Theodor Michael

Theodor Wonja Michael (15 January 1925 – 19 October 2019) was a German child actor, journalist and public servant, as well as a prominent speaker on living as an Afro-German and a prisoner in Nazi forced labor camps during Nazi Germany.

Life Theodor Wonja Michael was born in Berlin in 1925 as the youngest son of the Cameroonian colonial migrant Theophilius Wonja Michael and his German wife Martha (née Wegner). He had three siblings: James (b. 1916), Juliana (b. 1921) and Christiana. Michael's father worked in human zoos where his son also had to perform in stereotypical African dress.

When his mother died in 1926, he grew up as a half-orphan with foster parents, who were the operators of a human zoo and used him there from 1927, at the age of two, as an extra. He also played a minor role as an extra in the film Münchhausen (with Hans Albers and others). In 1943 he was imprisoned near Berlin and forced to labor until the labor camp was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945.

After 1945 he worked as a civilian employee for the US occupation troops and took on roles as an actor. He completed his high school diploma and studied political science in Hamburg and Paris with a degree in economics. Michael's independent study of African intellectuals, such as Kwame Nkrumah, and contemporary thought, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor's Négritude, led him to amass a personal library of nearly 700 volumes. By his own account, he was Germany's first black federal official in civil service. In 2013, Michael published his autobiography, Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu. Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen, which has been translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century, and subsequently appeared in many television programs. Michael spoke out against contemporary racial discrimination in Germany and argued for legal protections against race-based discrimination. In 2018, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his work as a contemporary witness to history.