Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World

Front matter

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY SERIES

Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World

Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany

Foreword

Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World: Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany tells the story of young men and women from southern Africa, their time sojourning in Central Europe, and their return back home. With its research anchored deeply in two continents, it explains the varied interests that brought Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany together and the many motivations—political, emotional, economic—that led both Africans and Germans to connect to one another. In this, Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World sits at the crossroads of African history, European history, and Cold War history.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I spent a few years living between Mozambique and the post-Soviet states of Ukraine and Russia. At one point, I found myself in a dormitory at Patrice Lumumba University, in Moscow, speaking with students from Guinea-Bissau, Mali, and Zambia. Our conversation ranged broadly over their experiences in Russia during the early 2000s. Some also spoke ofa recent event that weighed heavily on them—a fire that had swept through a neighboring dormitory, killing a number of foreign students. Some among those gathered hinted that the fire had been the work of xenophobic arsonists. In the context of that conversation, it was clear to me that such hints reflected the insecurity—at times tinged with racial hostility—they experienced as racialized foreigners. Their musings did not say so much about the fire itself yet spoke volumes about the aspirations that had taken them to Moscow and the arc of their experience. Their accounts told a certain amount about their lives in Russia, but they explained so much more about how I might understand vii viii FOREWORD the history that had brought them there: the path followed by generations of Africans who had preceded them, and their hopes to follow in their footsteps. As Marcia C. Schenck notes, oral testimony of this sort is simultaneously about past, present, and future.

Here, Marcia Schenck offers a deep, searching reflection on the history that brought thousands of young Angolans and Mozambicans to East Germany during the Cold War’s last decade. Broadly described as labor migrants—they traveled behind the Berlin Wall on four-year contracts— they did much more than simply work, and for some, migration gave way to long-term residency. The story she tells covers their lives as friends, workers, lovers, parents, party members, and much more, as they moved from the factory floor to the dance floor and from pubs to government offices. We learn about how these young people managed homesickness and culture shock (especially unfamiliar food and cold winters); how they seized opportunities for personal growth and navigated new relationships (finding and, at times, losing love); and how they confronted inevitable obstacles (such as discovering that their hard-won skills or knowledge was obsolete before its time).

Schenck brings impressive capacities to this endeavor. While others may share her broad reading of scholarship and capacious thinking, she brings an unmatched intellectual boldness, in her choice to tell this story largely though personal narratives she collected from the workers themselves. To be sure, she also consulted much surrounding written documentation, but she allows their self-narration to form the frame for the history. It is an audacious yet rewarding approach, for Schenck conducted more than 250 interviews with returned workers, an undertaking unparalleled by any historian I know working on such topics. In Mozambique alone, she traveled from one end of the country to the other, relying on tremendous creative reserves and physical stamina to carry her on a journey that covered over 2500 kilometers—one way.

This book brings a number of rewards for its readers, beyond appealing stories and fascinating visions of a bygone era. First, in relying on the self-narration of these once-young Africans’ life experiences, Schenck does something new and rare: she elevates their subjectivity to a global scale. Their narratives embrace the long distances—geographic, cultural, and otherwise—between southern Africa and Central Europe, otherwise almost impossible to grasp in the mind’s eye. It is their personal, subjective

FOREWORD ix experiences and their individual understandings of large-scale forces that shape the storyline. In so doing, Schenck renders what might otherwise be airless topics (such as state-to-state socialist cooperation) in human terms, showing how apparatchiks’ aspirations to Marxist dialectics could bring together young Africans and Germans in the closest possible, and unexpected, intimacies. She relies on their self-understandings and assessments as the yardstick by which to take the measure of socialist solidarities between East Germany and Angola, or of the outcomes produced by state-sponsored labor migration regimes.

A second, related reward is how Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World seeks to understand the perspective of the returned workers themselves, using their perspective as the lens to examine the labor migration program overall. At the time, in the late 1970s, they were meant to be the “object” of improvement, targeted as such by their governments and by East Germany. The idea was that they would head off as unskilled, politically naive youth and return home as skilled industrial workers endowed with a political consciousness of class—no longer objects of change, but rather revolutionary subjects able to remake their own societies. Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World is a mirror to this dyad: the former workers are both the object of focus and the subjects who tell the story.

