The Grunitzkys: One African Family's Journey through the Twentieth Century

Public talk by Prof. Sara Pugach (Cal State University), hosted by the Historical Association (Tyneside branch) and Newcastle City Library
About this Event

The Tyneside branch of the Historical Association and the City Library Newcastle are delighted to host a joint event with Sara Pugach, Professor of History at California State University in Los Angeles and a major experts on African-German interconnections. Her public lecture is entitled 'The Grunitzkys: One African Family’s Journey through the Twentieth Century'. Further information is included below.

In 1897 Harry Grunitzky, a German merchant from Hannover, arrived in Togo. Togo was then a German colony, and Grunitzky was there as a representative of the import-export firm Bodecker & Meyer. He would remain in Togo until his death in 1912, although he also travelled back to Germany frequently to sell Togolese and Ghanaian objects of uncertain provenance to German Ethnology Museums. In addition, during his time in the colony, Grunitzky fathered 17 children with seven different Togolese and Ghanaian women. He left the children a house in the Togolese capital of Lomé, where many of them received education at Catholic and Protestant missionary schools. The Grunitzkys went on to become part of a mixed-race West African elite that played an important part in the history of Togo and the region over the course of the twentieth century. One of Harry Grunitzky’s youngest children, Nicolas Grunitzky, was the second president of independent Togo from 1963 to 1967; an older daughter, Dina Grunitzky Olympio, was the wife of Sylvanus Olympio, Togo’s first post-independence president. This lecture will tell the complex story of the Grunitzkys as they moved back and forth across the global stage through the World Wars, decolonization, the Cold War, and beyond. It will delve into how they shaped and were shaped by these historical forces.