![]() ![]() Mr Diaby’s research showed that the allotments had suffered from air pollution but that the ground was largely uncontaminated. At first, they made jokes about black men always wanting blonde girls, but I got to know them and they me.” Many had lost their jobs since the fall of the Berlin Wall. “There were all kinds of different people, ranging from university professors, to policemen and train drivers. I couldn’t have been more wrong,” he says. I thought they were all small minded and petit bourgeois. “Like many students, I looked down on allotment holders. Mr Diaby, the chemist, was told to go and find out whether the developer’s claims were true. He used his claims to argue that most of the allotments should be broken up for use as building land. At the time, a western developer was convinced that most of Halle’s 12,911 allotments had been hopelessly polluted by the region’s chemical plants. But then Halle’s allotments came to the rescue. Like millions of others, Mr Diaby’s future was uncertain. But then the Berlin Wall fell and the secure if not often monotonous world of communist East Germany suddenly fell apart. Mr Diaby studied chemistry and remained active in student politics as head of the International Student Committee. It was in Halle that he met his future German wife, Ute, who was studying agriculture. ![]() It was Martin Luther King who brought me to Halle,” he admits with a smile. “I wanted to go study at a university I thought was named after one of my heroes. ![]()
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