Keywords

The transnational dimension of the labor migration programs between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany is vividly illustrated by Dito Tembe’s 2021 painting Remembering the GDR (Fig. 8.1). Pedro Jeremias Tembe, alias Dito, was born in Maputo and lived in Schwerin between 1985 and 1989. There, he worked at the VEB Kombinat Lederwaren, a factory producing leather goods. The twenty-five-year-old Dito decided to leave Mozambique mainly for economic reasons and initially sought a way to migrate to South Africa, but eventually an opportunity to go to East Germany presented itself. In Germany, despite demanding shift work, he was able to carve out time to continue to paint. He also regularly attended courses in drawing and art at the cultural center in Schwerin. His passion for art and music connected him to East Germans and other international visitors, and he remains in contact with some of his old friends. These enduring friendships have enabled Dito to travel back to Schwerin several times to exhibit his work.Footnote 1 Since his return to Maputo, he has become a well-known painter. He, too, is hopeful that compensation payments will still be forthcoming and he still visits other madjerman in the park in downtown Maputo, whenever he can find the time to do so.

Fig. 8.1
A painting illustrates a man holding an hammer, a man carrying a pot on his head, and a pigeon holding a flower in its beak.

Remembering the GDR, painted by Dito Tembe, 2021

Full size image

Remembering the GDR strikingly illustrates the dualities that have been the central theme of this book. The city scene on the left features a gray Berlin winter’s day, while the right side of the image shows the sun bathing a factory and its workers in warm light. The upper half of the image depicts the East German cityscape as Dito remembers it, while the bottom half shines light on figures who appear to be Mozambican. These moods, people, and places, even if they sometimes appear contradictory at first sight, played an important role in the lives of the worker-trainees, and accordingly take their place together on one canvas. In the same vein, this book embraces the dualities of the migrant experience, bringing them into one narrative through a lens of dichotomies: the state and the individual, working and consuming, integration and exclusion, loss and gain, the past and the remembered past. These dualities coexist and mold this story of African migration to the Eastern Bloc.

Dito’s painting centers the figures of two workers of nondescript age and ambiguous gender and race. The first worker—the one in the spotlight—is dressed in blue dungarees, wielding a hammer in the left hand and a spanner in the right. Their gaze is turned upwards, following their raised fist, toward the sun, imagining a brighter future. Behind, the face of the second worker emerges. The composition is reminiscent of the depiction of workers around the world in contemporary socialist chromatist images.Footnote 2 The image confronts the observer with the central theme of this book: the labor migration of young Mozambicans and Angolans to East Germany. Like this book, the image is a product of the twenty-first century, and is thus as much about the present moment as it is about the last few decades of the Cold War. Dito’s painting does not attempt to show the totality of the labor migration program; similarly, this book is neither intended to be a total or comprehensive history of the labor programs between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany, nor is it a full record of the manifold migratory connections between these countries. In this book, like in the image, the state takes a back seat to the individual experience. The German state is relegated to the margins of Dito’s canvas. The emblems of East Germany are clearly visible, but are clearly secondary to the two aspiring figures which are the centerpiece of the work: an impressionistic East German flag, the tricolor of black, red, and yellow, and a hazy rendering of the emblem of East Germany, the compass and hammer surrounded by a ring of rye. This book, much like Dito’s painting, foregrounds the workers’ own agendas.

The complexity of the bottom-up perspective—the multiple, overlapping, and fluid motives of the migrants—challenges prevailing concepts of socialist migrants as passive participants in state-led schemes and stagnant definitions of labor migration. The workers had myriad motivations to sign up for a labor and training program roughly 9000 km (or 5600 miles) to the north of their home. This truth reveals the epithet “labor migrations” to be a shorthand for complex decisions involving a deeply personal mix of a desire for education, to flee war, to travel to Europe, and to earn money for consumer goods and remittances. The workers’ consumption ranged from entertainment goods like videos, TVs, compact discs, and sound systems, to household items like dishes, fridges, and ovens, to bicycles, MZ motorbikes, and even used cars. Worker-trainees bought necessities and luxury items for immediate consumption either by themselves or through their friends and family at home and in Germany. Much of their buying was future-oriented and intended for their own and their families’ futures in Africa. Perhaps the shadowy figures on the left-hand side of Dito’s painting hint at the families and friends who always traveled in spirit and memory with the migrants. Migrants did not leave Africa behind when the airplane door closed behind them. As the central depiction of the two laborers in the composition of the painting makes clear, Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World is a book that centers the human stories of the workers, their life course, experiences, and memories and follows their transnational sojourns in a socialist world.

