Bonn International Serge Mpouma Sprinting into a new world
Geislar · Serge Mpouma came to Bonn from Cameroon more than 50 years ago. He has been chair of the Geislar citizens' association for 14 years. And he still has many visions for the village.
Serge Mpouma (70) is still trying to find out how his father died in Cameroon. Until today, he talks about how he "never came back". Mpouma was only five years old when his father was kidnapped and murdered. A highly respected former teacher and later a timber merchant and employer of more than 150 people in Edea, about 50 kilometres from the port city of Douala, his commitment to Cameroon's independence led to his violent death in the late 1950s.
He left behind twelve children, with Serge being one of the four of his last wife. Today, his siblings are scattered around Cameroon's neighbouring countries, except for one of Mpouma's older brothers, who has continued his father's business. Serge, who first started an apprenticeship at Mercedes-Benz in the capital Yaoundé, has now been living in Germany for over 50 years.
He first stepped on German soil in East Berlin as an 18-year-old with a group of track and field athletes from his country. He ran the 100-metre distance in eleven seconds back then. "That was when I entered a new world," he says, recalling how impressed he was with the streets and buildings of Berlin.
Three weeks later - back in Cameroon - he knew he wanted to emigrate to Germany. He had already learned his first German sentences at the Goethe Institute in Cameroon. His mother, with her knowledge of Germany's atrocities in the Second World War, warned him against the "evil Germans", but she could not stop him from arriving at Cologne-Bonn airport in the winter of 1973.
"It was cold," he remembers when asked about his first memories of Germany. He was only dressed in a shirt, tie and jacket. He bought a jumper while still at the airport. "Now the adventure begins," he thought, sitting on the bus to Bonn.
Sleepy in the pub
He took a room in the then Steigenberger Hotel on Bundeskanzlerplatz to visit the Cameroon embassy the following day. He had heard that it was easier to get a work and residence permit in Bonn than in East Berlin. But he slept through the next day until early evening.
"That's how I ended up entering a pub for the first time in my life," Mpouma says with a laugh about the evening he spent, surprisingly, at the Luke on Kaiserstraße. There he met a group of students who were not only surprised that Mpouma had stayed at the posh and expensive Steigenberger, but also offered him a bed in their Südstadt flat-share, where Mpouma then stayed for about three months.
"From the beginning, I only had good experiences in Germany," he says. It was only later, when he was already employed as a machine fitter at Kautex, that some people were surprised that he, as a black man, was the boss of an assembly team of whites. "Prejudice. Nothing more," he says today.
The student flat-share prevented Mpouma from sleeping away the days and arranged for him to take a German course at the Volkshochschule (adult education centre). Mpouma worked at Opel-Bachem on Reuterbrücke, washing and polishing cars, earning the 2,000 marks he needed to improve his German at the Goethe-Institut in Bad Arolsen, Hesse, within half a year.
Looking for an apprenticeship, Mpouma ended up back at the Cameroon embassy in Bonn, where the economic attaché brought him together with a German entrepreneur who wanted to invest in Africa. He was put in touch with Mpouma's respected brother in Cameroon, which in turn led him to get Mpouma an apprenticeship at Leitz in Wetzlar.
"I always met the right people at the right time," says Mpouma happily. So he also regards it as a fortunate twist of fate that it was difficult to extend his residence permit in Hesse, which led him back to Bonn, where his application for a scholarship from the Carl Duisberg Society meant he could study for two and a half years in Cologne and become a mechanical engineer. It was there, at Friesenplatz in Cologne, that he met Christel Schmidt, also a Bonn resident, in 1982 while visiting the "Porto Rico" disco. Mpouma has now been married to her for almost 40 years, has a son Fabien (37) and four grandchildren.
A good listener
"We don't need people like you here," Mpouma remembers the wisecracking remark of Willi Küpper, the now deceased landlord of the Hubertusklause in Geislar. Mpouma and his wife were looking around Geislar, where they could both imagine buying a house ("It's so nice and quiet here"). Mpouma says the fact that it ended up being one diagonally opposite the Hubertusklause - despite the 80 competitors for the house - is due to his tactic of listening carefully.
"Instead of pestering the sellers with conversion plans, we just listened to them," he says. Everything else would then have fallen into place. For example, he has never had any problems in Geislar because of his skin colour and origin. "After all, 46 nations live together peacefully here," he emphasises. He says people should take an example from children, who don't ask each other where they are from, but just play together.
Mpouma not only knows how to integrate but can also gain advantages from being black: "I have more freedom," he says. People always let him do things first. Geislar has become his home. Even though he has to go back to Cameroon every two years at the latest so as not to "neglect my identity", as he says, "the German" is simply deep inside him. Even in Cameroon, he dreams in German.
For 30 years, Mpouma has been involved in the Geislar Bürgerverein (civic association), of which he has been chairperson for a good 14 years. "Now we still have to tackle the expansion of the football field and build our market hall," he says. Then he would be happy to leave the chair to younger people.
Original text: Stefan Hermes
Translation: Jean Lennox
