The Manfred Loimeier Archive comprises 35 lever arch files full of newspaper articles, interviews, book reviews, manuscripts, cuttings from publishers' brochures, print-outs of internet pages, and numerous other documents related to African writers and African literatures, which the German journalist, author and literary scholar Manfred Loimeier collected between 1990 and 2010. In 2010, Manfred Loimeier bestowed his collection on the Jahn Library for African Literatures in order to make it accessible for research.
Manfred Loimeier studied German literature and linguistics, art history and philosophy in Tübingen, Vienna, Basel and Berlin. 2005, he completed his PhD at Bayreuth University with a dissertation on the journalistic interview as a form of reception in the francophone, anglophone and German-language press, focusing on Wole Soyinka and Ousmane Sembène. In 2010, he acquired his habilitation in Heidelberg with a study on J.M. Coetzee.
Since 1990, Manfred Loimeier has, as part of his work as a journalist, published numerous newspaper articles on African literatures as well as interviews with African writers. He has published several books on African literature, one collection of interviews, and two anthologies of South African short stories, as well as translated Zimbabwean writer Shimmer Chinodya's latest novel, Strife (2007), into German. In 1997, he evaluated projects of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Nigeria and Mali to enhance reading skills. For two years, he acted as a literary scout and presenter of readings with South African writers who, between 2003 und 2005 and on invitation of the foundation "Kunst:Raum Sylt-Quelle", read from their work in Hamburg and on the island of Sylt. Furthermore, he has taught seminar courses on African Literatures at Heidelberg University and at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.