Dito’s painting resonates with this book in other ways too. The factory and the tools the workers carry evoke the centrality of the factory floor for the labor migration program. It was here that workers became workers, negotiated their working conditions, and labored to meet production quotas. Following the workers’ oral histories, the importance emerges of seeing worker-trainees as both producers and consumers. Socialism held the promise of uniting production and consumption, an insight of central importance to the laboring sojourners. The helmeted workers in the painting suggest a certain uniformity of experience and hint at the formation of worker-trainees into workers in a double sense. They received language and skills training, albeit at times rather limited, to manage their new jobs. But more than that, working at an East German factory was intended to forge workers’ new identities: blue-collar socialist workers, the vanguard of the new Angola and Mozambique. They were New Men and Women. These new identities were to stay with the migrants long after their return. The migrants saw and still see production and consumption through the lens of their experiences in the postcolonial conflict economies at home. This meant that they read these two facets of economic life radically differently to those who see capitalist economies as the benchmark of success. The experience of the East German socialist consumer economy from the perspective of producers and consumers from the global South offers insights into German, Angolan, and Mozambican histories that only a transnational history can offer.

Behind the two central workers in Remembering the GDR we see the blurry contours of a female shadow emerging on the horizon. According to the artist, she symbolizes the emancipation of East German women, which left a deep impression on him as a young man.Footnote 3 In this book, East German women emerge as cultural compasses, facilitating orientation in a foreign society and allowing for limited two-way integration of workers into East German private lives. This provided migrants with a certain agency away from the blueprints of the state-led migration programs. German women played different roles in the lives of the labor migrants, most commonly as partners, mothers of children, and lovers. Both female and male labor migrants commented on the apparent freedom of “the East German woman” and the seemingly equal household relations they witnessed in East Germany. Even if much of this remained in the fantasy of the worker-trainees, mysterious like the woman in this image, the fact that these memories remain central tells us about the transformed understanding of gender relations and the role of women that many young worker-trainees experienced abroad and brought back home.

Dito’s painting features many people: some are recognizable as Mozambican; others remain of ambiguous provenance. Their centrality underlines the importance of human relationships to the labor migrants at the same time as it forebodes a life between inclusion and exclusion. As intimate strangers, labor migrants became part of life in neighborhood bars, discos, and shops. They invited guests into their hostels where possible. They negotiated and adapted the strict rules demarcating what was considered as proper socialist behavior. They became immersed in East German family lives and started families of their own, despite governmental attempts of all involved states to maintain distance between the East German population and the international guests. While many a worker-trainee learned how to subvert the barriers, they remained distant, different, intimate strangers.

Perhaps the gray figures moving toward the city in the painting are African contract laborers walking into their partly cold and dark East German futures. There was much that was difficult for the temporary sojourners: the weather, unfamiliar foodstuffs, the monotony of shift work. But most of all, they had to contend with exclusion. Exclusion operated on many levels. There was sexism, racism, and xenophobia. Sexist and ethnic tensions came to the fore within the groups of Mozambican and Angolan laborers and xenophobia also occurred between workers from Angola and Mozambique. Racism and xenophobia were the two most paramount problems in interactions with the East German host. In officially anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist East Germany, racialized thinking survived behind the propaganda, unquestioned from colonial times and the Nazi period. While some East German officials addressed racism in word and deed, they were not trained to see the racism in their own prejudices and interpretations of what occurred, often labeling racist acts within the euphemistic categorizations of the East German state like antisocial behavior, rowdyism, or the deeds of a lone wolf. A state which literally walled off its citizens behind an “antifascist barrier” (as the Berlin Wall was called), allegedly to “protect” them from what was different, did not prepare its citizens to welcome black African migrants in an open-minded way. Many people turned away, although others were drawn to the exotic. Details pertaining to the labor migrations were not readily available to the public in East Germany, Angola, or Mozambique, and rumors about those who were perceived as foreign were rife in all these countries. And yet, as workers tell, the worst was to come only after the Wende, when racism reached unprecedented and unbearable levels and influenced the return decision of many workers.

