Sitting at the crossroads of African history, European history, and Cold War history, Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World: Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany tells the story of the state-sponsored labor migration project from Angola and Mozambique to East Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. The project had multiple intentions: to alleviate the labor shortage in East Germany, to equip young Angolans and Mozambicans with industrial training skills, and to inculcate socialist ideals that the migrants would use on their return to Angola and Mozambique to help build the nascent industrial economy and cement the socialist revolution. Schenck makes two interrelated arguments. First, at the macro level, she shows how the collapse of the East German socialist government helped to hasten the collapse of fledgling socialist governments in Mozambique and Angola and impacted the lives of ordinary individuals in all three countries. Second, at the micro level, she shows that—although the program was largely a failure for the state and it did not live up to the migrants’ expectations that it would change their lives for the better economically—it expanded their knowledge of the world outside their villages and homelands, and it empowered them to unify and make demands on their governments, which had robbed them of their earnings and broke the promises made to them.
The study is divided into eight chapters. Demonstrating Schenck’s contention that the migrants’ lives in East Germany and as returnees were filled with dualities and contradictions, each chapter has two parts. For example, Chapter Three, “Between the Hammer, Machete, and Kalashnikov,” covers the migration from Angola and Mozambique between 1979 and 1990 and examines the dual nature of the scheme’s motivations from the perspective of the state and the individual. The first half of the chapter provides the political and economic background of the labor training programs in East Germany and explains their workings and objectives. The second half of the chapter discusses the migration from the perspective of the migrants, revealing how and what they felt about the experience of leaving home and settling temporarily in a place and culture that was foreign to them.
Schenck’s study contributes to several historiographies—African history, labor history, and migration history—and as she lays out on page 20, makes five interventions. First, the bottom-up perspective that it employs allows for the uncovering of multiple reasons that led Angolans and Mozambicans to sign up for work and training programs in East Germany. Second, analyzing migrants not only as producers but also as consumers of goods in East Germany is a corrective to the dominant narrative of communist societies as societies with limited consumption. Seen through the eyes of migrants coming from conflict-ridden societies—conflicts that were proxies of the Cold War—the consumer landscape in East Germany appeared bountiful. Third, the study shows the importance of affective ties in their homelands and in East Germany. Fourth, the study shows how the migration scheme affected the lives of its participants during and after the migrants returned home. Finally, the study carves out a space for Africa on the global memory map of studies about post-socialist nostalgia. To explain this, Schenck coins the term eastalgia which is both a historical outcome and a moral-political critique of post-socialist society by returnees. While it is ostensibly about the past—a nostalgia for life in East Germany which no longer exists—eastalgia is really a critique about the present and the state of life in Mozambique and Angola as these nations transitioned from socialism to a democracy and a market economy, and it raises the question if this change will lead to a new, more just, society (22).
Some of the strengths of the study include the presentation of migrants’ oral histories, the identification and examination of the dualities of the migration scheme and the migrants’ lived experiences, and the discussion of the role of leisure activities—particularly in the space of discos—in creating a culture of inclusion as well as exposing exclusionary attitudes. Employing migrants’ voices to tell the story of the migration experience lifts the study from the purely theoretical to the actual. Examining the migration from the perspective of the state and, most importantly, from the perspective of the migrants provides a more wholistic account of the migration and labor scheme. Finally, exploring life in the discos that the migrants and East Germans frequented reveals the barely hidden racial, sexual, and xenophobic tensions that existed between the two groups. Thus, the ideal of socialist racial solidarity is revealed to be a very thin patina. Indeed, the hostility that burst into the open, especially in social situations, reveals that colonialist attitudes of European superiority (in this case, German) and perceived African inferiority are deeply embedded in the minds of the colonizers and their progeny. These tensions also reveal that while ideologies such as socialism paper over these attitudes, they stunningly fail to uproot them.
If Schneck’s study has any weaknesses, it would lay paradoxically in one of the study’s strengths: the extensive use of oral histories. How one remembers and what one remembers, is influenced by time, distance, and one’s present reality. This raises the question of accuracy, which tends to be under-addressed in the study. Are the experiences of the migration recalled by the migrants accurate or are they seen through the lens of not only time and distance but also disappointment and dissatisfaction with the outcome of the labor migration scheme and the failure to honor the terms of the agreement it made with the migrants to remit wages owed them? While this might be beyond the scope of the study, I wonder if the forging of a shared identity between what Schneck refers to as “intimate strangers” (16) held up when the migrants returned to their homelands.
Schenk’s study sheds light on the impact of colonialism on African countries long after the colonizers left and the countries declared independence. Not only did the colonizers underdevelop these countries but also left them dependent on the largesse of their former colonizers for economic survival. The study also shows the impact of Cold War politics and its role in African economic and political instability. Finally, the study reveals the integral role that memory plays in how migrants reconstruct their past, understand their present reality, and construct their future. Well written, and compellingly argued, scholars of Africa, Germany, migration, labor, socialism, and the Cold War, as well as lay persons with interest in these topics, will find Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World an informative, insightful, and interesting read.