Finally, readers will benefit from Schenck’s refusal to indulge in retrospective assessments of success or failure that sometimes creep into reflections on the Cold war. After all, in writing of something so caught up in Cold War politics, such a “winner” vs. “loser” framing offers little of interest or utility. It is true that the expectations and aspirations that carried many Angolans and Mozambicans to Germany went largely unfulfilled. This was due in part to forces of global reach, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany, and also of local scale, such as the inadequacy of specific skills training. In refusing the simple math of a success or failure balance-sheet framing, Schenck instead follows their life trajectories along the paths these now middle-aged men and women have chosen. She shows us how some among them have ended up as agents of change, if not as their handlers originally imagined. Socialist revolution is no longer on their mind; they seek reform and aim to usher in a new, more just social order to replace the closed and iniquitous politics that filled the vacuum created by socialist collapse.

x FOREWORD

As a clear-eyed observer of the era once wrote, it was a time “replete with unfulfilled ambitions and disappointed hopes,” charged with seemingly world-changing ideas that did not turn out as anyone expected.! Marcia Schenck offers us a history full of ambition and hope, showing us how young men and women from Angola and Mozambique changed the worlds in which they lived, in ways other than anyone expected.

Ottawa, ON, Canada Eric Allina January 2022

NOTE

1. Stephen Ellis, “Writing Histories of Contemporary Africa,” Journal of African History 43, no. 1 (2005): 3.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. ...the cloud and the paper inter-are.!

Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully expresses the concept of inter-being. Like the sheet of paper, a book is much more than the eye perceives. This one exists because of the tireless support of many people and institutions across several continents.

First and foremost, I extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who agreed to be interviewed in Angola, Germany, and Mozambique. I am deeply grateful to the migrant workers, university students, Friendship School students, government officials, and family members of migrants who graciously gave of their time and willingly shared their life stories with me. Many of you went above and beyond to facilitate my research by welcoming me into your homes, finding me places to stay, providing drivers, making phone calls, and making sure I participated in cultural events in Angola and Mozambique. I cannot thank you all enough or even by name, but I carry you in my heart and am tremendously grateful for everything you have done. Without you, this book would not exist.

The book started as a history dissertation titled “Socialist Solidarities and Their Afterlives: Histories and Memories of Angolan and Mozambican Migrants in the German Democratic Republic, 1975-2015” and my sincerest gratitude extends to my wonderfully supportive dissertation committee: Emmanuel Kreike, Mariana Candido, Jacob Dlamini, and Jeremy xi xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Adelman at Princeton University, and Andreas Eckert at Humboldt University in Berlin. A big thank you also to Wendy Belcher for shelter, for writing advice, and for mutual writing sessions when most needed. Beyond Princeton, I owe a debt of gratitude to many mentors and colleagues. First and foremost, to my colleagues at the University of Potsdam, where I have had the pleasure of being Professor of Global History since January 2020 and where I have shared—despite the coronavirus—important conversations with my colleagues as I am learning the ropes of being a professor in Germany. My heartfelt thanks go to Sönke Neitzel, Dominik Geppert, Filippo Carlà-Uhink, Frank Bösch, Monika Fenn, Matthias Asche, Thomas Brechenmacher, Monika Wienfort, and Christine Kleinjung. I also want to thank my former colleagues at the Center for Global History at the Friedrich-Meinecke Institute and the department of History and Cultural Studies at Freie University Berlin, foremost Sebastian Conrad. A heartfelt thank you also to the wonderful group of fellows from near and far that shared the fellowship year with me at re:work, the International Research Center for Work and the Human Lifecycle in Global History at Humboldt University Berlin, during the academic year of 2017-2018. Our many discussions about labor, generation, and life cycle are reflected in this book.

Internationally, there are many colleagues who took the time to engage with this project. Eric Allina in Canada has been nothing but supportive from the start. I truly appreciate his comments on the manuscript and taking the time to write a foreword. In the US, Allen Isaacman and Kathleen Sheldon have generously taken the time to read through and comment on the manuscript. I have greatly appreciated Anne Pitcher’s sharing of Mozambican newspaper articles about the madjerman. A heartfelt thank you to Idalina Baptista for introducing me to all things Portuguese. Those whose insights have improved this work include: Alena Alamgir, Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Bellows-Blakely, Eric Burton, Samuel Coghe, Fred Cooper, Anne Dietrich, Immanuel Harisch, Patrick Harries, Minu Haschemi Yekani, Dan Hodkinson, Christoph Kalter, Stephanie Lämmert, Sebabatso Manoeli, Luke Melchiorre, Jamie Monson, Tanja Müller, Justin Pearce, Alexandra Piepiorka, Sarah Pugach, Janne Juhana Rantala, Susanne Schmidt, Julia Seibert, Julia Tischler, Thomas Thadewaldt, Berthold Unfried, Jelmer Vos, and Malte Wandel. I appreciate the ongoing support of my former adviser William Beinart at the University of Oxford. Likewise, I am indebted to my incredible mentors from the Massachusetts Five College Area: Holly Hanson, Eugenia Herbert, John Lemly, Sean Redding, Penny Gill, Eva Paus, and Lois A. Brown.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

