Eleven Nigerian Students in Cold War East Germany: Visions of Science, Modernity, and Decolonization

Abstract

This article follows the story of the first African students in the German Democratic Republic, 11 Nigerians who arrived in 1951. Thousands of other African students followed them in the years leading up to the GDR's dissolution in 1990. My work is the first to chronicle the Nigerians' story, and how East Germans received and reacted to these Africans living among them. I focus on what each side hoped to gain from the exchange. East German government officials and university administrators were intent on using the Nigerian students to promote socialism as an alternative in a British colony quickly moving towards independence. Meanwhile, the students wanted scientific educations to help boost their economic standing and class status when they returned to Nigeria. Although Nigeria would never become aligned with the Soviet Bloc after decolonization, in the 1950s East Germans imagined that a socialist future was possible. Drawing on their country's sizable scientific expertise, officials argued that the GDR offered the ideal blend of technological and Marxist knowledge to attract exchange students like the Nigerians into the communist orbit.

Paternalistic internationalism and (de)colonial practices of Cold War higher education exchange: Bulgaria's connections with Cuba and Angola

“…This development is mirrored in the discussion of the asymmetric internationalization of HE in the present day. It also connects with the most recent scholarship on the student exchange between the socialist and the post-colonial world during the Cold War, developed especially in works focused on East Germany (for example Burton, 2019;Pugach, 2018). For instance, Sara Pugach (2018) has reminded us that not only governments in Western liberal democracies but also those in state socialist countries believed in scientific modernity's developmentalist premise and promise that technological solutions and expert knowledge would solve the problem of "underdevelopment" in the Global South.…”

“…At the same time, socialist countries in the North also controlled the number of students they would receive from their Southern counterparts and which subjects they would train them in (Pugach, 2018, p. 15), which gave them more power over planning of knowledge and technology transfer than the countries sending their students to be trained abroad. And, although students and workers from developing countries were often exposed to "hygienising" and "civilizing" in Northern socialist societies (Apostolova, 2017;Ginelli, 2018;Pugach, 2018), they often had to face racist violence that state socialist countries turned a blind eye to (Hessler, 2006) or sometimes even institutionalized (Apostolova, 2017).…”

“…Written mostly by historians of the Soviet era, this research literature does not focus on policy travel or alternative HE models. Recent scholarship concerning exchange students in East Germany (Burton, 2019;Pugach, 2018) or Czechoslovakia (Hole cková, 2018) has been similar in focus. An emphasis on policy travel has been present in the work on Cuban exchange with other socialist countries, yet with a strong focus on South-South development, aid, and exchange (see Hatzky, 2012;Hickling-Hudson, González, & Preston, 2012).…”

Youth leadership for development: contradictions of Africa's growing leadership pipeline

“…Though educated Africans assumed leadership within anticolonial struggles after the Second World War, the transfer of administrative power to this ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ in independence settlements ‘consolidated control in the existing state machinery’, largely preserving imperial structures of power (Zeilig 2007: 27–30). The power struggle created by the onset of the Cold War later opened the door for the USA and Soviet Union to join former colonial powers in capturing popular demands for education through aid in the form of scholarship and grant programmes (Pugach 2019; Burton 2020; Tarradellas 2020).…”