and colonial power: German development policy at home and abroad into conversation. Both books engage with the ‘colonial question’ (Tilley 2016) in Africa through contrasting research strategies and standpoints. Reading them together and drawing attention to their overlaps and divergences allows us to reflect on the diverse ways of analysing the colonial in Africa, and how to conceptualise the relationship between development and decolonisation. As such, the books contain urgent calls and analyses relevant for academics in development studies, political economy, and de/post/anti-colonial scholarship. Following brief book summaries, I will review the authors’ conceptualisations of coloniality and colonial power with particular consideration for the question of whether ‘coloniality’ is applicable for analysing Africa. I then turn to the relationship between knowledge, memory and education which is emphasised by both authors in the context of decolonisation. While the authors diverge in the audiences they address in pursuit of decolonisation, they converge on the imperative to (re)centre and recover non-Western knowledges. Following a reflection on the authors’ calls for decolonisation in education and knowledge production, and how they sit within the contemporary context of ‘metaphorising’ decolonisation at universities, the article considers the ways forward proposed by the authors in the form of alternative, non-colonial development paradigms. It then ends with a brief summary and an outlook on future dialogue between the two authors in the particular context of Germany and German colonial power.
Setting the stage, framing the books
In Decolonization, development and knowledge in Africa, Zimbabwean decolonial theorist Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni takes up Frantz Fanon’s call to ‘turn over a new leaf’ by opening up avenues for Africa (as a continent and transcontinental community) to attain liberation, decolonisation, and self-determined development. Across the six main chapters – the decolonial turn, the Bandung spirit, blackness, African political economy, African Renaissance, and African humanities – the author powerfully argues that in order for Africa to turn over a new leaf, it needs to disentangle from coloniality, which describes the global condition of Euro-modernity based on ongoing colonial relations of oppression, exploitation and alienation. This is achieved through decoloniality in the interconnected spheres of power, knowledge and being (discussed below). For the author, key to this disentanglement is the revitalisation of non-Eurocentric African knowledges and archives as the basis for autonomous decolonised development. Ndlovu-Gatsheni forcefully brings together anti-colonial thought from African liberation fighters and scholar-activists on the one hand, and the decolonial school of thought originating from so-called Latin America on the other. The focus on complex and deep historical processes of colonialism/coloniality, and engagement with topical theoretical discussions within the fields of political economy, global politics, decolonial studies, development studies and African studies, is complemented by constant reference to past and contemporary decolonial struggles.
Postcolonial scholar Daniel Bendix’s Global development and colonial power offers a meticulously researched case study of what he calls ‘colonial power’ in German development policy which is analysed across four key sectors: 1) development education and 2) billboard advertising in Germany, as well as 3) childbirth-related practices and 4) ‘family planning’3 in Tanzania. His central argument is that colonial power is deeply entangled within contemporary German development policy. This manifests, in particular, in the reproduction of colonial, racial, and gendered hierarchies, the continued denial of non-Western knowledges, an imagined European supremacy in development techniques and strategies, and the advance of capitalist interests. The book makes an urgent call to break with current Eurocentric development regimes through a thorough rejection of colonial hierarchies and the fostering of genuine postcolonial transnational solidarity as an alternative development paradigm. This includes the acknowledgement of the validity of African knowledges, and the need to dismantle the reproduction of colonial hierarchies between Africa and Europe/Germany in education. Contrasting Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s contribution, which engages mostly with wide-ranging theoretical debates, Bendix draws on an array of primary research (including interviews, archival research and document analysis) to construct one single case study. As such, his book makes a refreshing contribution to postcolonial and development studies, not only due to its case study of Germany, which remains understudied in the field, but also because of its empirical groundedness.