During my extensive research travels, I incurred debts to many people and institutions. In Angola, the director Alexandra Aparicio and the staff of the Arquivo Nacional de Angola in Luanda provided advice and an institutional home during my research stay. The directors, archivists, and civil servants of the Ministério da Administração Pública, Trabalho e Segurança Social, the Ministério da Educação, the Ministério das Relações Exteriores, the Instituto Nacional de Gestão de Bolsas de Estudo, the Arquivo do MPLA na Sede Nacional do MPLA, and the Biblioteca Nacional de Angola in Luanda helped me unearth primary sources. Maria da Conceição Neto and Aurora Ferreira from the Universidade Agostinho Neto and João Lourenço, director of the Biblioteca Nacional, generously gave of their time to orient me academically. A big thank you also to ambassador Hendrik Dane and Anna Mikeska from the German embassy for generously sharing their expertise and Angolan contacts with me. Ambassador Rainer Müller and Ricardo Gerigk, Laureano Receado Paulo, Faustina Fernandes Inglês de Almeida Alves, Leif Biureborgh, Miroslav Petrovic, Tako Konig, Irmgard Riemer, and Cristina Pinto shared their rich knowledge about Angola with me. Finally, my stay in Angola would not have been possible without the generous logistical support and kind friendship of Inês Alves, Massalo Araujo, Verena Gois, and Martin Hercules.

In Germany, Humboldt University became my institutional home during the research phase of this project. A special thank you to the re:work international research center, and Andreas Eckert, Felicitas Hentschke, and Farah Barakt for their support of my convening an international workshop, “Of Minds, Migration and Master Narratives: Reframing Labor Migrancy in Mozambique” in 2015. Further, I was fortunate to participate in re:work’s labor history summer school in Dakar. Moreover, I extend special thanks to Simone Geisler at the BStU and Chris Fengler at the Bundesarchiv. Ulrich van der Heyden, Ralf Straßburg, and ambassador Ulf- Dieter Klemm have graciously shared not only their expertise but also their private archives with me. Finally, thank you to Manuel Siegert and Peter Steudtner for keeping Reencontro Familiar running.

In Mozambique, Ramos Muanamoha and the late Gerhard Liesegang at the Centro de Análise de Políticas, Faculdade de Letras e Ciências Sociais, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) provided me with an institutional home base. I am also grateful to Joel das Neves Tembe for his dedicated work heading the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique and to António Sopa and Alberto Calbe Jaime for useful tips. Further, I would xiv | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS like to acknowledge Yusuf Adam, Luisa Chicamisse, Polly Gaster, Alves Gomes, Ines Raimundo, and ambassador Philipp Schauer for taking the time to speak to me about this project. A warmhearted appreciation for the support of Ludomilo Fumo and Fernando Machava, my two very capable and highly motivated research assistants. Thank you to Maria Augusta Gois for improving my Portuguese and to the Instituto Cultural Moçambique-Alemanha (ICMA) for my first Changana lessons. Paul Fauvet, Donna Coletta, and Senhor Jerry made my research at the Agéncia de Informação de Moçambique possible; thank you to Paulino Matumbene at the Ministério do Trabalho, Emprego e Segurança Social and to Birgit Plank Mucavele and the entire staff at the ICMA. Further, I must recognize the invaluable contribution of the staff at the Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros e Cooperação de Moçambique, Ministério da Educação e Desenvolvimento Humano, Rádio Mozambique, Instituto Nacional Audiovisual e Cinema (INAC), Centro de Estudos Africanos at UEM, Biblioteca Central at UEM, Banco de Moçambique, Biblioteca Nacional de Moçambique, and the Biblioteca da Assembleia da República. I learned much from Ruth Castel Branco, Alicia Lazzarini, Rosa Williams, and David Morton in 2011 and 2014.

