With the exhibition “Hey Hamburg, do you know Duala Manga Bell?” the MARKK engages the topics of racism and colonial heritage for young people and families. It tells the tragic and in Germany largely forgotten story of a resistant young king from the Bell merchant family, who grows up in Douala, Cameroon, and in a small village in southern Germany. When Rudolf Duala Manga Bell rebels against the arbitrary acts and the expropriation plans of the German colonial government in Cameroon at the beginning of the 20th century, he and his allies pay for their resistance with their lives.

Surrounding a graphic novel style drawing by Nigerian artist Karo Akpokiere and a commissioned work by Hervé Youmbi, the exhibition brings together archive holdings and photographs with the MARKK’s Duala holdings and impressive loans from other museums. The experimental exhibition was created in cooperation with Princess Marilyn Douala Manga Bell, a great-granddaughter of Rudolf Duala Manga Bell. Together we look back and ask: What now?

TIP:
Bring your own headphones for the listening stations in the exhibition!

The exhibition is a project of MARKK in Motion, sponsored by the Initiative for Ethnological Collections of the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the program 360° – Fund for Cultures of the New Urban Society of the German Federal Cultural Foundation with the support of the Rudolf Augstein Foundation, the Mara & Holger Cassens Foundation, the ZEIT Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius, the Commerzbank Foundation and the Friends of the Museum am Rothenbaum.

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