Berlin's Mohrenstraße is now Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße. Who was this man who had to navigate between Africa and Europe in the 18th century - not by choice, but by force? From this existential necessity, Amo developed a philosophical method: equipollence. The art of allowing contradictory truths to coexist without having to resolve them. What his era saw as tragic failure appears today as anticipation of a competence we urgently need. First article in my series on African thought and Connectivist Anthropology
Street signs in Berlin-Mitte: The former Mohrenstraße was renamed Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße. The district office implemented the change despite legal objections. A symbolic act of remembrance for the first Black philosopher in the German-speaking world. Source: Bezirksamt Mitte Berlin/X.com
Berlin's Mohrenstraße is now called Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße. Eight years after my first LinkedIn article about this philosopher, it has finally happened. Who was this man whose name now adorns a street sign? And what does his way of navigating between worlds teach us?
Anton Wilhelm Amo was born around 1703 on West Africa's Gold Coast and shipped to Europe as a child. Not as a slave for the plantations, but as a living prestige object for the court of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.
Keeping a Black child at court, baptised and educated, was part of the baroque self-presentation of enlightened princes. It demonstrated worldliness and Christian magnanimity. Little Anton Wilhelm was baptised with the names of the dukes - Anton after Duke Anton Ulrich, Wilhelm after his son. He was their property, marked by their names.
But Amo made use of what little room for manoeuvre he had. He absorbed education like a sponge. When he arrived at the University of Halle in 1727, he spoke Latin more fluently than most German students. In 1729 he defended his first dissertation "De iure Maurorum in Europa" - on the rights of "Moors" in Europe.
Picture the scene. A young Black man argues in perfect academic Latin about his own rights as a human being. The professors applaud the brilliant argumentation without realising that someone is fighting for his right to exist.
Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703-1759), contemporary sketch. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.
In 1734 Amo became a lecturer in Wittenberg. In his major work he developed the concept of "equipollence" - the art of allowing opposing positions to stand as equals alongside each other without having to resolve them.
A concrete example from his work. On the question of whether the human soul is material or immaterial - a fundamental debate of his time - Amo argued that both positions are simultaneously defensible, depending on perspective. For physicians the soul was materially measurable, for theologians divinely immaterial. Amo showed that both are right - from their respective perspectives. Not as a lazy compromise, but as an epistemological method. Some truths only reveal themselves when one can occupy different standpoints simultaneously.
This was no abstract game. It was the philosophical processing of his existence. He was simultaneously African and European, object and subject, prestige possession and free scholar. He couldn't resolve these apparent contradictions - he had to endure them and make them productive.