Work in Progress: 

Decolonization, Development, and the Organization of African Unity: 

The creation of the African refugee regime in global perspective, 1963-1984

The United States, Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world, from Bangladesh to South Africa, have recently been preoccupied with what is often labelled a global “refugee crisis.” The public discussion about these crises remains often ahistorical, even though historians have demonstrated how refugees are co-constitutive of nation states; far from being an exception to the norm, they are the norm. Despite good scholarship, moreover, historians have paid too little attention to how people have sought, and governments have provided refuge in the Global South, where most refugees have been and continue to be hosted.  In contributing to the literature that retells histories of displacement from this perspective, my book advances the argument that refugee management was as much a political imperative of pan-African solidarity as it was a humanitarian and/or development concern of African politicians. Positioning Africa in the center, not just as a refugee-producing and -hosting continent, but also as place where new ideas regarding refugee management were developed, brings into stark relief the importance of the visions and experiences of the decolonizing world, demonstrating that the emergence of global refugee rights and management approaches after 1945 were intertwined with the efforts of anticolonial movements and politicians of young nation-states to imagine new states and citizens. The nexus between decolonization, development, humanitarianism, and refugees has thus far been understudied and minimal attention has been paid to the African continent’s premier political organization, the OAU; this book seeks to redress both lacunae.

Open Access Monograph

Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World: 

Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany

The life histories and memories of Angolan and Mozambican men and women who worked and trained in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the late 1970s until the early 1990s are central to this book. Political and economic relations between the “Second World” and the “Global South” opened up migration routes to young Africans to work and study abroad. This was an opportunity not only for migrants but also for their governments, as migrants were expected to gain the necessary skills with which to develop their nascent post-colonial home nations. 

By examining the lived experiences of those who temporarily migrated northwards, the project makes multiple contributions to African and global historiography. First, it reveals the human side of state-led migration circuits, demonstrating the ways that migrants adapt to and challenge the  migration programs. Second, it redirects our attention away from African theaters of the hot Cold War towards transnational socialist mobilities and the working of government programs in the name of “mutual aid” and “solidarity.” Moreover, it explores the largely understudied period  of postcolonial African history, tracing the political transition of Angola and Mozambique from colonialism to independence, to socialism, and finally to free-market economics through following the life course of the transnational workers. Finally, by connecting migrants’ memories and life histories to large-scale political and economic relationships between socialist nations during the Cold War, it illuminates the interplay between local, national and global geopolitics. This integration of micro and macro history across local and global connections allows my work to address fundamental questions regarding the relationship between migration and development – a question which remains highly relevant in present-day considerations of migration, labor, development, and global inequality.

The open access publication was generously funded by the University of Potsdam's Graduate School and the university's central research support unit.

Visit the book's website here:  https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-06776-1?sap-outbound-id=4828594207424E25809E667BFDBEAEF09572A272 

Stay tuned for the book's Portuguese translation, which will be published by Imprensa de Ciências Sociais in 2023.

Reviews

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

Socialist Solidarities and Their Afterlives:

Histories and Memories of Angolan and Mozambican Migrants in the German Democratic Republic, 1975-2015

This dissertation examines state-sponsored education and labor migration 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. Tracing Angola’s and Mozambique’s political transitions from decolonization, to socialism, and finally to free market democracies through the lived experiences of these migrants, this dissertation is firmly rooted in African history. 

The memories and lived experiences of Angolans and Mozambicans who migrated to work and study in East Germany are central to this dissertation. It draws 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. 

Outlining the lives of the transnational migrants we understand the importance of non-military global socialist ties for African history during the Cold War and beyond. Moreover, the dissertation illustrates the lasting impact of the migration experience, which indelibly shaped the Angolan and Mozambican workers’ relationship to production, consumption, education, and affective relationships.

The dissertation engages with migration history, the history of nation building, labor history, and collective life history, in order to show just how intertwined the workers’ and students’ professional experiences were with their private lives as they travelled from Africa to Europe, and back again. Following in the migrants’ footsteps, it demonstrates the degree to which Angolan and Mozambican history is intertwined with that of other socialist nations like East Germany; the global socialist conjuncture is ill-understood unless we account for Angola’s and Mozambique’s multifaceted connections to the socialist world.

Dissertation, PhD in history

Princeton University, September 2017

This research was generoulsy funded by the History Department at Princeton University, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Research Fellowship at the National Library of Portugal (FLAD‑BNP). I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Mercator Fellowship. Many thanks to my colleagues at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Humboldt University in Berlin, and the directors and staff of the Angolan National Archives in Luanda, and the Portuguese National Library in Lisbon for providing advice and institutional homes during my research.