This volume is situated within the recently developed historiographical trend that examines the encounters between the Cold War East and African movements. Using a biographical and historical-anthropological approach, Sebastian Pampuch explores the presence of African exiles in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), recovering a history long marginalized in Germany and presenting the critique of capitalism as one of the main motives for attraction towards the Eastern bloc. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews, archival material, films and newspaper articles, this study primarily reconstructs and recounts the life stories of Mahoma Mwaungulu and Asaph Makote Mohlala, two African freedom fighters who lived in the GDR and remained in Germany after the fall of global communism. The volume brings significant innovations to the field by spanning three decades and considering two distinct contexts of African decolonization, which the GDR approached in different ways. While Mwaungulu was a Malawian activist staying in the GDR between the 1960s and 1980s, Asaph Makote Mohlala, a South African freedom fighter, arrived in socialist Germany in the 1980s. Mwaungulu’s story, which forms the empirical core of the study, is particularly significant as it sheds light on the overlooked history of the GDR’s (tepid) solidarity with the Malawian exile movement and represents a rare case of intra-German expulsion.

The book aims to distinguish itself from other studies by analyzing the subject through the prism of exile rather than educational or labor migration. It takes as its starting point the concept of exile as proposed by the anthropologist Andreas Hackl, who emphasized the political connotation and the prolonged condition of this type of forced displacement. Moreover, the author highlights the narrow focus of German exile studies, which has focused primarily on Jewish and German exile during the Nazi era, and points to the challenges within German scholarship in addressing and coming to terms with the country’s socialist past. Pampuch argues that Western literature has paid little attention to African exile in the Eastern bloc, often portraying exile as the prerogative of white Eastern European dissidents fleeing communist repression to seek refuge in the West, while associating Third World refugees with poverty and underdevelopment in their home countries, thus dismissing the possibility that they might seek a better life in the East. According to the author, studying the history of African exile in the GDR reveals a form of mobility that clearly embodies a critique of capitalism, while also revealing different, and mostly positive, nuances of GDR history when compared to findings on Third World labor migrants in the GDR. While the focus on the political nature of African exile in the Cold War East adds an innovative dimension to the volume, the distinction between exile and educational/labor migration seems overly rigid, as these two connotations often coexisted and overlapped in the lives of Africans residing in Eastern bloc countries. Indeed, the fact that many were drawn to the Second World because of its perceived role as “a corrective to the capitalist and racialized political economy” (p. 256) of the First World does not preclude the idea that, for most, it primarily represented a place of educational and professional opportunities.

A significant part of the volume is devoted to the exile experience of Mahoma Mwaungulu – whom the author knew as a neighbor – whose life is posthumously reconstructed through archival material, interviews conducted by others and the author’s own interviews with Mwaungulu’s relatives, friends, and comrades, as well as his writings, letters, and documents. Mwaungulu arrived in the GDR in 1960 as a politically engaged, knowledge-thirsty, and socialist-oriented young man. Until 1964, he lived in Leipzig, where he studied economics at the Karl Marx University, married a German woman and started a family, and became involved in the Union of African Students and Workers in the GDR, a pan-African student organization that sought to raise awareness of racism among the East German population. In 1964, Mwaungulu returned to newly independent Malawi, where he found himself caught in the midst of the Malawi Cabinet Crisis, which foreshadowed the country’s transformation into a Western-backed dictatorship under president Hastings Kamuzu Banda. To escape Banda’s repression, Mwaungulu spent several years in a refugee settlement in Tanzania and a few months in Cuba, before returning to the GDR in 1967 on a scholarship to pursue a PhD at the University of Economics in Berlin-Karlshorst. To highlight Mwaungulu’s critique of capitalism, Pampuch dedicates a substantial section of the chapter to his nearly completed, but never defended, doctoral thesis on Malawi’s industrial development. The author traces Mwaungulu’s intellectual thinking, connecting it to Walter Rodney’s work and the wider black radical discourse, as well as to Western Marxist dependency theory, which emphasized the role of capitalist economics in perpetuating global inequality and racial exclusion.

