Book Review
Destined To Witness
Hans Massaquoi
"A Marvel of Memory From A Resourceful Author." 
*******
QUOTE: "Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe." 

WOW! Does this guy have a story!

A book like this could probably only be written one time. (After all, how many half black people survived Nazi Germany? And then how many of those really were the descendant of an African prince? ) even if a reader can't remember all of the details of the narrative arc, if he could just remember 1/5 of them, he would have learned something fascinating.

The end of WWII comes exactly on page 250 (out of a book that is 440 pages long). 

The second part was his life in Liberia, up to page 411. 

And in the United States was the last 30 pages--including his time in the military while it was segregated.

WWII was the hard part, but afterwards the Allied occupation was much harder. (Hunger is no joke, and no words can describe it; almost none of us have seen firsthand a case of hunger edema. But this author did, because it happened to him. p.268)

The book is written as a series of sequential (but unnumbered) vignettes, mostly around characters and events.

But even after that, his life experience in Liberia alone would have made the book worth reading. 

And from there, he ended up in the US army in the airborne training division.

The author is:

1. Very German in his outlook (folksy, pithy and non pretentious);

2. Intelligent, and adaptable. (He sired two sons, one doctor and one lawyer. He also got to play boxer, welder/mechanic, clarinet/saxophone player.)
*******
Spillover thoughts: 

1. The German government of that time has been linked with so many bad things, that it has become a caricature. But, quiet as it is kept, there were people who lived there everyday and did not buy into the propaganda and saw at least one black person just as their neighbor. 

2. The author attributes his survival to security by obscurity (there were extremely few blacks at that time) and also the fact that Hitler's number one priority was to exterminate Jews- after which black people might have been next if he had succeeded. (There were the sterilizations that Rhineland--and that amount to something like 800 people. Also, there was lots of very cruel vivisection in Germany's African territories.)

The events of the Holocaust also take a very minor role in all of this--and I have heard some people argue that ordinary Germans didn't really know what was going on, and still others argue that they knew exactly what was going on.

This book seems to be emphatically in the camp of the former. 

3. It also appears that the Nazi movement was something that appealed to a fairly small minority of German people. (This is not hard to believe; the Transgender Hysteria that the Western world is being dragged through en masse is actually the handiwork of a very small number of people.)
 
(p.251): "I was totally unprepared for the way my countryman actually reacted to the announcement. When the news flashed repeatedly over the radio, it was met with neither jubilation nor sorrow, just monumental, yawning indifference.'

4. A lot of movies have been made about black people living in uncomfortable circumstances (in the United States), but I think they have been over dramatized.  What you reading this book is: a black guy living in a town somewhere, and in a slightly uncomfortable modus vivendi in a matter of fact way.

Some people disliked black people, and he knew to stay away from those. And to seek out people that did not have problems with him.

5. Liberia has to be a fascinating place. Americo-Liberians. With English names (Jason the house boy/ William Tubman the President/ Supreme Court Justice Eugene Shannon) and a capital city Monrovia, named after James Monroe. 

And varying degrees of social inter-mixture with the local Africans.

6. Good genes seem to rise to the top no matter what. This author found some measure of success and everything he did, and he survived in a lot of very bad circumstances.

Verdict: Emphatically recommended.
*******
Quotes 

(p.350): "How can I live in a country that doesn't have any women I like?" (Author went to his father's home country of Liberia, where all the women are black. Yuck.) 

(p.324): "... They jived to what the Nazis had always derided as 'Negermusik.' I was sure that if the Führer hadn't blown out his brains, the mere sight of his cherished Deutsche Madchen with the 'ape-like creatures' would have killed him."

(p.316): " .. could make the difference between cordial acceptance as a brother and cold rejection as an unwelcome stranger. It had me taking long to find out that most black Americans considered Africans and Africa backward and thus a personal embarrassment."

(p.315): "I would decision to avoid American ships for a while with academic, since there was not a single one in Port."

(p.357): "Diehard followers of Hitler didn't believe in an Allied victory until Allied troops actually marched through Germany's streets.. while Germans opposed to Hitler predicted a German defeat from the very outset of the war."

(p.382): "We simply don't have the resources in Liberia to incarcerate thousands of law breakers for any length of time. The best way to deal with most of the criminal elements on this plantation is to give them a good whipping that, hopefully, they won't forget very soon."

(p.399): "My grandmother confided to me that my grandfather... was an intolerable ladies man.... She said that the more than 20 children momolu admitted having fathered in and out of wedlock were only the tip of the iceberg."

(p.403): "She gave Felix a long lecture on how Arab Muslims led raiding parties throughout Africa and either captured or bought from greedy African Chiefs large numbers of slaves, whom they then sold to eager European and American slave traders."

(p.405): "Morris was familiar with President Tubman's permissive policy on graft, which expected government employees to steal a little as long as they remembered to reach into the government to tell no further than their elbows instead of all the way to their armpits."

Vocab/concepts:

Rhineland sterilization 
purser
fufu
palaver sauce
Arshloch