Iam further indebted to Neels Muller at the archives of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation in Pretoria, South Africa. Baie dankie to Rob Scarborough, Ian Lucas, and Marion Isaacs for shelter, cultural entertainment, and friendship during my forays into South Africa.

I am fortunate to have been granted the opportunity to spend time in Lisbon. Due to the financial support of the Fundação Luso-Americana, the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal was my home base. Thank you to Luis Farinha Franco and the staff at the Arquivo Histórico Diplomatico, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, and Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo. I was also lucky to receive generous guidance from Michael Baum, Cláudia Castelo, Philip Havik, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Alexander Keese, Rui Lopes, Pedro Aires Oliveira, Gerhard Seibert, Miguel Vaz, and Thomas Weißmann in Lisbon. Thank you to Tiago Castela for inviting me to give a talk at the Centre de Estudos Sociais at the Universidade de Coimbra, and to Tiago, Lidia Branco, Sara Araújo, and Miguel Cardina for making my stay intellectually stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable.

I have also benefited immensely from the intellectual exchanges with colleagues and feedback from scholars across disciplines. I presented my work at various international conferences and workshops such as the American, British, and German African Studies Association Annual

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XV

Conferences in Chicago, Washington DC, and San Diego, but also in Birmingham and Leipzig; the American Historical Association Conference in Washington DC; and the 6" European Conference on African Studies in Paris. I have learned from exchanges with colleagues at Annual Greater New York Area African History Workshops, the Herder Institute’s conference on digital humanities and transnational history, and workshops on labor and migration history at Universities in Berkley, Vienna, Prague, Oxford, Leipzig, Gießen, and Paris. I would also like to thank Paul Ocobock for an invitation to present my work at the African History Seminar at Notre Dame University, and Birthe Kundrus for extending an invitation to present at the Social and Economic History Colloquium at Hamburg University.

I was fortunate to frequently visit my alma mater, the University of Oxford, to give talks at the African Studies Centre and present my work at workshops on “Africa, Eastern Europe and the Dream of International Socialism: New Perspectives on the Global Cold War,” St Antony’s College; “Student Activism Reconsidered,” Department of International Development; and “Labour Mobility in the Socialist World and Its Legacies,” European Studies Centre. It is a privilege and an honor to have a second intellectual home where I have considerably benefited from stimulating conversations with Jocelyn Alexander, Paul Betts, Oliver Bakewell, Carlie Coetzee, Tim Gardam, Nicolas van Hear, Miles Larmer, James Mark, Michaela Mossetto, Cleovi Mosuela, Jonny Steinberg, and Jodie Youzhou Sun. David Pratten, Helene Nuveau-Kringelbach, and Nic Cheeseman taught me critical research and analytical skills during the MSc in African Studies at Oxford and continue to take an active interest in my scholarly life.

Princeton has been my intellectual home for the crucial parts of the genesis of this book. I have been fortunate to learn from other scholars at Princeton who shaped my intellectual development in classes, workshops, and over coffee: Robert Tignor, Stephen Kotkin, Gyan Prakash, Margot Canady, Harold James, Sheldon Garon, Philip Nord, Carolyn Rouse, and Mark Beissinger. My immense gratitude also extends to the Department of History, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Program in African Studies, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Global History Lab, which generously funded my research trips, conference attendance, and language learning.

Last but by no means least, I want to thank the people who supported this project at various stages with their labor power. Thank you to Pieter xvi | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Cordwell for editing the manuscript. Another special thank you to my diligent team of interview transcribers and coders: Fernando Machava, Niko Tillmann, Raphael Glod, Mira Schneiders, Thandeka Cochrane, Avichai Bass, João Pedro Oliveira, Cristiano Baldi, and Camila Dos Santos. Many thanks to the series editors at Palgrave Macmillan’s Transnational History Series, especially Rana Mitter, for his tireless support. Thank you also to the two anonymous reviewers and everyone at Palgrave Macmillan and Springer who has worked to support this book: Emily Russell, Faith Su, and Sam Stocker. I am grateful for their support and assistance. All mistakes remain my own.

I also would like to thank the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System and Taylor & Francis for the opportunity to draw on my previously published articles for this book: Chap. 3 draws in part on “From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin: Uncovering Angolan and Mozambican Migrants’ Motives to Move to the German Democratic Republic (1979-1990)” African Economic History vol. 44, 2016, 203-34; Chap. 7 is derived in part from “A Chronology of nostalgia: memories of former Angolan and Mozambican worker trainees to East Germany” Labor History vol 59, 2018, 352-74.