One of the key aspects that makes this volume innovative is its exploration, through Mwaungulu’s life, of an understudied topic: the history of the Socialist League of Malawi (Lesoma) and its relationship with the GDR. In East Germany, in fact, Mwaungulu participated in the opposition to the Banda regime through his involvement in Lesoma, a political organization of Malawian exile with a Marxist orientation that linked its opposition to the Malawian government to the broader struggle against neo-colonialist logics. The volume shows that while the GDR prioritized support for certain struggles, such as the fight against apartheid in South Africa, it overlooked others, including Lesoma’s opposition to the Banda regime, which the GDR regarded as a hopeless cause. Mwaungulu’s expulsion from the GDR in 1982 adds a new dimension to the history of GDR solidarity, bringing out the tensions between East Germany and its African hosts. The reasons for his expulsion are complex and the author explores several hypotheses. These include the end of his marriage, which was linked to his residence permit, and his membership in Lesoma, from which the GDR began to distance itself in the 1980s for geopolitical motives.

The life story that follows, that of Asaph Makote Mohlala, sheds light on the relationship between the GDR and its main partner in solidarity, the African National Congress (ANC). Mohlala, whom the author was able to interview, fled South Africa after the 1976 Soweto uprising. He arrived in the GDR in 1984 as a member of the uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, and a trained paramedic. In the GDR, he received medical training at the Dorothea Erxleben School in Quedlinburg. As the author points out, Mohlala’s generally positive recollection of his time in Quedlinburg contrasts with the more negative portrayal found in Young-Sun Hong’s work. 1 While I agree with Pampuch when he highlights the need to correct these accounts with oral histories and acknowledges the differences by pointing out that Hong’s examination focuses on East Germany in the 1960s, I would be cautious about treating Mohlala’s positive memories as representative of the broader context.

Despite his relationship with a German girlfriend and a newborn child, Mohlala was instructed by the ANC to return to Angola. He had to exert pressure on the ANC leadership to facilitate his eventual return to the GDR. This delay could, in my view, be attributed to the discouragement of permanent resettlement in the GDR by African liberation movements, although the author does not propose this hypothesis. Mohlala was finally able to reunite with his girlfriend in East Berlin in 1990, where they married and have lived to this day, along with their children. His life story illustrates the educational opportunities that stemmed from the GDR’s close relationship with the ANC, as well as the personal perseverance he demonstrated in his efforts to return to the GDR.

The two empirical cases at the heart of this volume illuminate key aspects of life as Africans in East Germany: the challenges of marrying German women within a solidarity program that did not anticipate the permanent settlement of exiles, and the racism they faced in a country that professed to have eradicated racial hatred. Both, in fact, recount to have endured various forms of racism: While Mohlala remembers increasing hostility towards blacks in the late 1980s, Mwaungulu recalls a violent attack in Leipzig in 1964 that left him with permanent injuries. In analyzing Mwaungulu’s case, it would have been valuable to explore how the East German authorities documented the crime, as racist incidents were often stripped of their racial context and attributed instead to anti-social behavior. 2

In conclusion, this volume makes a significant contribution to the historiography of the relationship between the Second and Third Worlds by enriching the understanding of the GDR’s solidarity through the testimonies of two African freedom fighters. While their unique stories illuminate previously neglected aspects of the GDR history and the political dimensions of exile, a broader dialogue with different and contrasting narratives would have offered a more balanced perspective on the complexities of this relationship, moving beyond the binary logic of representing the GDR as either inherently negative or positive.

Notes
1 Young-sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime, Cambridge 2015, pp. 177-214.
2 Marcia C. Schenck, Small Strangers at the School of Friendship: Memories of Mozambican School Students of the German Democratic Republic, in: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC, Supplement 15 (2020), pp. 41-59, here pp. 49f.