Navigating global socialism: Tanzanian students in and beyond East Germany

Abstract

This article investigates tensions and dynamics in global socialism through a focus on Tanzanian students in East Germany between the late 1950s and 1990. Disciplinary techniques partially known from Tanzania and everyday strategies of survival explain why most students complied with official requirements, but did not necessarily agree with East German ideological tenets. Additionally, throughout the decades, mobility across the Iron Curtain remained an important strategy to further own interests. The article concludes that an analytical framework spanning several decades and paying attention to dynamics in the country of origin sheds new light on agency and mobility among 'East', 'West', and 'South' during the Cold War.

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.…”

“…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).…”

Transnational Lived Citizenship – The Case of the Eritrean Diaspora

“…The complex and often contradictory dynamics between practices of belonging and how citizenship is being performed by migrants or return-migrants has been analysed in the wider literature often with respect to past historical periods and as connected to collective memory formation, for example in relation to post-socialism (e.g. Burton, 2019;Bernal (2006); Freytag (1998); Müller, 2012bMüller, , 2018bMüller, , 2021Pitcher, 2006). More recently, the role of the internet and social media in altering conceptions of belonging among diasporas that translate into new forms of lived citizenship and conceptions of home and host states has received scholarly attention (Bernal, 2006, Bernal, 2020Royston, 2020;Turner and Berckmoes, 2020).…”

Decolonization, the Cold War, and Africans’ routes to higher education overseas, 1957–65

“…However, this does not mean that they necessarily returned to their country of origin. 83 A striking phenomenon in the early 1960s was that hundreds of foreign students left Eastern bloc countries even before the end of their studies.…”