Conceptualising coloniality and colonial power
Within the university there are ongoing debates on how to conceptualise the colonial (Bhambra 2014, Mignolo 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Walsh 2018). These concern, among others, the historical and geographical starting points for analysing the colonial, the bodies of knowledge and experiences which form the basis of such analyses, the specific political projects of decolonisation and its primary battlefields, the question of whether colonialism is better understood as a mere historical episode or a deeper global system, and whether the colonised should aim to be included in colonial structures or dismantle them entirely in pursuit of alternative futures. Different bodies of literature grappling with the colonial question, although overlapping, include decolonial, anti-colonial, postcolonial theory, Indigenous scholarship, critical race theory, and others. Bendix and Ndlovu-Gatsheni intervene in these discussions by conceptualising the colonial with a specific geo-focus on Africa. Two different strategies are employed. While Bendix focuses on colonial power in Germany and then examines how German development policy affects Tanzania, Ndlovu-Gatsheni examines how coloniality manifests in Africa. Bendix analyses the colonial by examining the coloniser while Ndlovu-Gatsheni speaks from the perspective of the colonised. Furthermore, while Ndlovu-Gatsheni engages primarily with decolonial theory and the concept of coloniality, Bendix explicitly rejects the use of coloniality and instead uses the term ‘colonial power’ while situating himself within postcolonial scholarship. This produces divergences in the authors’ conceptualisation of the colonial and raises questions over the extent to which ‘coloniality’ is appropriate for analysing Africa.
Bendix’s rejection of coloniality is based on his assertion that it is unsuitable as a theoretical tool for the context of Germany and Africa:
While this book is inspired by this debate [on coloniality], it acknowledges that the concept of ‘coloniality’ is closely related to the particular context of Latin America. I have chosen to use the term colonial power for my analysis of Germany’s colonial present, so as to underline the specificity of that context. (Bendix 2018, 28)
Interestingly, Bendix draws on a wide array of post/de/anti-colonial concepts and authors who speak from various geographical standpoints and experiences to construct the building blocks of ‘colonial power’. This includes, for instance, concepts from the ‘Latin American’ decolonial school of thought such as the ‘colonial difference’. The question arises that if ‘coloniality’ is deemed too closely linked to Latin America and thus inapplicable for understanding Africa, what makes the ‘colonial difference’ appropriate? Coloniality and colonial difference originate from the same theoretical (decolonial) current and its rootedness in ‘Latin America’, but while the former is seen as too closely linked to its geographical origins the latter seems to have transcended these origins which make it relevant for an analytical framework that analyses the colonial relations between Germany and Tanzania. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s understanding of coloniality and its usefulness as a conceptual framework for analysing Africa offers a solution to this apparent contradiction.
Coloniality for Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a system of power centred on race which describes colonial relations beyond formal colonial administrations. It is notable that this centring of race is a key point of convergence between Ndlovu-Gatsheni's coloniality and Bendix's ‘colonial power’. For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, the colonial is a system rather than a historical episode and forms the darker side of Euro-modernity, meaning that without colonial violence, accumulation, genocide and enslavement, modernity’s self-proclaimed civilisation, progress and development would have been impossible. Coloniality requires decoloniality, which according to Ndlovu-Gatsheni includes delinking from colonial structures of power such as global capitalism, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, racism and hetero-patriarchy, which are identified as part of the ‘coloniality of power’. This structural delinking must be based on the reclaiming of African histories and knowledges which have been denied or misappropriated as part of Eurocentric regimes of knowledge, or what is termed the ‘coloniality of knowledge’. Such a reclaiming of histories and knowledges is necessary to heal the colonial wound which continues to fester in the collective and individual subjectivities of the colonised following centuries of dismemberment, epistemicides, linguicides and alienation.5 This means moving away from the ‘coloniality of being’. Since modernity could not have been possible without the 500 years of colonialism and ongoing coloniality, Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that decolonisation/decoloniality should not aim to get a piece of the European pie, but to pursue futures outside and against Euro-modernity. For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, coloniality, while originating in the Latin American decolonial school, is not alien to Africa, and in his book he demonstrates the analytical similarities of ‘African’ anti-colonial and ‘Latin American’ decolonial scholars. This follows the assertion that coloniality, while grounded in the experiences of the Americas, is not necessarily or at least exclusively a theory of Latin America, but a theory of Euro-modernity as a global colonial condition. Based on this, Ndlovu-Gatsheni is able to produce powerful analyses of the colonial in Africa by bringing Latin American scholars into conversation with African writers who do not explicitly use ‘coloniality’.
