“We were going to create a society outside capitalism”, Jose, fifteen at independence in 1975, recalls Frelimo’s aim to create a non-tribal, non-racial, non-capitalist Mozambique. And to achieve this, the party sought not only to recreate the country but its citizens too, to fashion the homen novo: a new man, modern, skilled, secular and socialist; free from African backwardness, traditions and superstitions. [...]
But it was also a country to which Mozambique owed a large debt. And here was a more hard-edged reason for Frelimo sending Jose, and 20 000 others, to its communist ally over the 1980s: to help pay off the 200 million marks (approximately US $110 million) owed to an East Germany itself short of labour. And here too the terms of their migration were set: workers would receive 40% of their salary in Germany; the rest would automatically be transferred back to the government in Maputo, to be paid out in Mozambican meticais on their return. [...]
It wasn’t, of course, to last. For amidst all the euphoria around the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there were thousands of Mozambicans in Rostock, Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin itself both fearful for their immediate safety—some remember roving gangs shouting ‘foreigners go home”—and worried over their long-term future. In the end, at their places of work, they were offered a choice. “Each one of us had to decide in that moment”, Jose remembers: they could stay, but would have to leave their jobs and support themselves; or they could return to Mozambique and pick up the 60% of their wages that had always been sent to their government. “We were tied”, he says, ruefully, as the vast majority opted to go home to claim what they were owed. [...]
Yet for the magermans, history did not end, moving frictionlessly from a failed socialist past to a prosperous capitalist present. Rather, they are stuck in it. Jose is visited every year by Birgit, his enamorada from Dresden; others have half-Mozambican sons and daughters they cannot see for the lack of a visa; and they are all united by the dwindling hope that, one day, they will receive the life-changing amount they are rightfully owed. For now, admirably and without expectation, Jose and the rest will carry on their protest to a government and country that no longer seem to care: “We have nothing else. They take away your rights. You have no job. It’s the only thing you can do.”
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