21. Oktober 2021
Keynote by Carola Lentz at the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Goethe-Institut Cameroon

- Es gilt das gesprochene Wort - 

I am delighted to be here in Yaoundé to celebrate with you the 60th anniversary of the Goethe-Institut in Cameroon and to present the Goethe Medal to Princess Marilyn Douala Manga Bell.

This is also a special moment for me personally. I have been working as anthropologist since more than three decades in West Africa and established many personal and collegial relations, but this is my first visit to Cameroon. In fact, this is my first “real” travel to Africa since I have become president of the Goethe-Institut a year ago. Due to the Corona pandemic, I could only visit our branches all over the world in digital form. So, I am delighted to be here, get to know this wonderful country, and meet you personally!

Even though I have not been in Cameroon before, there are personal connections. Let me just mention two.

You see me wearing a batik jacket. It has been designed and tailored by “Nohnee”, a fashion enterprise that two Cameroonian sisters, Marie Darouiche and Rahmée Wetterich, have established in Munich. The sisters became famous for their beautiful “dirndl à l’africaine” style, a typical Bavarian dirndl dress made from West African wax prints. But not every woman wants to wear dirndl, and so Nohnee also offers modern jackets and dresses, like the one I am wearing. Nohnee regularly presents at African fashion shows; business is expanding, and the sisters recently opened a production site in Northern Benin which also offers training programmes to local women. This is a great example of creative entrepreneurship. It links Cameroon, Benin and Germany, and it has merged different cultural traditions to create a unique and attractive style.

My second, much more sombre connection to Cameroon is a photograph hanging in my office at our headquarters in Munich which shows a suspension bridge built by the German colonial forces in Western Cameroon. The photograph reminds me of Germany’s colonial past and of the importance to acknowledge our responsibility for a complicated and painfully entangled history. The photograph was shot by Andréas Lang, a German artist who travelled through Cameroon and neighbouring countries in search of traces of his family history. In his mother’s attic in a village near Berlin, Lang had discovered a diary and historical photos taken by his great-grandfather, who had served in the so-called protection force of the German colony of Cameroon. These historical photographs inspired Lang to travel to Africa to investigate the architectural legacy of German colonialism.

The hanging bridge on the photograph in my office was built around 1904. In that very year, the German colonial troops brutally put down an uprising of the Anyang people who lived not far from the bridge. We don’t know whether the bridge played a role in this repression, but in any case, its construction was part of the colonizers’ project to establish control. Today, the bridge has become rather wobbly, but it is still used by the local population which continues to call it “The German Bridge”. For me, Lang’s photograph is a reminder of colonial violence and of the challenge to cross over from the colonial past into an African-European future of truly post-colonial, respectful and cooperative relations.

After many decades of silence, the colonial legacy and decolonisation have recently become much debated topics in Germany and Europe as well as in Africa. There seem to be promising advances. Germany will give back some of the Benin bronzes to Nigeria, and we all hope that the German and Namibian governments will sign the joint declaration and reconciliation agreement regarding the genocide of Herero and Nama committed by the German colonial troops. However, the intense critiques of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin suggest that there is still a long way to go towards recognition, healing, and future cooperation.

What role can the Goethe-Institut – with its 158 branches around the world and 15 institutes in Africa – play in all this? To offer some answers to this question, let me first take you back on a brief journey through the institute’s history. I will zoom in on three periods: first, the 1960s and 1970s, when many Goethe-Institutes were established in the decolonizing world; second, the beginnings of bilateral cultural exchange and a growing interest in the host countries’ artistic productions from the 1970s onwards; and finally the past two decades, when colonialism became an important theme in the institute’s work, and new forms of multilateral cooperation between German, European and African culture makers and civil society activists developed.

The first period: After the Second World War, a wave of decolonization set in. At the same time, the Soviet Union and the US with their respective European allies began competing for influence, also in the decolonising countries. Germany had already lost its colonies after the First World War, but all the same, in the context of the Cold War, the two German states, too, were vying for geopolitical alliances in the former colonies.

The Goethe-Institut was founded in 1951 and started training foreign teachers of German in Germany. Soon, it also opened institutes abroad which offered language courses. At the end of the 1950s, cultural work was added to language teaching. In the early 1960s, several institutes were opened in Africa’s newly independent countries, among them the one in Yaoundé.