The list of friends and loved ones who have supported this endeavor over the years and across the continents in ways big and small is too large to name here—you know who you are—I could not have come this far without you. I am forever grateful to my parents Renate and Rainer Schenck, neither of whom ever questioned my path, and who gave me the most important gifts a child can receive: unconditional love, the courage to dream, and the confidence to be proactive. This book is dedicated to them and to the former workers who shared their stories with me.

NOTE 1. Thich Nhat Hanh, “Peace is Every Step,” New York: Bantam, 1992, 95.

Contents

1 Prologue: Juma Madeira—From Socialist New Man to

Madjerman Activist

Transnational Socialist Labor Migration Schemes

CHAPTER 1 Prologue: Juma Madeira—From Socialist New Man to Madjerman Activist

One of my favorite photos shows the young Mozambican Juma Madeira posing on the hood of a friend’s car in front of his workers’ hostel in East Germany (Fig. 1.1).! Who was this young man and what brought him to East Germany?

Juma was born in the district of Memba in northern Mozambique, on April 5, 1963. A year before his birth, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), the current governing party of Mozambique, was founded. When Juma was one year old, the Mozambican war of independence started, which lasted until independence was finally attained on June 25, 1975. In 1974, Juma finished the fourth grade at a Catholic missionary primary school in Mutauanha called Paz e Amor, Peace and Love, a school in the tradition of the Portuguese civilizing mission. When the country finally became independent, Juma was in the fifth grade at the technical school in Nampula city. The Mozambican civil war erupted in 1977 while Juma was still in secondary school. He graduated in 1980. In the same year, FRELIMO constituted itself as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party.

Juma’s parents were non-practicing Muslims, engaged in subsistence agriculture. He remembers his upbringing as rural, working the fields, and sleeping on mats on the floor with his three siblings. He walked to primary school. To continue his secondary education, however, he moved to Nampula where he lived with his aunt, a housewife, and uncle, a tailor. Compared to many of his compatriots, Juma was well educated. Between

© The Author(s) 2023 1 M. C. Schenck, Remembering African Labor Migration to the

Second World, Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06776-1_1

Fig. 1.1 Juma in front of his workers’ hostel in Zschopau, East Germany. Source: Juma Madeira

1979 and 1981, he taught a literacy course for adults as part ofthe national literacy campaigns aimed at workers and cadres of the party, army, cooperatives, and communal villages.

While still in secondary school, Juma was recruited to continue his training abroad. He was excited for the possibilities this opportunity offered: “I was sent by President Samora Machel, the father of our nation, to prepare myself in Germany to return to save our country through work.” Before he touched down in Berlin-Schönefeld in 1981, he spent a few months in various collection centers across Mozambique, where he received quasi-military training and listened to lectures about life in East Germany. He was to learn how to conduct himself as a socialist New Man and ambassador for Mozambique abroad. Juma remembers: “we learned to eat with a knife and fork, to wear shoes, and to wash our hands. And we had to run, run, run, run!”

After six months of language training, Juma began working at the VEB Motorradwerk Zschopau, a so-called people-owned enterprise producing motorbikes, close to the city which is today called Chemnitz but was then

1 PROLOGUE: JUMA MADEIRA— FROM SOCIALIST NEW MAN... 3 called Karl-Marx-Stadt. He underwent training for milling and lathe machines and received a diploma as a skilled laborer in November 1986. From 1983 to 1989 he also occupied a position in the company as FRELIMO Secretary for Information, Propaganda, and Finances. He worked for eight years at the motorcycle factory, serving two four-year contracts. According to company documents, Juma’s open and gregarious character made it easy for him to integrate into the work collective. He sometimes needed reminding though that the goal of work was efficiency—a virtue Juma never came to fully embrace—and the fulfillment of the production quota. To the frustration of his supervisors, he constantly remained below quota. Even though he graduated with an overall evaluation of “good,” Juma did not take work too seriously; to him, work was something that needed to be done, but his heart really beat for the many experiences Europe had to offer outside of the company gates.

