This paper examines state-sponsored education and labor migrations between the Peoples’ Republics of Angola and Mozambique, and the German Democratic Republic (“GDR” or East Germany) in the late 1970s-1990s. During the Cold War, political and economic relations between the “Second World” and the “Third World” opened up migration routes to young African men and women to work and study abroad. In the process, migrants were expected to gain technical skills and expertise to develop their nascent post-colonial home states upon their return. While this plan succeeded for most university students, many former labor migrants found themselves on the informal labor market and at the fringes of society back home. Regardless, both groups share personal memories of professional, private and emotional connections established in their new temporary homes in the GDR, so that the lived reality beyond borders was a translocal, rather than a transnational reality.
I focus herein on the lived experiences of labor and education migrants as they remembered their time abroad in 2014/15 and draw on 268 life history interviews with workers, students, and government officials, triangulated with archival sources, collected during two years of fieldwork in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal, South Africa, and Germany.
This paper brings together migration history, labor history, and collective life history, as one of my aims is to show just how intertwined the workers’ workplaces and the students’ university experiences, and their private lives were as they traveled from Africa to Europe, and then back again. These histories fit naturally into a global history framework, both because people, goods, and ideas circulated beyond the nation states, but also because these circular migrations were shaped by global events - i.e. decolonization, socialist entanglements, and “readjustment” towards neo-liberal economic paradigms. These global conjunctures are ill understood unless we take into account Angola’s and Mozambique’s multifaceted connections to the socialist world. Rooted firmly in African history, this research follows Africans abroad at a time that witnessed socialism’s failed attempt to go global.