In 1889 Suleiman bin Said, a 17-year old from Zanzibar, arrived in Berlin to work as a Swahili lecturer. His employer was the Seminar for Oriental Languages, a training facility for German civil servants. Said was the first African to teach at the Seminar, which later prided itself on hiring “native” assistants from throughout the world. Less than two years later, Said was dead. He was ill throughout his stay and succumbed to pneumonia, a disease that afflicted many of the African lecturers who came to Berlin after him. A discourse of illness and death surrounded the lecturers, and their German associates could not cope with the frequent hospital stays and long periods of convalescence the Africans required. African bodies became a problem in need of solution, and Germans responded by “recycling” the lecturers; they were kept in the city for short durations and then replaced. Because the job of lecturer paid well and offered social mobility, there were many young Africans willing to risk their health for it.
In this presentation, I will tell Said’s story. I will look at the kind of medical treatment Africans received, and how it compared with white medical assistance. Did Said have anything to say about his own illness, or did others speak for him? Was he just a foreign body to be disposed of and superseded, or was greater significance attached to his death? After he died, Berlin newspapers reported extensively on his funeral, indicating that however interchangeable African lecturers eventually became, Said’s passing was cloaked in mystique. The entire incident turned into colonial spectacle as Said’s coffin was paraded through Berlin. This unusual display demonstrated that Germans were not sure how to accommodate Africans, living or dead, in their cities, and made a simple burial into a colonial exposition. That disease and death were later handled differently shows that Germans had become accustomed to African presence, and either learned how to fit Africans into the urban landscape or ignore them altogether.