From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin: Uncovering Angolan and Mozambican Migrants’ Motives to Move to the German Democratic Republic (1979–1990)

Abstract

A better future,The one that now I own,Like a bee I suck roses;The rest does not matter,I embraced Germany.-Regina, February 27, 2007Introduction1Regina's poem expresses the intensity of emotions that accompanied her move from the People's Republic of Mozambique to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in the winter of 1988.2 She migrated as a young Mozambican woman to work and receive vocational training on East Germany's factory floors. What is notable about Regina's poem is that it claims ownership of her new future, despite the fact that she arrived in Berlin as part of a bilateral agreement between socialist states that regulated her contract length, place of employment, housing, pay, and, to a certain extent, even monitored her free time and regulated her personal relationships. Yet Regina embraced her new life in in the face of multiple challenges, including learning to communicate in a new language and navigate a foreign culture, while acclimating to an industrial work routine. Regina's poem is about her individual expectations, dreams and desires; it is about the human aspects of migration.3This article focuses on a key time in the lives of Angolans and Mozambicans who migrated to East Germany, namely the decision-making process that preceded their migrations.4 Multiple reasons led young Angolan and Mozambican men, and to a lesser degree women, to actively sign up, or consent to being recruited, to work and receive technical training thousands of miles away from home. Focusing on this decisive moment in the migrant's lives prior to departure sharpens our understanding of the complex decisions they faced. Such an approach challenges both prevailing conceptions of migrants as passive participants as well as wooden definitions of As the migrants' memories reveal, it was not clear to all young people why they were sent North, and their decisions were often based on hearsay and imperfect information. Economic considerations, which fuel labor migration the world over, predictably played a significant role, sustaining dreams of material independence and servicing filial duties to help support families in war-torn nations. Yet migrants' motivations were far more diverse. Young people were drawn by the promise of education, of laying the foundation for their own careers through the acquisition of skills while also preparing to aid their native country's development. The motive of escaping the myriad consequences of civil war, from the risks of military service and the violence of combat, to the privations of the conflict economy, also featured prominently. Moreover, emotional motivations were important to some migrants, who followed personal ties abroad to reunite with a partner or family member, or who signed up for a second contract to stay with their newfound family in East Germany. In the future migrants' imagination, East Germany came to stand not just for a commercial paradise and safe haven; it was also part of a notion of as an imagined space of possibilities that bundled notions of adventure, prosperity and the good life. This article demonstrates that the Angolan and Mozambican migrants to East Germany were as much educational migrants, war migrants, aspirational migrants and emotional migrants as they were labor migrants. Examining the myriad reasons that led the young to board the planes from Luanda and Maputo to East Berlin allows us to question the assumption that this labor migration was primarily about finding work elsewhere, and opens up the historiographical category of labor migration to reflect its complexities on the ground.In part, international labor migration to East Germany-which in addition to migrants from within Eastern Europe encompassed migrants from Algeria, Angola, China, Cuba, Mozambique, and Vietnam-was justified by official government propaganda precisely by packaging the labor migration as labor and educational migration. …