I had decided that when I finished my studies I would do something related to Africa. Exactly what, I didn't yet know, but I had journalism in mind. However, I still didn't know enough about the new Africa that was emerging from colonialism and its people. My observations and experiences with my African father and his “countrymen” in the diaspora of the Weimar Republic were already decades in the past and couldn't tell me anything about the future. In the Third Reich Africans and their children hadn't been considered “real” human beings, and in the USA African Americans (who weren't yet being called that) were also second-class human beings. All of this was constantly on my mind.

I had to know more. I applied to the Stiftung Mitbestimmung for a scholarship to spend a study year at the University of Paris. I got it. In November 1960 I began my studies as “auditor libre” at the Institut d'Hautes Études du Développement Économique et Social. The Institute had developed out of the former training college for French colonial administrators. When I was there, most of the students were future leaders from Africa's new francophone states. In the lectures and seminars and in many conversations with the young Africans the image of Africa that I had formed only from German colonial literature was completely transformed. Francophone African literature was also a great help.

I already knew about the African politician and writer Léopold Sédar Senghor when I went to Paris. I knew him from the translations of his works by Jan Heinz Jahn, a writer who had been making African literature known in Germany since the 1950s – more than fifty years after the anthropologist and Africa traveler Leo Frobenius had founded his “Africa Archive” in Munich. But it was only now that I realized what a man like Senghor meant to the new political and intellectual élite in Africa. I first heard the term négritude from African students. At first I was appalled, because in translation that would literally mean “negroidness” or “niggerishness”. I later learned that that was how it was seen by anglophone Africans, who largely rejected it.