The mass return of 1990 brought about a new distance between East German life and life in Angola and Mozambique. Dito’s painting deals with this theme of distance in several ways. Firstly, the medium of transport which the migrants took to and from East Germany, right in the middle of the painting’s sky: the airplane in which the workers journeyed back and forth along the longitude of labor. Secondly, the shoreline in the right lower middle section of the painting, which catches the viewer’s eye. This scene, too, remains ambiguous. Two women with their backs turned toward the spectator—one might be German, while the other could be Mozambican—are gazing out over a large body of water, which could be simultaneously read as the Indian Ocean or the Baltic Sea. And lastly, the pastel color scheme of the whole image suggests a certain distance to the spectator. Though we are seeing some elements clearly, the painting has a dreamlike quality, like a painted memory. It is an artistic rendition of a lived recollection.

Read in this way, the image is a symbol of socialism’s afterlife. Perhaps the woman balancing a clay pot of water on her head and the man gazing out of the picture are returned workers, who, after years on the factory floor, resumed a rural way of life in the early 1990s. These figures are painted in earthy colors and they do not bear distinct regional or ethnic markers, which might symbolize the unity of all Mozambicans. It was this idea of a single, unified nation with which the young workers were imbued during socialist nation-building under Samora Machel. They were to serve as its ambassadors on the East German factory floor and they were to return to help develop their home country as part of a new working class in the making. What had previously been a rather abstract idea became concrete to workers when they were sent abroad in ethnically and regionally mixed groups in which they lived, worked, and trained. They returned from East Germany with a strong group identity maintained until this day. While this was less pronounced with the Angolans, organizations that represent the workers operate across regional and ethnic borders there, too.

Workers lost many things upon return. Necessity made them part with many of the goods they had brought from Germany, while many lost the opportunity to pursue a blue-collar work life with health insurance and pension entitlements. Others lost their status as big men and women, others still their ties to Germany and family members, and most lost at least a portion of the wages for which they had labored in East Germany. They also lost their belief in the development of Angola and Mozambique through industrialization as they saw that there was limited place for blue-collar workers in the new Angola and Mozambique. But the workers’ return was not all loss. In hardship many found collective agency, and in their abandonment many forged solidarity with each other inside and outside of returned workers’ organizations. In their difference many Mozambicans have formed a lasting identity as madjerman. Workers were transformed by their migration abroad and some gained different viewpoints on gender equality or sexuality, while others took to the streets to fight for the repayment of outstanding wages and benefits. The Angolan workers successfully settled with their government. These losses and gains were two sides of the same coin.

Memories are not exact imprints of the past in our minds. Rather, they distort and shape anew, influenced by what those who remember have experienced after the memory was acquired and by the modes of recall of the memory itself. The painting’s cityscape features the Berlin TV Tower and a church, but otherwise it looks more like an American city with skyscrapers than the East Berlin of the workers’ migration experience. It is worth pausing on the towering quality of the buildings. Angolan and Mozambican former contract workers look back upon their socialist migration from their twenty-first-century vantage point with eastalgia, a longing that is simultaneously a historical outcome and moral-political critique of their present-day governments. It has a restorative dimension to it, which is expressed in the strong community among returned migrants. It is multicausal and combines a longing for one’s youth with a longing for an imagined modernity and materiality of the past, and nurtures ongoing political claim-making. In Dito’s painting the observer’s eye is caught by a white peace dove to the right of the central figures. It has a sprig of clover in its beak. It is an immediately recognizable international symbol for peace and, despite being of biblical origin, became ubiquitous in East Germany, particularly through Pablo Picasso’s rendition of the theme. Dito’s dove symbolizes peace and solidarity between socialist nations, something that many worker-trainees at the time of their migration placed their hopes in but later came to understand much more critically. To me, it also echoes their eastalgic memories and serves as a symbol for the dreams of the young worker-trainees for leading peaceful, happy lives and their willingness to cross continents to pursue these dreams.

In Remembering the GDR, global, socialist, and traditional southern Mozambican influences cleverly merge into a single composition, much as the labor migrants’ lives have been shaped by their experiences. They became socialist cosmopolitans, mobile along socialist axes from South to North and returned to a life often, but not always, at the margins of Angolan and Mozambican society. This book draws upon my composite reading of individual life histories to paint a collective history of Angolan and Mozambican socialist labor migration to East Germany and its legacies. “The problem with historical events which are intricately interwoven is that, the better to understand their constituent elements, we have to pull them apart,” argues Tony Judt. “But in order to see the story in its plentitude, you have to interweave those elements back together again. … Separatism falsifies one part of the story; its absence has a comparably distorting impact on something else.”Footnote 4 Following the lives of the workers across temporal, political, and geographical divides brings together what might otherwise be seen as separate. The lives of the labor migrants transcend simplistic dichotomies often connected to concepts such as the Cold War, East–West, and the global South and North. Instead, the protagonists of this story are simultaneously recipients of and contributors to German, Angolan, and Mozambican life. My focus on the workers’ experiences and corresponding selection of threads has been intended to create a reading of a Cold War migration from the perspectives of those who migrated and through that experience have come to re-evaluate East German, Angolan, and Mozambican postcolonial and (post)-socialist histories.

