When I first turned to Germanic studies at a very young age, many people — in Africa, Europe, and the United States—questioned the relevance of that choice. Why would a Black Central African, living more than eight thousand kilometres from the German-speaking world, devote his life to a culture seemingly so distant from his immediate environment? For many, studying German in Africa was an intellectual luxury, a detour into a body of knowledge with little impact on local realities.

The educational system that shaped me opened the doors of the world, yet offered very little insight into Africa from within. Africa appeared above all as an object, rarely as a subject. Observing German studies in the West, I realised that the field largely serves the self-understanding of the societies that sustain it: Germanists in Germany, France, the United States or Asia turn to German culture primarily to deepen knowledge about themselves. In Africa, however, our departments of German studies often replicate these Western models and research agendas without reframing their questions to illuminate African history, culture, law, and society. German studies thus becomes, for many African students, a space where we contemplate the knowledge of others without allowing it to speak to our own contexts or help us confront the challenges of our time.

Yet there is another path: the path of reclamation. How can one, as an African Germanist, ignore that a Cameroonian, Dualla Misipo, wrote a novel in German before the celebrated dramatist Bertolt Brecht ever rose to fame? How can we forget that Joseph Ekolo, after visiting Germany, set down his impressions in the Douala language—the first literary text ever written in a Cameroonian language? How can one teach German philosophy in Africa while erasing the thought of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a Ghanaian philosopher who taught in Germany long before Hegel was born? And how can we continue to neglect thousands of pages of German ethnographic archives on Africa, written in a language now largely mute on our continent, yet containing invaluable fragments of our cultures, epistemologies, and memories?

Are German studies in Africa doomed to remain a colonial discipline? I do not believe so. I am convinced that any genuine knowledge of the other must begin with a deepened knowledge of oneself. Far from being merely a degree that leads to a job teaching German, German studies can and must become a bridge toward a better understanding of Africa itself. They offer the possibility of rereading German history, culture, and archives through African questions and urgencies, transforming an imported academic heritage into a critical tool at the service of African realities.

This conviction led me to redirect my intellectual trajectory, placing Africa at the centre of my reflections within Germanic studies. I trained in African studies and chose translation as a means of intellectual liberation: not simply the transfer of words between languages, but an act of reclaiming archives and a gesture of epistemic justice. I translate German texts from the colonial era into French and English—two major languages of contemporary Africa—so that researchers on the continent and in the diaspora can finally access these sources, interrogate them, and rewrite their histories. My ambition is to reopen sealed doors of memory and restore to African scholars the possibility of being subjects of their own history, rather than its objects.

The translation of German colonial archives in Africa is thus far more than a linguistic task; it is an act of intellectual and cultural reclamation. By making these documents accessible beyond narrow linguistic boundaries, translation renews our understanding of African cultures—their arts, religions, and epistemologies—and allows our heritage to be revisited with critical eyes, free from the filters imposed by external powers. It dismantles stereotypes, reveals the depth of African philosophies and systems of thought, and lays the groundwork for a truly global and decolonial dialogue. More than an academic endeavour, it is a liberation of knowledge and a reaffirmation of Africa as subject and agent of its own memory.