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Research ArticleArticle

From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin

Uncovering Angolan and Mozambican Migrants’ Motives to Move to the German Democratic Republic (1979–1990)

MARCIA C. SCHENCK
African Economic History, January 2016, 44 (1) 202-234; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/aeh.44.1.202
MARCIA C. SCHENCK
Marcia C. Schenck () is a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University. Her dissertation focuses on life histories of labor migrants from Angola and Mozambique to the former East Germany. She holds an MSc in African studies from the University of Oxford and a BA, , in international relations from Mount Holyoke College. Her previous work discussed San land rights and ethnicity in South Africa and Namibia. Her research interests include oral history, memory, migration, development, and labor history.
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Abstract

Migration between select “Third World” and “Second World” countries were often organized around bilateral labor migration regimes. As a result, individuals from Angola and Mozambique who came to work and train in East Germany are categorized as labor migrants; an analysis of workers’ motivations to migrate is missing. On the basis of oral history interviews collected in Angola and Mozambique, this article examines the myriad reasons for which young Angolan and Mozambican men and women temporarily relocated to East Germany. These reasons included economic, educational, emotional, and security considerations. The migrants’ complex understandings from below are discussed through the categories of labor, educational, war and emotional migration, providing an important corrective to the top-down designation as “labor migration.” Rather than abandoning the term altogether as an analytical category, this article suggests that it may serve as a shorthand, provided that scholars take seriously the motivations for migration, rather than obliterate these motivations through an uncritical use of the term. This approach challenges the prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants in socialist labor migrations, as well as the limited conceptions of labor migration often adopted by outside observers.

  • © 2016 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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African Economic History: 44 (1)
African Economic History
Vol. 44, Issue 1
1 Jan 2016
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From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin
MARCIA C. SCHENCK
African Economic History Jan 2016, 44 (1) 202-234; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.44.1.202

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From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin
MARCIA C. SCHENCK
African Economic History Jan 2016, 44 (1) 202-234; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.44.1.202
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  • Article
    • Abstract
    • Introduction1
    • Reasons to Migrate
    • Labor Migration: “German businesses asked for a Mozambican workforce, but people came.”18
    • Educational Migration: “I felt selected for the days to come and everything was a project of the future.”36
    • War Migration: “The military was an awful place to be. They scraped your head and collected baskets of fresh blood.”46
    • Emotions and Migration: “ . . . this was my chance to see Europe.”59
    • Conclusion
    • Footnotes
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