The Spaces Between Second and Third Worlds

The interconnected socialist world led to a temporary integration of Africans into the Second World and, via the cosmopolitan travelers, of the Second World into the Third. With the implosion of socialism, these axes of connectivity waned. As the former Secretary General of the United Nations—Boutros Boutros-Ghali—aptly remarked, with the collapse of socialism the Iron Curtain moved southwards, to the middle of the Mediterranean, where it seeks to divide Europe from Africa.Footnote 5 An increasingly fast-paced capitalist globalization has not necessarily brought down barriers. We only need to think about legal travel opportunities into the heart of Europe for unskilled Africans. This contemporary comprehension, coupled with a deeper knowledge of the complex web of linkages provided by the socialist world, avoids reinscribing a teleological narrative of increased connections under capitalist globalization. It reveals a socialist globalization process that existed in parallel and yet was intertwined.

This book, like Dito’s painting, renders obvious that even though we cannot say exactly where the socialist world started and where it ended, socialism created new spaces between countries that we need to study from all involved angles, including Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as well as Europe and the Soviet Union.Footnote 6 Too often, the communist world is equated with the Iron Curtain, borders, and barbed wire, and its collapse with the eradication of said barriers and the inexorable spread of liberal capitalism. The convergence of history in geographically distant socialist countries was no accident, nor was it a path-dependent development that came out of prior colonial entanglements. Instead, it was intentional. The study of the socialist world, then, is also the study of an aspirational world—an imagined better future—on which the worker in Dito’s painting is concentrating. Such study allows us to zoom in on a time period in which Africans and their counterparts around the socialist world imagined an alternative to colonial and capitalist development and acted on these imaginings to shape the fraught realities of countless lives. Taking the socialist world seriously as an analytical concept means studying the history of the many possibilities that contemporaries envisioned. It demands that we take seriously the manifold dreams and desires of workers, students, diplomats, technical experts, union members, journalists, and military personnel and pay attention to the many small, haphazard, and ambiguous ways in which the grand notions of socialist internationalism influenced the lives of transnational sojourners.

As part of scholarship dedicated to revealing the scope and functioning of the socialist world, this transnational labor migration story can never be confined to a national container, told as only East German, Angolan, or Mozambican history. Betty Banks, Robin d’Avignon, and Asif Siddiqi have thought about a very similar historical space created between continents and called it the “African-Soviet modern.” The space they seek to demarcate with this designation is characterized by “an asymmetrical combination of aspiration, materiality, and practice that was rooted in diverse African states and in the Soviet Union.”Footnote 7 Similarly, Eric Burton, Anne Dietrich, Immanuel Harisch, and myself have, along with the authors in our edited volume, devoted attention to the study of the “encounters, moorings and (dis)entanglements … between people from various African states and East Germany.”Footnote 8 Both works remain somewhat imbalanced as they take countries in the north, the Soviet Union and East Germany respectively, and seek to explore their relationships with various African countries. These are, however, important starting points for mapping the socialist world along axes connecting Africa and Europe. Elsewhere, I have called for the construction and deconstruction of a “Black East” to bring to the fore the manifold roles of African actors from Havana to Vladivostok.Footnote 9 While this writing of black histories (and their integration into what remain mainly white histories) remains an important project across Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, studying the socialist world as a series of migration axes goes one step further in attempting to write interconnected, entangled histories. They cannot be told without giving weight to different geographies and their attendant histories.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, socialism served as a doctrine of economic development but also of nation-building. Moreover, it functioned as theory to critique and overcome colonialism. Looking back from today, the socialist world seems fleeting. Its teleology of a future-oriented notion of progress has forfeited much of its attractiveness. On both sides of the transnational exchange, the bureaucrats in the socialist world were interested in state planning and production, infrastructural development, in scientific expertise, in skilled labor, in linguistic and cultural knowledge, and in political know-how. Socialism also provided a point of engagement between the various newly independent states on the African continent and the various states in the Second World such as the Comecon members but also Yugoslavia and China. The Soviet Bloc was not the only major player in the socialist world. There was competition within the Eastern Bloc for the hearts and minds of the global South. Tens of thousands of people across the Second and Third Worlds, who contributed to building transnational axes between socialist countries, adopted socialist dreams, and filled the planned cooperation with meaning. This was, as we have seen, far from a smooth process. It included misunderstandings and unexpected developments as well as constant reminders of asymmetrical relationships. Histories of (dis)entanglements within the socialist world are bound to be complex, messy, contradictory, and ambiguous. In short, in this respect they were everything the planners involved envisioned them not to be.

