ABSTRACT

The article focuses on the West German reception of Taiwo Shango in the mid-1960s. It positions Klaus Stephan’s television film at the intersection between motifs of the popular Heimatfilm genre of West German cinema and the critical self-image of public television as a “window to the world”. West German Cinema started to produce a number of films on location in Africa in the late 1950s. The films either ignored Germany’s violent colonial past or tried to define German identity on the background of an allegedly benevolent German colonial rule. Television was becoming the new dominant medium in the second half of the last century and offered young committed journalists who questioned Germany’s colonial past a place to experiment with new audiovisual formats. Taiwo Shango is a response to the independence of African countries at that time and raised awareness about it among the West German public. An overview of contemporaneous reviews, however, reveals that critics largely rejected Taiwo Shango, not least because of its portrayal of an interracial relationship and the comparison of the Christian faith with a long-established African belief system.