Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxvii

   PDF

2. Prologue: Juma Madeira—From Socialist New Man to Madjerman Activist

   • Marcia C. Schenck

   Pages 1-6Open Access

3. Introduction

   • Marcia C. Schenck

   Pages 7-56Open Access

4. Between the Hammer, Machete, and Kalashnikov: Labor Migration from Angola and Mozambique to East Germany 1979–1990

   • Marcia C. Schenck

   Pages 57-106Open Access

5. Socialist Workers and Socialist Consumers

   • Marcia C. Schenck

   Pages 107-157Open Access

6. The Social Life of Socialism: Intimacy and Racism

   • Marcia C. Schenck

   Pages 159-213Open Access

7. Return, Fall, and Rise of the Madjerman: The Afterlives of Socialist Migration

   • Marcia C. Schenck

   Pages 215-275Open Access

8. Temporality, Memory, and Meaning: Eastalgia in Angola and Mozambique

   • Marcia C. Schenck

   Pages 277-318Open Access

9. Epilogue: Transnational Sojourners, Intimate Strangers, and Workers of the World

   • Marcia C. Schenck

   Pages 319-332Open Access

10. Back Matter

    Pages 333-377

    PDF

This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained as a vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were there, they contributed their labor power to the East German economy. 

• Open access
• Third World
• Second World
• East Germany
• Angola
• Mozambique
• Socialism
• Labor Migration

Marcia Schenck, deploying an extraordinary array of oral and documentary resources, tells us what Mozambicans and Angolans who went as worker-trainees to East Germany were able to make of the experience: their hopes, their frustrations, the relationships they made, and the memories and cultural resources they brought back with them. Her book is a compelling reflection on socialism in Africa and Europe and on what it means to move between continents and ways of life.

Frederick Cooper, author of Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present.

The book’s compelling central message is a fundamentally human history of migration to socialist East Germany. Friendship and cooperation, education, professional training, and labor all played a role in shaping this cold war migration to a place that emerged as quite cosmopolitan.

Dito Tembe, Mosambican artist and former contact laborer

The book foregrounds the creation of a socialist world in the spaces in between nations and continents, in the details and places of migrants’ lives and memories. The absolute abundance of interviews conducted by Schenck gives her a source base that is unique among historians of socialist globalization, giving real insight into the experience of socialist encounter for hundreds of non-elite men and women. This close focus on the individual produces a subtle method-as-argument intervention that complicates chronological and geographical divides of African, Cold War and European history in fruitful ways. Following migrants from colonial to post-colonial, socialist to post-socialist, the book illuminates the interwoven histories of GDR, Angola, and Mozambique alongside the interconnected lives of the migrant workers she follows

Elizabeth Banks, European University Institute

Marcia Schenck’s outstanding and richly textured study on socialist mobilities between Angola, Mozambique and East Germany clearly is among the best recent efforts to analyze African history in a global perspective. It also offers a re-reading of the GDR as consumer paradise and the factory as a site of the production of goods, workers, race, and ideology. The portrayal of contract workers from Lusophone Africa as holders of specialized knowledge reveals the myriad ways that migrants adapt to and challenge state migration programs. Finally, the book fills an important gap in the literature on the Global Cold War, as it substantially expands our knowledge of transnational socialist mobility experienced from below. Following closely in the migrants’ footsteps, it demonstrates the degree to which Angolan and Mozambican history is intertwined with that of other socialist nations including East Germany.

Andreas Eckert, Humboldt University Berlin

• University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

  Marcia C. Schenck

Marcia C. Schenck is professor of Global History at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her research interests include global and African history, oral history, labor and education history, and migration history. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Africa, African Economic History and Labor History, among others. She recently co-edited a volume about the varied relationship between East Germany and the African continent called Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War (De Gruyter, 2021). She is co-founder of the H-Net Refugees in African History network and the founder of the Global History Dialogues, which constitutes part of Princeton University’s Global History Lab.