Negotiating the German Democratic Republic: Angolan student migration during the Cold War, 1976–90

Abstract

This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of higher education between Angolan independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on oral histories collected in Luanda from twenty-one returned Angolan students in 2015, triangulated with archival material from Angola and the GDR, it argues that students negotiated between accommodation and resistance in their everyday life at the university and beyond. Conscious of the importance of academic success and adaptation to the East German learning culture, Angolan students drew a line when regulations infringed on their personal freedom and responded by engaging East German officials in discussion or simply by circumnavigating the rules. The life history of a female student illustrates how she negotiated between responsibility to formal learning and personal needs within a controlling society. When one considers the conditions of Angolan student life in East Germany as a whole, it becomes apparent that the East German notion of the model foreign student did not map onto the complexities of Angolan student lives. This article sheds light on the student migration of a generation of Angolan post-independence technocrats, many of whom studied in the former East during the Cold War. Through the eyes of Angolan educational migrants, we see the limits and possibilities of the lives of foreign students in the GDR.

Notes sur l’opinion publique allemande du xxe siècle, le colonialisme et les colonies portugaises (approche provisoire)

“…It is a story that has only begun to be told (see e.g. Müller, 2010;Schuch, 2013: 222 -229;Schenck, 2019;Pugach, 2019: S101 -S105) but whose consequences still echo in the overt racial tones of today's East German public space and political landscape.…”

Agents of dissent: African student organizations in the German Democratic Republic

“…The organizations offered a space for protest within a tightly policed socialist nation, where both citizens and visitors were subject to surveillance by the infamous Ministerium für Staatssicherheit – the Stasi. Protests also certainly took place on an individual level, as they did for the Angolan students Marcia Schenck addresses in this issue, and the ability to use one's position as an invited guest to subvert authority was immensely powerful (Schenck 2019). What the NHG did was allow select groups of students – usually, if not always, co-nationals – to come together and amplify their respective voices.…”

Student/teachers from Turfloop: the propagation of Black Consciousness in South African schools, 1972–76

“…One of the teacher biographies here recalls the Pan-Africanist literature – by authors and statesmen such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere – that was being read and circulated among politicized schoolchildren in Soweto in 1975 and 1976 (Chikane 1988: 56). Schenck (2019) discusses in this special issue the role played by the victory of FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique or the Mozambique Liberation Front) over the Portuguese in neighbouring Mozambique in galvanizing student protest on one South African campus. Others note the inspiration and influence that the protesting Soweto students provided for other students around the continent, highlighting the way in which the circulation of political ideas and practices – both domestic and transnational – has shaped student protest across Africa.…”