The colonial, the epistemic, and decolonisation
What stands out when reading Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Bendix together is their shared emphasis on the primacy of knowledge and discourse in their conceptualisation of the colonial. Bendix understands colonial power primarily as a set of discourses: ‘[c]olonial power [is] conceived as discourses which emerged during colonisation, interconnected with practices, institutions and political-economic conditions’ (2). For Bendix, ‘[t]o explore colonial power, it is useful to conceive of power as dominant ways of thinking and their interconnectedness with the material world’ (34) which rests on the assertion that ‘[d]iscourses take effect in the material world, are expressed in actions, located in institutions and brought to life by people’ (32). Bendix emphasises nonetheless that ‘taking for granted the primacy of discourses is theoretically flawed and politically problematic’ (32). This understanding translates to Bendix’s analysis of German development policy where he identifies colonial power primarily in the imaginaries and representation of the global South in curricula, billboard advertisements, attitudes of development professionals, and perceptions of development needs and policies. Bendix considers and examines material dimensions, but discourse is given primacy. For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, the epistemic, the discursive and the material cannot be disentangled, but ‘[w]hat is … emphasized … is that the modern world system and the global order are epistemic creations. Such spheres of life as society, politics, and economy are also epistemic creations’ (3). He stresses that it is ‘in the epistemic domain that the sources of systemic, structural, and institutional crises are resident’ (1). While Ndlovu-Gatsheni asserts that ‘[a]t the centre of the contemporary decolonial struggles are such targets as racism, enslavement, imperialism, colonialism/coloniality, capitalism, and patriarchy’ (4), he makes clear that he understands decolonisation and decoloniality to be first and foremost epistemic projects: ‘the turning over of a new leaf by Africa must begin in the knowledge domain and entails the process of producing new knowledge and working out new concepts that liberate human genius rather than imprisoning it’ (5). Therefore, decolonisation and decoloniality for Bendix and Ndlovu-Gatsheni centre on the question of knowledges and how they are (re)produced in memory and education.
Crucially, in their respective analyses of memory, knowledge and education, the authors have different audiences. Ndlovu-Gatsheni addresses and calls on the ‘wretched’ to free themselves from Eurocentric thought and epistemology by recovering their own histories, literatures, and archives. It is they who hold non-Eurocentric knowledges which have the potential to generate autonomous African development paradigms and envision decolonial futures if remembered, activated and decolonised. Bendix by contrast speaks to German development professionals to question their own knowledge, imaginaries and attitudes and how these translate into colonial development practices. He speaks to the ‘former’ colonisers of the North who have historically crafted global colonial systems and benefited from them. Since Bendix’s analysis demonstrates that German development professionals and educational systems continue to reproduce such relations, it is them who he finds to be in need of decolonisation. In this sense, Bendix and Ndlovu-Gatsheni address different nodes of coloniality and speak to those who find themselves at the opposing ends of its racialised hierarchies. As both projects are urgently needed, the authors complement each other in their analyses and proposals for decolonisation.
