Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

This Berlin Wall that Runs through Me sheds light into the legacies of the European colonization of Africa, chartered at Berlin in 1884-1885. The violent, crude invasion alienated Africans and criminalized intra-African mobilities by re-engineering Africans into rightless “natives” and “alien natives,” controlled within the new colonies in violation of their social, political and economic realities. Independence reified these “tribalizing” Berlin walls into national borders. The Ghana-Nigeria transborder expulsions (1960s-80s) illustrate the legacies of this alieNation. The Berlin walls continued the immobilization, alienation and criminalization of invented intra-African difference, rationalizing Afrophobic violence that still afflicts Africans today.