Helga Emde: A Black Feminist Internationalist in Praxis

In 1984, Helga Emde, along with other Black German women in the Frankfurt area, hosted the first Black German gathering and sparked a modern Black civil rights movement across the nation. Narratives of the Black German movement of the 1980s and 1990s tend to view figures such as May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, Eleonore Widenroth-Coulibaly, Jasmin Eding, and Abenaa Adomako as pivotal figures. Yet Emde was also a notable person in the cultural-political movement. In addition to her activism in the movement, she also worked within ecumenical and Black European feminist organizations. In doing so, she supported intersectional agendas that attempted to make Europe antiracist and inclusive. Her work in and beyond Germany certainly mattered. In this paper, I argue that Emde was a Black feminist internationalist who advocated for her compatriots in Germany as well as other minoritized communities across Europe. Her internationalism had local, national, and continental contours. Through her work, she pursued cultural diplomacy and moved beyond the status quo. By addressing the entrenched “matrix of domination” (Collins), Emde showed how intersectionality was not only an ideology but also a praxis that offered possibility and change in an oppressive “Fortress Europe.” Grounded in a Black feminist ethic, Emde’s activism envisioned alternative worldmaking and remained attentive to the particularities of Black European experiences. Her work offers models of futurity and what is possible in our contemporary moment of heightened illiberalism, fascism, and ethnonationalism across Europe and the globe.