Kardi Kassin

Welcome to my site. I'm glad you're here.

I study History and Religious Studies, and yes, that sounds like a lot. But it's really just the logical continuation of a search that started much earlier.

My path actually started somewhere else. I began with a basic degree in Law. If it hadn't been for Covid, I probably would have kept going the conventional route, and never would have engaged with African colonial history, the subject that had always occupied me anyway. As an Afro-German, I was given almost nothing about the history of this continent, about Germany's entanglements with it, neither in my family nor in school.

One moment from my final years of school still sits deep. My history teacher told me colonial history wasn't on the curriculum. Full stop. That was it.

Then, by chance, I found out there was a degree program that covered exactly those subjects. So after my basic law degree I switched to African Studies. Finally I could engage with the history of a continent that mostly shows up as a footnote in our textbooks.

The society we live in pushes you, as an Afro-German, to want to understand the "African" part better. The questions come from outside. "Where are you really from?" Eventually you start asking yourself. But the longer I searched, the clearer one thing became. Why only that one part? Why not the German part too?

Because on the other side of my family, there were stories too. My great-grandfather had spent years researching our family history. As a teenager, he told me a lot about history and Germany's past, about Prussia, about wars, about what had been. But back then? Honestly? No interest. Teenagers have little patience for their great-grandfather's stories. Today I'd love to listen to him. Today I'd ask him questions. But he's gone. And I'm left with all the stories I never heard, and the burning wish to find them anyway.

The deeper I got into African Studies, the more I realized that questions stayed open there too. I kept running into things that amazed me, and made me angry at the same time, because none of it is part of basic general knowledge in Germany. And it became clearer and clearer how much religion shapes what the world has become. So I started studying Religious Studies too, alongside everything else.

Four subjects in the end, Law, African Studies, History, and Religious Studies. On the surface, far apart from each other. And yet they all circle the same question.

Law gave me the tools to understand structures, laws, constitutions, systems of order. But something was missing. The perspective. The question of who never showed up in those systems…

I think, in the end, it's not only about understanding the part society expects from me. It's about understanding both parts, and maybe, in the end, myself too…

This site is where all these questions meet.