In the mid 1980s, several German women collaborated on a writing project evolving from their commitment to discover and embrace their full identities as Germans, Blacks, and females living in a society that is often racist and sexist. The completed project was developed into a monograph entitled Farbe Bekennen ('Showing Our Colours') and published in Berlin in 1986. Well received, Farbe Bekennen was influential in promoting a metamorphosis of identity consciousness among black people living in Germany; it thereby helped to revolutionize the nascent Black German Movement two to three years before German reunification took place in 1990. One of the authors of Farbe Bekennen, Katharina Oguntoye, described that work as the medium through which she and her fellow authors were able to 'emerge from the isolation in which we were living and name ourselves Afro-Germans or Black Germans and we Black Germans began the search for our identity.' A graduate student of history, Oguntoye recognized the need to address this problem and, in her own words, 'accepted the challenge to discover and develop sources for researching the history of Africans and Afro-Germans in Germany.' She wrote an intriguing, powerful and innovative master's thesis entitled Eine Afro-Deutsche Geschichte: Zur Lebenssituationen von Afrikanern und Afro-Deutschen in Deutschland von 1884 bis 1950 (An Afro-German History: Circumstances of the Lives of Africans and Afro Germans in Germany from 1884-1950).