To a certain extent, this expansion of the Goethe-Institut was a result of the Cold War. In 1951, the German Democratic Republic founded the Herder Institute in Leipzig to train teachers of German as foreign language. East Germany hoped to gain international recognition as a sovereign state through an attractive cultural and educational policy abroad. This, in turn, motivated West Germany’s foreign office to support the Goethe-Institut financially and logistically. The institute was to help restore Germany’s reputation in the world and represent “the better Germany”, namely the democratic Federal Republic.

The second period: In 1970, the social-democratic chancellor Willy Brandt declared cultural policy as the “third pillar” of foreign politics, in addition to political diplomacy and economic policies. Meanwhile, the Goethe-Institut had broadened its understanding of culture to include a much wider variety of cultural activities than just classical concerts or readings of canonical literature. However, there were intense political debates about which image of Germany the institute was to present abroad. Conservative politicians accused the institute of featuring German artists, writers and film makers who were too critical their home country. But the institute insisted that it was an independent institution and that it should offer a “realistic” portray of German cultural life. At the same time, the institute now placed more emphasis on cultural exchange with local artists and intellectuals. However, these programmes were usually bilateral, involving Germans and citizens of the individual host countries. Furthermore, the support of local cultural scenes was not yet systematic.

This was to change in the third period, starting from the early 2000s. The end of the Cold War, together with German re-unification, and the terrorist attacks of September 2001 were dramatic developments to which Germany’s foreign policy had to respond. The world was becoming multipolar, increasingly insecure, and ridden by economic crises as well as mounting tendencies of illiberalism and authoritarianism. This also created new challenges for cultural politics. In the Goethe-Institut’s work regarding the Global South, decolonisation eventually became a central topic. Furthermore, the institute initiated multilateral, transnational projects of cultural exchange and programmes that support the cultural scenes and creative industries in the host countries.

One important momentum was the “Aktion Afrika”, declared by former Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in 2008, that was to deepen the cooperation with Africa in the fields of culture and education. In this context, the Goethe-Institut was invited to establish additional branches or liaison offices in Africa, for instance in Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some Goethe-Institut projects now also addressed Germany’s colonial heritage. In Germany itself, too, colonialism eventually began to be discussed outside narrow academic quarters. In 2018, finally, the German government coalition agreement explicitly declared the self-critical engagement with the country’s colonial past as integral part of the “basic national consensus”.

In the Goethe-Institut branches in Africa, the regular tasks around language, cultural, and library and information work continued. But the institute also increasingly committed itself to support national and transnational networks among African artists and intellectuals, human rights activists, journalists, and bloggers. The institute offers an open space for debate, inviting exchange between different perspectives on the fraught relations between former colonizers and formerly colonized. Cultural exchange and dialogue, or rather: multilogue, has become ever more important in the face of repressive regimes and continued injustices in global relations.

Let me just mention two programmes that exemplify this approach. MuseumFutures Africa supports the conceptual and practical development of museums throughout the African continent. It is curated by an African team and aims at facilitating peer-to-peer learning between and within African museums. It promotes intra-African dialogue, co-creation, and study-labs to help museums respond to changing local needs and demands.

The second example, Burden of Memory, started with an inventory of cultural productions on the legacies of colonialism in each of Germany’s former colonies in Africa. The project culminated in an inspiring cultural week in Yaoundé in 2019, curated – together with a Kenyan and a South African ‑ by our awardee Princess Marilyn Douala Manga Bell. The week brought together artists and intellectuals from Cameroon, Togo, Namibia, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi who engaged in mutual interrogations of their quite diverse perspectives on their experiences with German colonial rule and on how to promote healing and future cooperation.

To conclude: This brief journey into history shows that the Goethe-Institut has developed, over the past decades, from a focus on cultural export to one on cultural exchange. The institute eventually opened up to questions of colonialism and decolonisation. And it has learnt immensely from the cooperation with artists, intellectuals and civil-society activists in its host countries, and established relations of mutual respect and trust.

Of course, we should be aware of our own origins and remain self-critical. Furthermore, cultural policies do not have the power to unsettle economic and political asymmetries. However, I believe that the institute’s work, together with the efforts of our partners in Cameroon and elsewhere, can greatly contribute to develop a world that is more just and more human.

Let me finish by thanking the entire team of the Goethe-Institut Yaoundé for its engagement and its long-standing work! 60 years is quite a long time, and many of you have been supporting the institute for many years. You are all doing a great job, bravely facing up to many challenges, and I wish you all the best for the future!

I also want to thank all the Cameroonian partners and representatives of other institutions who came to celebrate the institute’s birthday today. Special thanks go to the German embassy for their constant support.

Thank you for your attention, happy birthday, and enjoy the celebration!