Joe Chialo has been appointed during the session of April 27, 2023, during which, the House of Representatives of Berlin elected the new Mayor-Governor of Berlin, Kai Wegner. After taking the oath of office as the reigning mayor of Berlin, he appointed the members of his government (Berlin Senate).
The Senate of Berlin (in German: Senat von Berlin) is the government of the city-Land (State) of Berlin, the capital of Germany. This government is headed by the regierender Bürgermeister. The new governor Kai Wegner is a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Joe Chialo replaces Klaus Lederer, a politician from the left-wing party (Die Linke) and former deputy mayor of Berlin.
As minister of culture, Joe Chialo will manage a budget of 928 million euros ($1 billion) in 2023 and is expected to bring a fresh perspective to one of Europe’s leading cultural capitals. For the new regional minister, culture should not be elitist, and he particularly wants Berlin’s clubs to be recognized as “cultural sites.” “Clubs are talent factories, they make an important cultural contribution, they make city centers more attractive and attract the public,” he told the Berliner Zeitung.
Among his duties is the appointment of the new general manager of Berlin’s largest opera house. He also hopes that culture can work better with business to attract more international creative entrepreneurs to Berlin.
A self-described proud “Afropoean,” Joe Chialo also encourages cultural producers to confront Germany’s colonial past. He would like to promote alternative narratives of German life, for example, including the success stories of migrants.
Joe Chialo pleads for African countries to be seen as partners, with a new development policy based on partnership.
Music industry leader
Prior to his appointment, Joe Chialo, was, since May 2020, Executive Vice President of Universal Music. Prior to that, from January 2010 to May 2020, he was Senior Executive Vice President A&R (Artists and Repertoire), Universal Music Central Europe & Africa, responsible for the identification and acquisition of artists from the African cultural space and their marketing in Germany and Europe. In 2009, Joea Chialo, together with Universal Music, laid the foundation stone for the current Airforce1 Music Group to realize his vision of integrated marketing for creatively and conceptually outstanding artists. The music label “Afroforce1,” a subsidiary of Universal Music,e established in 2018, serves to promote African artists and brings them to international attention.
Artist-musician
Born in 1970 in Bonn into a family of Tanzanian diplomats, Joe Chialo studied history, politics and political economy for a few semesters in Erlangen, before dropping out of school and signing a music contract with Sony Music and starting a singing career with the music band Blue Manner Haze, which combines heavy metal with funk and hip hop. He was also a bouncer in a Nuremberg nightclub.
His subsequent career in the creative and cultural industries took him to Cologne, Amsterdam, Munich and finally, in 2002, from Hamburg to Berlin with Universal Music, the world’s largest music production group. He also founded his own labels, under which he marketed, among others, the Irish-American band “The Kelly Family”, which enjoys great popularity in Germany.
Politician
In 2016, Joe Chialo joined the CDU. It was former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to welcome refugees fleeing the war in Syria that convinced him to join the CDU a year later. Since the beginning of 2022, he has been a member of the CDU’s federal office. Since then, he has been active in the party’s local branch in Berlin-Mitte, a large central district of Berlin. As a member of the association for the promotion of pop culture, he worked for the promotion of young talent as well as for the tolerant and creative identity of the city.
In 2019, Joe Chialo was part of the German jury for the preliminary decision of the Eurovision Song Contest.
In October 2022, Joe Chialo published his autobiography “Der Kampf geht weiter. Mein Leben zwischen zwei Welten” (The fight goes on. My life between two worlds). The title of the book was inspired by the motto of the Mozambican liberation movement of the 1970s, “A luta continua!”, which became his family’s motto.In fact, the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) was fighting against the Portuguese colonial power from southern Tanzania, where Joe Chialo’s father, who sympathized with the freedom fighters, was from. “My father also took this expression to himself. In our house, it was a recurring term in the family when it came to overcoming difficult times. When it came to trying to move forward,” Joe Chialo said in an interview.
Joe Chialo is married and has a daughter, born in 2018.
