At the end of my studies I found a permanent salaried post with a publisher of economic journals in Cologne. I found a rented room, worked Monday to Friday in Cologne and traveled back to the family in Butzbach on the weekends. Finding an apartment in Cologne turned out to be a problem; the landlords we approached almost always refused to take a family with four children, a black father and a refugee mother. After a long search and with the help of a housing cooperative we were able to move our big family into a small terraced house in 1963.

In the mid-1960s I met Bertram Otto, the head of the Berto publishing house in Bonn; he published mainly Christian books, but had discovered a passion for the new Africa. He had succeeded in getting funding for a new German-language magazine that would report on political, economic and cultural events in Africa. He offered me the position of managing editor, because he knew that I was relatively knowledgeable about the topic. I didn't have to think long before I accepted. We stood in different political camps, but in relation to Africa we were on the same ground right from the start. We both wanted to correct the false image of Africa and Africans that existed in the German mind.

The Cold War gave an edge to the business of reporting on Africa. It split the world into two camps, into friend and foe. The young African states actually didn't want to be drawn into the conflict. But they needed aid and support for their national development and sought it from the two blocs.

The financial resources of the Afrika-Bulletin were very limited. The publishing house had rented three rooms in Cologne for the editorial team. Bertram Otto had to be thrifty. That also applied to the recruitment of colleagues who knew what they were doing but didn't have to be paid too much. They had to be people who were more interested in the cause than in the money. At first there were only two of us, and we wrote articles under various pseudonyms to hide the fact that two writers and a secretary made up the whole staff.