Juma was in Germany for much of his youth. He left as an eighteen-year-old boy “who had never drunk alcohol, smoked, or made love to a woman” and returned as a twenty-seven-year-old adult, a trained skilled laborer with nearly a decade of work experience, a partner, and a child. Juma met his colleague Graciel in the motorcycle factory. She was born in Maputo in 1963 as the daughter of a cook and a housewife and went to school until sixth grade. Graciel’s older brother had been recruited while still a student to work and train in East Germany, and his letters home, describing his life in the brightest of colors, inspired her and her two other brothers to sign up for the program, too. After four years in a beverage factory in Leipzig, she went back to Mozambique for three months before returning to East Germany on a second contract, this time to the motorcycle factory in Zschopau. She never aspired to have a European boyfriend and remembers: “Juma was love at first sight!”

Juma, who had several lovers in Germany from different nationalities and backgrounds, told me that Graciel was very persistent and would not accept no for an answer; only when Graciel became pregnant did Juma commit to her. They decided to hide her pregnancy to avoid her being sent back to Mozambique, which had happened to other women in their company. In the end, they were not only allowed to stay but moved together into a small apartment provided by the company. Juma Junior was born in 1988, and two brothers, born in Mozambique, followed him. Unlike many of his colleagues, Juma did not father children with German women, but he does have four other children with two other women in Mozambique. As is common among many former Mozambican labor migrants, he never formally married and continues to describe his marital status as single.

For many Mozambican workers, German reunification continues to have a bitter aftertaste. On the one hand, they expressed happiness for the Germans, but for their own lives, it was often a catastrophe, as it meant a premature return to a war economy back home. In the ensuing disorder of the transition period that followed reunification, some companies decided to repatriate foreign workers; others withheld information about the conditions under which they could have stayed. Racism was rife. Juma and Graciel, however, experienced relatively little of this chaos. Graciel felt very strongly that she wanted to be closer to her parents to support them, as well as to receive help with her own children. They jointly decided to return, imagining a golden future in Mozambique.

The future, Juma and Graciel would quickly discover, turned out to be not quite so golden. Their bitter awakening came a few months after their homecoming. Socialist workers returned to a post-socialist country in flux economically and politically. Like the vast majority of workers who returned in the early 1990s, neither Juma nor Graciel found work in the areas for which they had been trained. They moved back to northern Mozambique. Juma worked as a driver and security guard but struggled to make ends meet in the beleaguered Mozambican economy. Graciel worked for eight years as a service worker in an informal soda shop. The family earned extra income in the informal economy, selling home-made foods in front of their house, and renting their phone out as a public phone. In 1992, the sixteen-year war ended in Mozambique, and the country continued its path toward market principles and multiparty democracy. In 1999, Juma moved to Maputo with his in-laws because his eldest son needed medical attention. The rest of the family soon followed. Juma worked a variety of impermanent jobs until, in 2003, at forty years old, he gave up looking for employment.

The family now depends on Graciel’s earnings—she has been cooking for a catering firm for nine years—and on the proceeds from Juma Junior’s bakery. One of Graciel’s brothers is married to a German woman and lives in Germany, so the family still has ongoing contact with Germany today. Juma became a full-time activist for the madjerman cause: first as vice-president, and then as the treasurer of ATMA, the Association of Mozambican Workers in Germany, he served the largest and most durable organization of returned workers. Since 2010, he has also been an active member of Mozambique’s second largest opposition party, MDM, the

1 PROLOGUE: JUMA MADEIRA— FROM SOCIALIST NEW MAN... 5

Democratic Movement of Mozambique, and is hoping to build a political career. Though Juma was not able to capitalize on his training as a skilled worker, he puts his political training to use, no longer as a socialist New Man, but as an activist and aspiring opposition politician in a post-socialist Mozambique.?

In January 2014, on one of the first days of my second stay in Mozambique, I visited what is known as the park of the madjerman, where ATMA President Zecca Alfredo Cossa introduced me to his righthand man, Juma. Juma had been given the task of detailing the official oral history of the organization of returned workers from 1990 to the present.’ This introduction was the beginning of an ongoing conversation about the organization and his personal experiences in East Germany. During my time in Mozambique, Juma was my host, excited for the opportunity to reciprocate the hospitality that he had experienced in East Germany. He invited me to his home to meet his family, cooked typical Mozambican food, and brought a big cake to my birthday celebration, knowing the great importance to every German of Kaffee und Kuchen—coffee and cake. He showed me sites important to the madjerman in Maputo and Matola, such as their protest route, the airport where they had first returned to the country, and the collection centers where the future worker-trainees were assembled prior to their trip, among many other locations. He included me in madjerman reunions, and invited me to community events such as weddings, funerals, and wakes. Thanks to him, and many more returnees like him, I eventually came to understand their history, their present, and their dreams for the future.