Germany has learned to speak the language of strategy. Since the Zeitenwende (a term coined by then Chancellor Olaf Scholz three days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, meaning “historic shift”) that language has filled up with new words: resilience, de-risking, competitiveness—terms that would have sounded almost foreign in Berlin a decade ago. We have a National Security Strategy. We have a China Strategy. We have Africa Policy Guidelines. The vocabulary has changed. Whether the instinct has changed along with it is a harder question.
For most of the postwar period, German caution was not a failure of policy. It was the policy. A culture of deliberate restraint suited a country still proving to its neighbors, and to itself, that it had changed. This caution earned trust. Over time, though, it hardened into habit, and habits survive long after the reasons for them have gone.
There is a difference between writing strategy and acting upon it. Germany excels at the first. It is less sure of the second. Ministries convene, budgets get attached, partnerships get declared. Much of this is useful, some of it impressive. None of it, on its own, produces political weight. Germany shows up and is respected for it. Where it struggles is when it comes to turning any of that into influence.
For decades this ambiguity cost little. Washington guaranteed German security. Grand geopolitical posturing was left to others. Prosperity came through globalization, moral purpose through development policy and multilateralism. It was a comfortable division of labor.
That division no longer holds. Washington has turned transactional. Beijing is everywhere. Moscow has ended the illusion that trade alone buys peace. The Gulf states are ambitious and well-financed. Paris, for all its troubles, still understands the theater of diplomacy. Rome has learned to dress interest up as strategy—and make it convincing. Governments in Africa are not waiting for Europe anymore. They are choosing among offers.
A Visible Gap
That is where Germany’s strategy gap becomes most visible. Africa should never be read as a single theater. Its strength lies precisely in the range of histories, economies, and cultures that make up the continent. But one change cuts across that diversity and is unmistakable. African leaders are no longer asking who cares most loudly. They are asking who can help build power at home: energy systems, industries, skills, infrastructure, capital markets, and diplomatic influence.
German-African relations have not kept pace with that shift. Germany remains one of Europe's more trusted actors on the continent, and often for good reason. It has fewer colonial entanglements than some neighbors (though it is still struggling to get to grips with its colonial past, however limited), its development experience runs deep, and it brings serious companies, credible institutions, and genuine technological strength to the table. Yet too often these assets sit administered rather than composed into something coherent. Berlin still treats Africa as a policy field to be managed, rather than a set of political relationships in which German and African interests have to be argued for, joined up, and made visible.
This matters because Africa is no longer peripheral to Europe’s future. Its demographic weight, its renewable energy potential, its security dynamics, and its growing voice in multilateral forums all now bear directly on the questions Germany itself calls strategic. On every one of those ambitions, Africa cannot be an afterthought.
A Case in Point: Kenya
If Berlin is serious about acting strategically beyond Europe, then it could start with somewhere like Kenya.
Nairobi combines almost everything that matters to German policy: energy transition, digital growth, supply chains. Kenya will also have a say when it comes to the future of Europe’s standing in a multipolar world. So far, however, the record suggests Germany still treats the relationship as a file rather than a political proposition.
That’s not to say Germany is absent. In Kenya, the relationship already has real tangible components: a Climate and Development Partnership agreed at COP27, committing Berlin to help Kenya reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2030; a Migration and Mobility Partnership; and, since July 2024, the EU-Kenya Economic Partnership Agreement. Commercially, too, things are moving. In June, Berlin hosted a Kenya Business Day, pointing to the roughly 120 German companies already on the ground and to bilateral trade that grew 23 percent last year, to €590 million. This is not neglect.
Others, however, have made far more ambitious moves. In May, Kenya and France co-hosted the first Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi. Kenyan President William Ruto and French President Emmanuel Macron (a strong supporter of closer European ties with Africa) brought African and French leaders together to discuss investment and growth, and to sketch out a different kind of partnership—one built on shared responsibility rather than assigned roles, with ownership resting firmly in African hands.
Around the same time, Macron unveiled a €23 billion Africa initiative built on co-investment rather than aid. Ruto answered in the language Europe increasingly needs to hear: equality, sovereignty, mutual benefit. In April, Italy and Kenya adopted a 2026-2029 action plan under Rome’s Mattei Plan, naming Kenya a priority partner across trade, education, security, and technology.
President Ruto’s presence at the G7 summit in Évian a month later fits the same pattern. The French presidency had invited partner countries, including Brazil, Egypt, India, and South Korea, as well as Kenya, on the grounds that today’s major challenges can no longer be settled by seven countries alone. Ruto used the platform to press the case he has made consistently: reform the international financial architecture so the Global South, and Africa in particular, gains concessional, long-term finance and a genuine seat at the table.
None of this means that Paris or Rome is doing more than Berlin, in any technical sense. But they are doing something Germany still resists: giving German interest in Africa a political form. Berlin remains cautious, focused on procedures. It is serious, yet strangely unimaginative.
Visible Connections
This is the deeper habit at issue. Germany tends to assume that being a good partner is the same as being a relevant one. It is not. Relevance comes from connecting one’s own interests to another country’s ambitions visibly enough, and credibly enough, that the connection is felt. Germany has real interests in Kenya. Kenya, increasingly, has choices. Berlin needs a relationship that acknowledges both without embarrassment.
Kenya has earned that attention on its own terms. It is East Africa’s largest economy, a regional hub, and one of the continent’s genuine laboratories for renewable energy. Its young and increasingly digital economy and its position between Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the wider Indo-Pacific give it a strategic weight beyond its size. So does Nairobi's status as the only city in the Global South to host a United Nations headquarters. Kenya's real difficulties are also part of the picture. It carries heavy debt, struggles with high youth unemployment, and is faced with real exposure to climate shocks. Those difficulties are an argument for taking the partnership more seriously.
A Serious Approach
A serious German approach would begin with a change of perspective: treating Kenya as a single relationship rather than a set of separate files scattered across ministries dealing with development, migration, trade, and climate separately. Kenya experiences all of these at once, and so, in truth, does German interest in Kenya. A strategy would treat them as one conversation, not several.
Raising Nairobi's political standing would help, too; not to imitate French pomp and circumstance, but because presence itself, in diplomacy, signals respect. Berlin also has a genuine offer to make: vocational training, applied research, and institutions that work. These are real strengths. Too many of them, though, never leave the ministry.
The test is whether that offer serves Kenyan industrialization and Kenyan skills, or simply imports German needs dressed up as cooperation. Energy shows the difference most clearly. A green hydrogen partnership that ships electrons and molecules straight back to German industry teaches Kenya little and builds even less. One that finances processing, manufacturing, and applied research inside Kenya does something else. It turns Kenyan renewable power into Kenyan industrial capacity. Structured this way, the energy relationship benefits both countries, not just one.
What Germany needs, now, is a Zeitenwende in our Africa policy.
Kenya, in the end, is a test of whether a new German foreign policy is reaching beyond Europe’s own emergencies and whether Berlin can act strategically when nothing is forcing it to. Seriousness and industrial competence are genuine German strengths, and in time they may count for a great deal in Nairobi. But strength without imagination curdles into bureaucracy. And bureaucracy, however reliable, rarely gets noticed.
Germany does not need another Africa policy. It needs a decision—to match, at last, the ambition its strategy papers have been promising for three years with real action.
Thomas Matussek is a former German ambassador to the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and India.
