The newspaper was a site of negotiation of socially shared knowledge in the emerging culturally heterogeneous colonial society in the years 1885-1918 in German East Africa (which included Tanganyika, present-day Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda). In this process, newspapers are central contact zones and emerging archives in which the migration of knowledge from the European to the African context and vice versa, its entanglement, and the gradual emergence of knowledge themes can be concretely traced. The starting hypothesis is that colonial newspapers, as the first African mass media are the crucial sites of negotiation for the knowledge shared in colonial society, its mode of transmission, and its reception. By combining multimodal newspaper analysis such as close reading, narratology, and imagology, the project aims to investigate, on the one hand, the manifestation of the thematic concept of citizenship and its forms in terms of critical constellations of power as represented in textual codes; for example, aesthetic codes such as poetry and different genres in the selected newspapers. By fundamentally asking the questions, for example: what kind of genre did people experiment with to contribute to the notion of citizenship as socially shared knowledge? How was it negotiated, considering that citizenship was the subject of dialogue from above and below and shaped by both African and colonial powers, who wrote it ("discourse communities" Knoblauch 2003), who the audience (reading public) was and how was received. On the other hand, the project aims to critically examine the role of visual representations such as images and illustrations in the colonial web of narratives, realities, and concepts of citizenship. Furthermore, this study of colonial newspapers encourages us to critically rethink some of our assumptions about text, print, and writing in colonial Africa.