Goethe-Institut Lagos Gets New Director

The German Cultural Centre, Goethe Institut, Lagos has got a new director, Friederike Moschel. She is the official successor to former director, Marc-Andre Schmachtel who left Nigeria last year for Germany, having spent six years holding the position. He had left a large shoe to be filled with his record of activating several cultural events and supporting a host of others.

But in his absence, the cultural centre introduced to Nigeria Mr. Alfons Hug, a curator and critic. Of course, his brief stay as an interim director did not give enough room for year-long projects.

The good news is that Moschel, the new director loves literature and may well be what the Nigerian literary space yearns for.

Born in Munich, Moschel grew up in Hamburg, Bonn and completed studies in German and English literature. She later taught at the German Embassy School in China for two years. Subsequently, she worked for four years in the education sector in Hamburg before joining the Goethe-Institut.

The new director arrives in Lagos after a five-year term at the Institut's Dubai office, as one of the founding staff. She spent another two and a half years as director of the language department, Goethe-InstitutTashkent/Uzbekistan and the same number of years in Kiev/Ukraine where she was in charge of the regional co-ordination of the Eastern Partnership Fund and the implementation of cultural projects in Ukraine.

Moschel, who has been with Goethe-Institut for a decade, revealed that she looks forward to an exciting stay in Nigeria while picking up from where her predecessors left off.The new director is an avid reader of Nigerian writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe but needs time to feel the groove of our other cultural trends such as movie culture.

She had been dragged into the “jollof war” but diplomatically responded, “Jollof rice is spicy! And I love spice.”