THE AFRICAN COURIER. Reporting Africa and its Diaspora! The African Courier is an international magazine published in Germany to report on Africa and the Diaspora African experience. The first issue of the bimonthly magazine appeared on the newsstands on 15 February 1998. The African Courier is a communication forum for European-African political, economic and cultural exchanges, and a voice for Africa in Europe.
In an unprecedented show of unity, Germany’s immigrant communities — African, Turkish, Polish, Kurdish, Italian and many others — have joined forces to fight the planned shutdown of COSMO, ARD’s only multilingual, intercultural public radio service. More than 100,000 people have signed a petition. Now the organised diaspora is calling on ARD’s leadership to act.
On 11 June 2026, more than 500 migrant organisations across Germany published an open letter to the directors of all nine regional ARD broadcasters, demanding the immediate halt to plans to shut down COSMO — the public radio station that has served Germany’s immigrant communities since 1998. The letter, initiated by the Neue deutsche Medienmacher*innen (New German Media Practitioners), represents the broadest unified political mobilisation Germany’s migrant civil society has ever mounted on a media policy question.
What Is COSMO — and What Is Being Lost?
COSMO launched in August 1998 — the same year The African Courier was founded — under the name Funkhaus Europa. It was built as a joint production of the WDR, Radio Bremen and the RBB, and over nearly three decades grew into something that no other German public broadcaster offers: a full-spectrum, multilingual radio service that broadcasts in nine languages including Russian, Italian, Kurdish, Polish and Turkish, and that places the lived realities of people with a migration background at the centre of its journalism, music and culture programming.
On 3 June 2026, the WDR broadcasting council approved plans to end COSMO in its current form on 1 April 2027. In its place, the station would be absorbed into the 1LIVE brand family and relaunched as “1LIVE Street” — a hip-hop channel aimed at young audiences under thirty. The RBB, facing its own severe financial pressures, is withdrawing from the joint production entirely. Critics have been blunt: this is not a reform. It is a shutdown dressed up in rebranding language.
Why This Matters for African and Diaspora Communities
Germany is home to more than 21 million people with a migration background — over a quarter of the population. For communities navigating life between cultures, languages and legal systems, COSMO has functioned as something that mainstream German broadcasting has never provided: a media space that does not treat them as a minority to be explained to others, but as an audience to be spoken with, in their own languages, on their own terms.
For African communities specifically, COSMO has been part of a broader public media ecosystem where diaspora voices, African music and postmigrant perspectives — though never fully centred — at least had a recognised home. The station’s multilingual programming has also served a crucial democratic function: providing reliable, editorially independent information in mother-tongue languages at a time when disinformation circulates freely through social media and foreign state-controlled channels.
Once COSMO is gone, the WDR has confirmed that of the nine languages it currently broadcasts in, only Turkish, Farsi and Arabic will retain any presence in the successor programming. Russian, Italian, Kurdish, Polish and others will disappear from the public radio spectrum entirely.
An Unprecedented Coalition
The open letter published on 11 June is historic in scale. Among its signatories are the major national umbrella organisations of Germany’s immigrant civil society: the Bundeskonferenz der Migrant*innenorganisationen (BKMO), the Türkische Gemeinde in Deutschland, the Bundesverband russischsprachiger Eltern, the neue deutsche organisationen and the Dachverband der Migrant*innenorganisationen in Ostdeutschland. They are joined by the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, the Bildungsinitiative Ferhat Unvar, Sinti and Roma organisations, Italian Comites committees, Kurdish networks, Polish cultural societies and dozens of African-German organisations.
The coalition also extends into Germany’s cultural, academic and journalistic institutions: the Deutsche Journalistinnen- und Journalisten-Union (dju) in ver.di, the Grimme Institut, the Deutscher Musikrat, the Maxim Gorki Theatre and leading migration researchers from Humboldt University, the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the University of Bielefeld have all added their names. The breadth of the coalition is, by any measure, extraordinary. Never before has Germany’s immigrant civil society spoken with a single voice on a media policy question at this scale.
Three Demands — and a Deadline
The open letter makes three concrete demands of ARD’s leadership:
• Expansion, not abolition: COSMO must be developed as a nationwide ARD cooperative programme with a modern, cross-media offer — not dismantled into a niche genre channel.
• Transparency on reach: ARD must demonstrate how it measures and evaluates whether it is actually reaching Germany’s population with a migration background, as its public service mandate requires.
• Structural commitment: ARD must explain what role the country’s plural immigrant society plays in its overall editorial strategy.
The coalition set a deadline of 15 June 2026 for ARD’s directors to respond and propose a concrete dialogue. In parallel, the “Save Cosmo” petition — running independently on the innn.it platform — has passed 100,000 signatures, adding further public pressure to the institutional appeal.
The Bigger Picture
The COSMO battle is taking place within a wider crisis of public broadcasting in Germany. ARD’s regional stations are under significant financial pressure, with the licence fee (Rundfunkbeitrag) frozen at €18.36 per household per month and political resistance from several state governments to any increase. COSMO is one of several cuts ARD stations are making as they restructure ahead of a planned radio reform.
But critics — including the Tagesspiegel and the taz — have pointed out that the decision sends a deeply symbolic message at a moment when far-right politics is gaining ground in Germany.
For African and other diaspora communities in Germany, the fight for COSMO is also a fight over a principle: that public broadcasting funded by everyone — including the more than 21 million residents with a migration background who pay the licence fee — must serve everyone. The coalition’s message is clear: a diverse society needs a media space where its many voices can be heard.
Vivian Asamoah
