Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World
Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany
On a warm winter’s morning in August 2011, I ambled through the center of Mozambique’s capital city Maputo, known as the city of cement. On Avenida 24 de Julho, close to the labor ministry, I suddenly heard a voice. “Wie geht es Dir? Kommst du aus Deutschland?” (“How are you? Do you come from Germany?”) Surprised to hear my mother tongue, I turned around. The man who had just greeted me was a little shorter than me. He was perhaps in his mid-fifties and was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans. He looked ordinary to me. What he was about to tell me, however, was anything but. For me, the ensuing conversation was the gateway to a new world, the world of the madjerman. The madjerman were workers who migrated from newly independent Mozambique to communist East Germany and their story can tell us an enormous amount about Mozambique, about East Germany, about memory, and about people’s endless capacity for adaptation and resilience.
The name of the man who hailed me in fluent German in the middle of a city in southern Africa was João. He saw me, registered my skin color, clothes, and gender, and decided that he would like to speak to a young woman from Germany to reminisce about the past and tell me about the madjerman’s struggle. An impulsive decision led to, for me at least, a life-changing conversation. That morning, without knowing it, João had planted the seed for Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World: Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany.
For those readers not already familiar with the madjerman, the briefest and broadest possible summary of their story is as follows. About 21,000 young Mozambicans, and at most 2500 Angolans, migrated to socialist East Germany for work and training between 1979 and 1990. The idea was that they would go to Germany to help alleviate the shortage of labor there. While in Europe, they would obtain practical capabilities and soft skills which would make them useful workers, not least for envisioned East German projects in Mozambique. They would also be inculcated with socialist ideals. They would become vanguard African socialist “New Men.”
The plan was that the worker-trainees would then go back to Africa and deploy these skills in the service of Mozambique’s and Angola’s nascent industrial revolutions. Sadly, it did not work out like that. The migrants did not receive the expected high-quality training and there were few industries in which to employ the skills they attained. The scheme then fell apart when communism ended in East Germany. Nearly all the Angolans and Mozambicans returned home, where they expected to receive the portion of their wages that they had been practically obliged to send back while they were working. Most of the migrants never saw the money they expected. Their homecoming was for many a traumatic process marked by poverty and dashed hopes. In Mozambique, where most of the migrants were from, they acquired the nickname madjerman as they campaigned to receive the money and other benefits that they believed they were owed.
I returned to Mozambique in January 2014, this time with a purpose. I systematically collected oral histories from former workers, students, and school children who had taken part in state-led migration schemes to East Germany. With João, and with the other Africans I spoke to, I found that my own German identity opened doors and provided a starting point for my conversations with people. Many were keen to share their stories about a time long gone, and somehow my Germanness stimulated them. I reminded them of a former German friend or colleague. Interviewees often assumed they knew how to read me: they felt that they had a special insight into the German mindset. The fact that I was born in West Germany and was too young to remember the two Germanys did not seem to matter much. The differences between the east and west of my home did not greatly resonate into Mozambique, and neither to Angola, where I also carried out interviews.
However, differences, which from Africa look small, matter enormously when seen from the German perspective. My Wessi-ness mattered greatly when interviewing former East German officials. Whereas most Africans assumed a shared horizon of experiences for all Germans, many East Germans anticipated that, coming from the Germany that “won” the Cold War, I intended to write a victor’s history. I imagine the book I have written confounds these expectations. I hope it does.
In the book, I ask how migrant workers themselves remember their migration experience and how it has shaped them. I am offering to the reader a tapestry shedding light on different patterns, different perspectives of life in East Germany and in southern Africa from the unique perspectives of non-elite African socialist cosmopolitans.
This is a short extract from the introduction of Marcia C. Schenck’s book Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World: Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany (Palgrave Macmillan 2023, open access).