Previously, Africa has been of rather marginal economic, political and academic importance to Germany. For Germany the economic significance of the continent, which was in any case small, increasingly declined from the 1950s onwards. German policy on Africa is largely invisible domestically, and in the mainstream social sciences the continent plays an even smaller role. It is, however, continuously brought into connection with hunger, war and other catastrophes and considered as an international welfare case.

Since the obsolescence of the Hallstein doctrine, Germany has ceased to pursue any “hard” political interests on this continent, seeing itself instead primarily as a civil power: German foreign policy in Africa consists mainly of development policy. This is accompanied by an inflated notion of partnership, masking the fact that African elites have very little to hold against the dominant development paradigm universally suggested by the Western countries. In Germany this hinders the clear formulation of the country's own interests, which would enable a discussion in the first place and create a necessary foundation on which a true partnership could be developed on. At present there are some glimmers of hope that the political marginalisation of Africa in Germany is declining. Economic development will only be possible in the long-term if it is not just based on the transfer of public funds but also on private actors sensing investment opportunities in Africa.

I hope that the future will bring a true German-African dialogue about various development options, beyond the currently dominant model of a rent-based neo-patrimonial economy and those neoliberal utopias which are automatically seen as the only possible alternatives to this model. For such a dialogue to be possible, Germany’s African expertise in the social and cultural sciences must urgently be strengthened.