In his examination of colonial violence and coloniality, Ndlovu-Gatsheni frequently uses Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s concept of dismemberment. In Chapter 4, on blackness, dismemberment is understood as a global ontological splitting (of whiteness and blackness) which pushed black people out of humanity via six colonial processes. The first is the invention of blackness which consists of the questioning of black people’s humanity and the relegation of (invented) blackness as a signifier of sub-humanity. Second is the enslavement of black people and their reduction to commodity status through the specific context of the transatlantic slave ‘trade’. A third process is the fragmentation and scramble of Africa initiated at the 1884/85 Berlin Conference which resulted in the imposition of colonial boundaries on territories and peoples (i.e. fragmenting people through inventing contending ethnicities). Fourth is the denial of African history whereby the continent is envisioned based on Hegel’s notion as dark and devoid of history and development. Fifth is the ‘postcolonial’ entrapment of neocolonialism and coloniality, and sixth the perpetuation of patriarchy that dismembers women from power, knowledge and being. Ndlovu-Gatsheni identifies dismemberment as a tool to enable coloniality’s death project of genocides, epistemicides and linguicides. Following wa Thiong’o, he asserts that colonial education is ‘the most important force for “dismemberment” and alienation because it invades and takes control of the mental universe in order to produce a distorted consciousness among the colonized’ (78). This in turn disrupts African self-determined development and makes education a key site for decolonisation and liberation. Against dismemberment, Ndlovu-Gatsheni prescribes ‘re-membering’, the project of restoring and reclaiming an African identity, wholeness, history, and self-definition. Re-membering is embodied in multiple struggles around blackness including the Haitian Revolution, Ethiopianism, Garveyism, Negritude, African Consciousness, African nationalism, African socialism, the African Renaissance and, most recently, the Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements. As such,
Re-membering encapsulates the consistent and complex contestations, resistances, and struggles against dismemberment that took the form of not only initiatives aimed at counter-self-creation, self-definition, recovery, and restoration of denied humanity but also the systematic self-re-writing of black people back into human history. (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 81)
On the other hand, Bendix’s reflections on memory lead him to identify ‘dis-remembering’ of German colonialism in development policy as a key obstacle to move towards postcolonial transnational solidarity. Rather than being a passive phenomenon, dis-remembering constitutes ‘an active social and cultural process’ (22) which (re)produces colonial amnesia. It describes the failure to acknowledge and recognise colonial continuities in North–South relations generally, and German development policy in particular. Its active reproduction is achieved through a particular telling of German colonial history which is reduced to the period of state-sponsored colonialism starting in the late nineteenth century, imagined as short-lived and, crucially, not affecting the present. Dis-remembering is also constituted by the centring of the Nazi rule and the Holocaust, which again are not connected to colonialism in German national memory and have an ‘extinguishing effect’ (36) on colonialism’s re-membering. This includes restricting racism to mean anti-Semitism. Writing as someone who holds German citizenship and who was born, raised, and who completed high school in Germany, ‘dis-remembering’ precisely captures my own educational experience, and it was not until I started my undergraduate degree outside Germany that I began to consider its colonial histories. Education, both in the form of official curricula and billboard advertisements, therefore, becomes a crucial site of decolonial epistemic struggle. Hence, despite addressing different nodes of coloniality, Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Bendix both emphasise how the (re)production of memory and knowledges in various modes of education are key to development paradigms.
Decolonising knowledge and education: reflections from Britain
The calls for decolonisation and decoloniality in the realm of knowledge (re)production and education made by Bendix and Ndlovu-Gatsheni have gained traction in recent years. For instance, the Rhodes Must Fall movement originating in South Africa and discussed by Ndlovu-Gatsheni has reverberated in my own academic context of the UK. Here it has been taken up most prominently by students at the University of Oxford and in the form of student-led ‘decolonising the university’ societies, groups and campaigns. However, many of these movements to decolonise curricula, departments and university spaces have been abstracted, co-opted and ‘metaphorised’ to such an extent (chiefly under the liberal label of ‘diversifying the curriculum’) that even members of the royal family have endorsed the programme. This forces us to acknowledge that something has gone fatally wrong and that there is an urgent need to ‘remember’ the radical and anti-systemic programme of decolonisation and decoloniality in the realm of education and knowledges which calls for structural transformation, not inclusion. In line with Bendix and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, whose respective analyses leave no doubt about how deeply engrained the colonial is in memory, knowledge and education, I want to explicate some specific projects of decolonising knowledge production and education that must be pursued by members of the academy today. This is in consideration of Tuck and Yang’s (2012) reminder that ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’ – that decolonisation requires material changes and the redistribution of power.6
For teaching, decolonisation means revising curriculum and syllabus structures and goals which must be explicitly anti-colonial and directly serve projects of liberation and freedom. This raises questions about who/what should be centred, including what subjects should be covered, who has authority to speak on those subjects, and who should be part of this revision. This includes for instance centring the ‘decolonise curriculum framework’ organisation in Germany highlighted by Bendix in the rewriting of curricula. Those at the forefront of these struggles within the university but also outside the university who are currently excluded from these decisions must be able to take up a key role. Decolonisation here should also include a questioning of the hierarchical teaching structures and relationships themselves, the modes of ‘assessment’ and feedback, the type of materials chosen for learning where currently written and ‘academic’ sources are preferred, and the so-called academic standards we set for students – from meeting strict deadlines, restricting thought to specific word counts, demonstrating the ability to recite male European canons, linear and Eurocentric essay structures, and citation practices. We need epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2011) and what Ndlovu-Gatsheni calls ‘epistemic freedom’.
