African guest workers feel betrayed!

Gioia Forster and Ralf E Krueger -

Jose Cossa got put on a plane at East Berlin’s airport soon after the Berlin Wall came down 30 years ago. Within hours, he was landing in Maputo after years of working in communist East Germany.

Much of what he had earned would be awaiting him on his return to Mozambique, the land of his birth, he was told. “I thought I would return to become a businessman,” the 56 year-old says in fluent German, with traces of an eastern accent.

The future looked bright, given his elegant dress, language skills and training, but the money did not show up. “They lied to us and deceived us,” Cossa says today. The fates of the “madgermanes” — as those who once worked in East Germany are called in Mozambique — are all but forgotten, as is the case with other African returnees. But many, like Cossa, still live caught between two worlds.

In 1979, East Germany concluded a contract with the staunchly socialist Mozambique of the day on “temporary employment of Mozambican workers in socialist companies.” The former Portuguese colony, at the time in a state of civil war, would have its citizens trained, while East Germany would get the labour it needed, all in the name of socialist solidarity.

Around 21,000 contract workers were drawn from the East African country, and a further 6,000 from Angola, the former Portuguese colony on the other side of the continent.

Following the bombardment of a refugee camp, children from Angola and Namibia were brought to safety in East Germany.

The SWAPO guerrilla movement was waging a war against South Africa’s apartheid government at the time for control of Namibia, formerly the German colony of South West Africa.

Young Namibians were sent to the “Schule der Freundschaft” (School of Friendship) in Stassfurt near the central German city of Magdeburg. Some 900 young Mozambicans also received schooling and skills training here. One of them was Naita Hishoono, who arrived in East Germany as a child. After years of being brought up in a German environment, returning to Namibia came as a “culture shock,” she says. Many were unable to cope, although Hishoono, today head of the Institute for the Promotion of Democracy in Windhoek, regards herself as a traveller between two worlds in a positive sense.

“I was very lucky,” she says in the language of her former host nation, adding that she is well aware that other “East German children” did not fare so well. Some ended up on the streets, others are dead.

Cossa recalls his arrival in Germany in March 1983 in winter. He saw snow for the first time from the aircraft window. “‘Ice is coming out of the sky,’ we told ourselves.” He lived together with his fellow Mozambicans in a residential home, working after his apprenticeship as a wood technician in the state of Thuringia.

Up to 60 per cent of the contract workers’ pay was retained for payment into an account in their home country, they were told. The aim was for them to set up a new life for themselves on their return.

But the money was urgently needed for other purposes. By the time the Mozambican civil war had come to an end, more than a million had died, and the economy lay in ruins.

A rude awakening awaited the returnees. “The money was never transferred to private accounts,” Cossa says. The historian Hans-Joachim Doering believes that Mozambique used it to help pay off its debts. The government in Maputo also knew “that some of the pay was not sent to Mozambique as promised but stayed in East Germany,” Doering says.

Both sides thus participated in the deception. — dpa