Back in 2019 I moved to a quaint, little city in the West of Germany. Honestly, with its one nightclub, calling it a city feels criminal but apparently since it has over 100,000 inhabitants, it qualifies. 

When I arrived here, there was a fire inside me, a political fire. Politics and protest have been part of my character for as long as I can remember, but in 2019 the stakes felt higher. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was one of few Black people at my university in Germany.

I vividly remember in my first week here, being enrolled by a Black university worker in the international students’ office and asking her with desperate sincerity, “where can I go to find Black people?”

A month or so later and I’d been told that my English was surprisingly good countless times by white students who couldn’t comprehend Black Britishness and was even told that my name was unexpectedly easy to pronounce, by a student representative!

Over time, myself and Yve, the worker who’d enrolled me here, became friends and I eventually shared with her an idea I’d had to create a safe space at the university for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of colour) students.