In our research, we must challenge top-down research agendas and programmes to instead have marginalised, oppressed and Indigenous communities guide and set research agendas based on their needs and knowledges. Research protocols need to be overhauled so that they respond directly and are accountable to community needs rather than academic standards, hierarchies and career ambitions. We must centre global South perspectives, knowledges and experiences and treat them as testimonies rather than raw data (Smith 2012; Tilley 2017). We cannot afford to pretend to conduct objective, independent or apolitical research. We must acknowledge that such a position does not exist, and explicitly side with the oppressed (Smith 2012; Dei 2013; 2016). As Ndlovu-Gatsheni writes, ‘[d]ecolonial writers in politics are never “neutral”’ (1). Moreover, scholarship addressing the colonial question must not restrict itself to the realm of knowledge or education, but provide analyses and reflections on anti-colonial projects that directly address the material manifestations of colonial power. This includes for instance the redistribution of land in southern Africa, Indigenous and pastoral struggles for self-determination in East Africa, queer rights and liberation in Uganda, resistance to extractive imperial projects such as in the Niger Delta, and self-defence against military intervention and European ‘border imperialism’ (Walia 2013) in North Africa. What analyses and research can decolonial scholarship offer to aid those at the forefront of these battles? How do these projects generate and mobilise knowledges, address the issue of epistemic decolonisation and envision different futures? These are urgent issues concerning the colonial question in Africa which require research led and guided by movements and communities in resistance.
Institutionally, we must question the wider power relationships within the university and between the university and centres of power elsewhere. The neoliberal managerial university model must be dispensed with. University education, just like any other education, must be a right, not a privilege, and barriers to access based on class, race, gender and citizenship must be vigorously opposed, including student fees. Private donor-driven research as well as state interests must be banned. Undoubtedly, this implies larger and broader social and economic change. This should not be seen as a deterring factor or proof of the impossibility of radical decolonial change, but as a sign of the responsibility which academics have to participate in structural transformation at the university and beyond (Santos 2014). A guiding example for this project includes, for instance, La Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, Mexico. The programme for decolonisation in education and knowledge must directly dismantle colonial, racial and gendered hierarchies which, as both Bendix and Ndlovu-Gatsheni demonstrate, sit at the very basis of contemporary development agendas. Put differently, anti-racism, anti-colonialism and anti-sexism must be the guiding ideological principles for a radical decolonisation in knowledge production.
Ways forward: self-determined development, transnational solidarity, and non-Western knowledges
Bendix and Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s analyses of decolonisation in relation to knowledge, education and memory emerge as part of their broader pursuit of alternative development paradigms. They both argue that alternative development paradigms must be based on the (re)centring and revitalisation of non-Western knowledges. Once again, their proposals for ways forward differ in whom they address. Ndlovu-Gatsheni addresses the colonised while Bendix speaks to the ‘former’ colonisers.
For Bendix, among others, it is the colonial imaginaries and education in Germany as well as the dismissal and silencing of African knowledges, practices, and their validity with regard to childbirth-related practices in Tanzania which are obstructing self-determined development. In German development policy, ‘[c]olonial power is evident not only in the construction of racialised difference but also in the non-recognition of other knowledge systems’ (144). As a result, ‘the global South continues to be constructed as in need of intervention in the sense of help or guidance’ (144) from the West. He thus insists on ‘the transformation of the whole [development education] field and … changes of institutional and political frameworks’ (150). This is also where the challenge to the ‘dis-remembering’ of German colonialism becomes key. For Bendix this entails an abandonment of top-down developmentalism and a move towards ‘postcolonial transnational solidarity’. Detailed strategies and examples of such solidarity are not provided.
