German/South African/Scottish/Mozambican/Argentinian/Mexican | Senegalese
If I was holding a flag, I'd put the whole world on it. It's through traveling I created this idea in my head that all people are connected in some way. If you think about historical geography and colonialism, how certain folks ended up being born into another country being dragged out of their own home town from one place to another.
My Mother gave birth to me very young when she was 19 years old. My parents were together and separated multiple times. All I can remember from my childhood times is, the times my Father would bring me to his Senegalese family I would eat Senegalese food, maybe even get my hair braided. Living in Berlin my parents would speak English to each other. My Father speaks multiple languages though I think my Mother wasn't able to speak good German yet. My parents traveled to Senegal together with my young baby brother at the time. I myself have never been to Senegal but I do plan to go there.
As a child I typically learned numbers, abc's and colors. Learning what the colour Black is or Brown, I, as a child would never understand why a human being would be called Black. But this was me a child being literal about what I had learned at school. I'd look at my skin and say that looks Brown to me. Being raised in Berlin Germany back in the days they used a colour and called it ‘Hautfarbe’ which means skin colour. It was a kind of light peach colour the children would use making the people in the picture look White. I'd draw a portrait of myself using this colour drawing a person that didn't look skin colour wise like me at all. As a naive child I didn't think much about it, having teachers educate us this way. The older I got the more I realized that this wasn't PC. So I learned to educate children in Germany at nurseries and actually educated them what colours they were using or would question them asking them why they would call this skin colour. Quickly they would realize being aware of their surroundings etc. Nowadays you'll find nurseries with all kinds of dolls with different colors and stories from around the world. This is important!
Sign up to Patreon or Subscribe to our website to read more stories