Event Type: Branch

Takes Place: 5th September 2026

Time: 12PM

Venue: Newcastle City Library

Description: Professor Sara Pugach – who is based at California State University and a leading expert on African–German interconnections – will give a talk entitled ‘The Grunitzkys: One African Family's Journey through the Twentieth Century’. . Below is brief summary of the fascinating case covered in her talk. 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.

How to book: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-grunitzkys-one-african-familys-journey-through-the-twentieth-century-tickets-1990740222595

Price: free

Tel: 0191 278 7878

Organiser: HA Tyneside branch and Newcastle City Library

Lecturer: Professor Sara Pugach – who is based at California State University

Comments: The event is free

Region: North-East England

Branch: Tyneside