For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, the recycling of Eurocentric development patterns based on an enchantment with the ‘European game’ in Africa reproduces coloniality and prevents Africa from ‘turning over a new leaf’. The ‘“European game” is a secular invention of the modern world in the image of Europe, claiming that only Europeans are creators and rendering “Others” as imitators’ (3) and ‘to be enchanted by Euromodernity is to fall headlong into the logics and traps of the “European game”, where even enslavement and colonisation were articulated as part of the discourse of progress and salvation’ (4). As such, ‘the Eurocentric perspective urges Africa to imitate and emulate Europe and North America in its search for liberation and development [while] it conceals the “underside” (violence and violations) of Euromodernity known as “coloniality”’ (4). For Africa to turn over a new leaf thus necessitates ‘abandoning the “European game” on the grounds that it is dehumanizing and dismembering other human beings’ (4) and thus constitutes ‘a double act of decolonizing and making a new humanism (another possible world) … [which] must begin in the knowledge domain’ (5). Here ‘re-membering’ is imperative for non-Western-centric and autonomous African development paths. For this, Ndlovu-Gatsheni sketches summaries of African intellectual and ideological production.
Conclusion
This review put the two conceptualisations of the colonial (coloniality and colonial power) offered by Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Bendix in dialogue. Here it examined the role of knowledge, discourse, memory and education which stand out as key sites of decolonial struggle in the conceptualisations proposed by the authors. While they address different audiences, they converge in their call for a (re)centring and revitalising of non-Western knowledges through ‘re-membering’, as a strategy against ‘dismemberment’ and ‘dis-remembering’. This article then reflected on the authors’ push for decolonisation in education and knowledge production in the context of ongoing metaphorisation of decolonisation and sought to ‘remember’ its radical anti-systemic nature. Finally, it considered ways forwards proposed by the authors in the form of alternative, non-Eurocentric development paradigms. Overall, the authors offer important analyses and urgent calls for academics working in development studies, political economy, and de/post/anti-colonial theories; for development ‘practitioners’; and for decolonial movements more broadly. Despite their contrasting analyses and research strategies, they converge in their push for immediate dismantling of colonial, racial, and sexist hierarchies.
With Ndlovu-Gatsheni having recently been appointed to a post at the University of Bayreuth and Bendix writing from the Friedensau Adventist University, we can hope for future dialogue between the two authors as well as radical decolonial scholarship from and on Germany. As Bendix correctly identifies, Germany is an understudied case within de-/postcolonial studies where most of the focus is on British (and to a lesser extent French) colonialism. Given its role as regional hegemon in Europe and one of the largest economies in the world-system, as well as the fact that it has witnessed the alarming resurgence of far-right and neo-Nazi groups, there is dire need for expanding anti-racist and anti-colonial projects and analyses in Germany. This is especially true in light of the upcoming federal elections which could potentially serve as a catalyst for accelerated political turbulence since Angela Merkel, who has been perceived as a beacon for German and indeed European ‘stability’ and (neo)liberal ‘order’, will not be running for re-election. It is important that academic analyses in this context will interconnect with anti-racist, decolonial, and more broadly anti-systemic struggles and movements in Germany. This includes the fight for radical anti-racist educational spaces. The attempts to ban Achilles Mbembe from speaking at a cultural event in Germany in 2020, due in part to his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and this year’s far-right attacks on black academics, most prominently Maisha Auma, serve as reminders that there is much to do. Nonetheless, it must also go beyond university spaces to include migrant struggles and the German Black Lives Matter movement. Further, effective alliances with anti-fascist, environmental, anti-capitalist, workers’ and women’s movements must be formed, and there is a need to investigate Germany’s police violence, defund its police forces, and dismantle its military–industrial complex.