Textbooks blamed for racist young

School textbooks are partly to blame for racism among young people in Germany, a scholar claimed yesterday.

According to a report published by a conservative think-tank, German children are being taught a 19th-century image of Africans. A maths problem in the book used by 13-year-olds in Berlin, for instance, asks pupils to calculate the percentage of "foreigners" in their district.

Anke Poenicke, a scholar who has been combing through textbooks of the past decade, said Africans were depicted as primitive, saved from barbarity only by the white man. "The antiquated image of savage Africa lives on," she told the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation.

The report is published in the aftermath of vicious racist incidents, including the murder of a Mozambican in the city of Dessau last year.