This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes
to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained
as a vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were
there they contributed their labor power to the East German economy. This book draws on more
than 260 life history interviews and uncovers complex and contradictory experiences and
transnational encounters. What emerges is a series of dualities that exist side by side in the
memories of the former migrants: the state and the individual work and consumption
integration and exclusion loss and gain and the past in the past and the past in the present
and future. By uncovering these dualities the book explores the lives of African migrants
moving between the Third and Second worlds. Devoted to the memories of worker-trainees this
transnational study comes at a time when historians are uncovering the many varied complicated
and important connections within the global socialist world.
