Migration, Trauma and Memory in Postcolonial Mozambique: The Madgermanes through Comics and Literature

Between 1979 and 1989, about 20,000 Mozambicans were sent to study and work in East German factories under the aegis of cooperation agreements between FRELIMO and the GDR. Magermanes, madgermans is how these “Made in Germany” men and women are called, whose migration—behind the purpose of boosting professional training and contributing to the construction of the New Man—revealed inevitable similarities with the former exodus of the enslaved workers in colonial times in the mines of South Africa: paternalistic legal and institutional framework, rotating hiring of young single men, deferred payment of part of the wages, segregation and social-habitational control in the host country. Hastily repatriated after the fall of the Berlin wall and the failure of FRELIMO’s socialist project, many of the Madgermans were unable to reintegrate into the changed economic and social landscape: the one that was supposed to represent the future elite became a lost generation, suspended in an in-between condition. Thirty years ago, the Madgermans began marching in Wednesday protests, an almost unique case of political contestation in the post-independence period, turning the streets of Maputo into a stage for demanding recognition for the pensions and benefits accrued during their stay in the GDR. These demonstrations contributed to strengthening the perception of a common identity, in a movement somewhat comparable to that of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, particularly in the challenge to oblivion.