“Please sit somewhere else”
Mihambo is heavily affected by Germany’s racism
October 11, 2023, 9:26 p.m
Even in kindergarten and primary school, Malaika Mihambo discovered that racism was commonplace in Germany. The successful German athletics of their generation sees this as an “enormous burden” from which they can only slowly free themselves. She wrote a book about it.
Malaika Mihambo was on the road again. The way she likes it best: The long jump Olympic champion hiked across a foreign continent with a backpack and a lot of thoughts. As always after a trying season. This time, however, Mihambo had already formulated the main thing that concerned her. In a book that is different from common sports autobiographies: an impressive and very personal examination of everyday racism in Germany.
“At a very young age I had a large backpack loaded onto my back, an enormous burden,” the 29-year-old writes in “Jump free”which was published this week: “I managed not to overstuff my backpack (…) so that in the end I might not have been able to walk at all. It didn’t bring me to my knees.”
In almost 300 pages, the most successful long jumper of today tells how she became what she is. Even though she is what she is. “For a long time I didn’t dare to be different, to be me,” writes Mihambo: “But when I finally learned to accept myself in a way that made me happy (…), a new, much freer life began .”
Mihambo talks about his father, who comes from the island of Zanzibar, which is part of Tanzania. “It was difficult for me to understand why my father left us. I kept asking myself the question: Does he still love me?” She tells how she dealt with his African roots, which are also hers. And which shaped people’s behavior towards her.
“Malaika, please sit somewhere else”
“I was already treated differently in kindergarten because of the color of my skin. At the time, I didn’t really know that it had anything to do with my appearance,” she writes. The later realization that her skin color “actually made a difference” was “associated with a certain amount of pain.”
She tells how she encountered blatant racism. In elementary school, when she sat down next to a classmate: “The boy looked at me in horror, (…) as if he had the worst disgust for me. Finally he said (…): I don’t want to sit next to her. The teacher took a deep breath before uttering the words (…) that would forever be ingrained in me: Malaika, please sit somewhere else.”
Mihambo draws a line from childhood experiences to the racist attacks in Halle and Hanau. The realization: “We have to understand that our system is racist.” Her conclusion: “If politics does not manage to take active action against racism in the long term, we must reflect on values such as tolerance, openness and empathy.”
Mihambo has written a lot from his heart. In order to be able to concentrate on sport again. A lot of work awaits her on the way to a second Olympic victory in Paris in 2024. Her career has taught Mihambo: Nothing is self-evident.