FrauenOrt Bilillee Machbuba (2025)

Bilillee Ajiamé Machbuba was born around 1825 in what is today western Ethiopia, likely in the Guumma region of the Oromo territories. She was abducted during one of the many regional slave raids that devastated East Africa in the 19th century. From there, she was trafficked via Gondar to Khartoum, a central hub in the northeastern African slave trade (Wikipedia, 2024; Wien Museum Magazin, 2023).

In 1837, during his travels in Egypt and Sudan, the German aristocrat Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau encountered and purchased the teenage Bilillee at the slave market in Khartoum. From that point on, she was known as Machbuba—a name meaning “beloved” in Arabic, though it was likely imposed upon her during captivity. Pückler brought her to Europe, where she was introduced in Vienna and Muskau as an exotic curiosity. This was in keeping with the orientalist fascination and racialized aesthetics of the time, which viewed non-European women, particularly Black women, as symbolic of beauty and difference but rarely as full human subjects (Vester, 2023).

Machbuba lived in Pückler’s estate at Schloss Muskau, in present-day eastern Germany. Despite the affluence of her surroundings, her condition was one of cultural alienation, isolation, and declining health. She died young—on October 27, 1840, possibly from tuberculosis—when she was only around 15 to 17 years old. Pückler had her buried in the landscape park of his estate, under a stylized tombstone inscribed with orientalist motifs. Her grave remains to this day, situated in Bad Muskau, and stands as a physical marker of how colonial-era Europe consumed and silenced Black lives while aestheticizing their presence (Wikipedia, 2024).

In her 2023 workbook „gelebt – Das kurze Leben der Bilillee Ajiamé Machbuba“, Patricia Vester reclaims Machbuba’s story from the margins of European history. She presents her not simply as an exoticized object of 19th-century fantasy, but as a symbol of historical injustice, forced displacement, and cultural erasure—and simultaneously as a person of dignity whose life speaks to resilience and memory (Vester, 2023). Vester draws on Afro-German memory practices and decolonial approaches to reinterpret Machbuba’s short life as a lens through which we can interrogate the intersections of racism, gendered oppression, and forgotten colonial violence in German history.

By remembering Machbuba, we are invited to rethink who is commemorated, how stories are told, and whose lives are dignified in our public spaces. Her story becomes part of a broader project of decolonizing memory culture, not just by acknowledging suffering, but by actively restoring agency and visibility to those whose histories were silenced.

References

• Vester, Patricia. gelebt – Das kurze Leben der Bilillee Ajiamé Machbuba. Workbook, 2023.
• “Machbuba.” Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machbuba
• “Die Geschichte der Afrikanerin Machbuba.” Wien Museum Magazin, 2023. magazin.wienmuseum.at/die-geschichte-der-afrikanerin-machbuba