Just as Dito’s painting combines Mozambican and East German elements to tell a hybrid story, the study of the global socialist world cannot be undertaken from one place alone but must be studied in transnational and translocal ways that consciously contribute to coloring the contours of an alternative socialist world, drawing closer together Africa and the East. This promises multi-layered, connected histories rooted in specific places and histories, hopefully without losing sight of the global entanglements and disentanglements of which they form a part. The flattened histories that result from understanding the socialist only from the Second World’s perspective can be dangerous for Africa. Not only can the continent be painted as passive recipient of socialist aid and expertise, but also as the place from which people left. This detracts from seeing the continent as the origin of transformations, as a site of knowledge creation and adaptation of socialist ideas and practices. An example of this is the migration literature about Africans who moved to the Second World. Literature on African students all over the Eastern Bloc rarely traces their experiences back to the continent. Literature on labor migrations within the socialist world is primarily studied through the archives across the “East,” and, in the case of the German literature, remains siloed in a national frame. Examining the socialist world adds nuance to a bifurcated twentieth-century African temporality, divided into colonial and postcolonial periods.Footnote 10 It also challenges simplistic depictions of the continent as a passive victim of Cold War geopolitics. Instead, it draws our attention to the complex and ambiguous work of building nation states from colonial structures in an asymmetric world. In so doing, the study of the socialist world gives the continent a meaningful place in a profoundly global encounter.

Studying East German history in this framework contributes to reversing its fate as a border region, a mere footnote to world history.Footnote 11 This book has embedded East Germany into a global socialist world from the perspective of labor migrants who to a certain degree appropriated a tightly controlled migration regime for their own goals and subverted East German ideas of labor migration in the process. The vivid world that springs from the pages of the book belies Thomas Lindenberger’s statement that “the thin stream of migrant or contract workers from the Global South […] working in the GDR and the GDR’s engagements in international trade, economic aid and humanitarianism […] have contributed very little to the actual globalization at large.”Footnote 12 Operating with a more expansive understanding of globalizations in the plural and as multi-layered and multiscalar processes, this book has demonstrated the large and small ways in which labor migrants have structurally and spontaneously contributed to bringing distant parts of the global socialist world together. It has also shed light on the ongoing legacies that continue to bind post-socialist Angola, Mozambique, and Germany.

Painted more than three decades after the return of most of the workers, Dito’s image echoes many of the central tenets to which the young worker-trainees subscribed and, on some level, continue to subscribe. It is a nostalgic vision, a syncretic expression of the Mozambican Afro-socialism and East German socialism. The painting is evocative of socialist celebrations of progress through work but interprets this anew, skillfully interweaving Mozambican and East German elements. In so doing it emits a hopeful, future-centered quality while at the same time appearing as a dream once dreamed.

The labor program transformed young Angolans and Mozambicans into workers and socialist cosmopolitans. They contributed with their labor power to the East German and to the Angolan and Mozambican economies (albeit not always in expected ways). Their transnational sojourn taught those East Germans who interacted with the friends from abroad about the small stuff of the everyday as lived elsewhere: Angolan and Mozambican bands, dishes, words, and ways of praying. It taught Mozambicans and Angolans not only the German language, work ethic, customs, and socialism as practiced in Central Europe, but also about the unintended, such as notions of gender equality and possibilities of consumption. The post-socialist reverberations of the program have led people in Angola, Mozambique, Germany, and elsewhere to continue to reflect on the meanings and debts incurred through this entanglement. Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World has plotted the perspectives of labor migrants based on their memories. There remains much scope to trace other forms of migrations, of mobilities, and of (dis)entanglements. Hopefully, in so doing we can continue the project of mapping the transnational world that was created in the space in between the Second and the Third Worlds.