In 1929, Fasia Jansen was born in Hamburg as an unwanted kid. Her mother, Elli Jansen, is a German chambermaid who works for Liberian Consul General Momulu Massoquoi, who is already married. In the same year that Fasia was born, Massoquoi travels back to the West African nation of Liberia. Without the father’s assistance, the mother raises the child.
Fasia Jansen Early Life
“It was very black,” Elli Jansen is reported as having stated in a talk with her daughter Fasia Jansen at a young age. Elli Jansen tells Fasia that she was surprised by the color of the baby’s skin when he or she was born. Did I know? Fasia asked.
The sole mother, 18 years old, makes fruitless attempts to find herself and the baby an apartment. She is consistently turned down for the same reason: “Black children are undesirable.” Elli Jansen is finally made to spend a short period living with her parents.
But she also feels tolerated by Fasia here. Because he doesn’t accept the black child, she cannot meet her stepfather inside the apartment. Fasia discovered dancing at the age of 11.
Because of her skin color, she is forced to quit the private dancing school, where she was accepted despite having a lot of talent. Like all young girls in National Socialist Germany in 1944, Fasia was required to spend a year in a private home.
Because of her skin color, Fasia’s mediator discovered that the girl wasn’t a good fit for a German family. Fasia is made to do labor in the Neuengamme concentration camp’s kitchen instead. Otherwise, the only workers here are slaves and prisoners of war.
Fasia Janson As A Song Writer
In his participation in the project “Homestory Germany. Black Biographies and Present,” Fasia Jansen quotes from an earlier interview:
“My songs were and are a means for me to keep myself alive and to assert my dignity as a woman, as a black woman. If you ask me about my political motivation, I think it concerns my history.
Everything I’ve experienced must never happen again! I try to do everything I can to give younger people a glimpse of what you have felt and experienced—like a grain of sand on the beach that considers itself a grain of sand on the beach.”
Music Referencing Black Traditions
Around the same time, artists Aline Benecke and Nicola Lauré al-Samarai put together an art show at the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne that was mostly about Fasia Jansen.
Benecke used the People of Color Community Choir members to make the Fasia Jansen Ensemble. This group reinterprets her pieces by connecting them to black traditions and diasporic places.
Aline Benecke notices that she should always work on herself before going to the archive and learning about the other people who knew Fasia Jansen and what they did.
How could blackness or diasporicness be so concealed?
In actuality, the white friends and associates of the activist, many of whom were active in feminist women’s initiatives and the peace movement, are responsible for maintaining the Fasia Jansen archive, which is now a part of the city archive, and the International Women’s Peace Archive of the city of Oberhausen.
They warmly welcome everyone interested in Fasia’s life and work and do their best to aid in research. “I consider it positive when today’s young black artists learn about Fasia.
They view things from a perspective that I cannot provide, says Martina Franzke of the Fasia Jansen Foundation, which safeguards, manages, and publishes the inheritance.
Martyrdom Resulting From Race
So far, no one can say that the foundation has ignored the issue of blackness in its work. For example, the well-prepared standard work “Fasia – Beliebte Rebellin” by Marina Achenbach, to which many foundation employees such as Martina Franzke contributed, begins with the chapter “Black.”
It tells of Fasia Jansen’s birth on June 6, 1929, in Hamburg, the illegitimate daughter of Liberian Consul General Momulu Massaquoi and his nanny Elli Jansen, and of the mother’s first shock when she saw that the child was “so dark.”
The color of her skin gave the girl a veritable martyrdom: Elli Jansen wanted to take care of herself and her daughter. They could not find an apartment because the child was black. At home with his mother, stepfather Grandpa Stanislaw yelled: “She won’t come into my house with that negro girl!”
Of course, her situation did not improve with the beginning of the Nazi regime. In 1940, she was called to the health department and received an alleged vaccination, which, however, made her seriously ill. The family thought the injection caused Fasia’s lifelong heart condition, which kept her in the hospital.
Conclusion
Fasia Jansen was a well-known singer who experienced a lot worse early on. She expressed her sorrow through the songs she wrote and sang. After the war, Fasia Jansen becomes a well-known peace activist and songwriter. She died in Bochum in 1997.
