By Clare Byrne Oct 21, 2009, 5:08 GMT
Maputo, Mozambique/Hanoi - As West and East Germans reunited across the rubble of the Berlin Wall in 1989, tens of thousands of contract workers from East Germany's (GDR) Socialist allies were preparing to say their goodbyes.
For these migrants from Mozambique, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola and other Socialist states, the collapse of the GDR meant a one-way ticket home.
Beginning in the 1960s, initially mainly to give them training and then, as time went on, to fill a hole in its own workforce, the GDR brought in hundreds of thousands of workers from friendly countries through agreements with their governments.
The workers' contracts lasted between two and six years depending on their country of origin. At the end of their contracts they were supposed to leave.
By 1989 there were more than 90,000 still in the country. They faced a swift send-off.
After being immersed in German culture for several years, the return home, usually to a developing world context, was difficult for some.
Nelson Thomas, 40, was one of around 16,000 Mozambicans who had seized the opportunity in the 1980s to leave the war-ravaged southern African country for the GDR. 'I was young and I wanted to see the world,' he recalls.
For three years 'and sieben Monate (seven months),' he says, showing off his German, he worked in a factory in Erfurt, a town of around 200,000 people close to Leipzig, making machines that sort seeds.
While black migrants in those days stuck together and steered clear of skinheads, Thomas found a lot to like, including the fact that Germans had smaller families than Africans. Today, he and his wife have two children.
'When the Wall fell, I knew I was going home,' he says. Only men with German wives were allowed to remain.
If he was expecting his experience in Germany would give him a leg up at home, he was wrong. Many Mozambicans resented the 'Majermanes' for having dodged part of the 16-year civil war that ended within two years of his return in October 1990. He struggled to find work.
The social security contributions that were deducted from his salary in the GDR and transferred to the Mozambican government for payment to him on his return should have been a cushion against the hardship.
But, says Thomas, the government spent most of the money. He and other Majermanes have spent 20 years fighting to get it back, but have received only a fraction.
Meanwhile, in the former Germany colony of Namibia, a group of around 430 children was also returning from a decade in exile.
The 'GDR Kids' as they became known, had been whisked as infants from refugee camps in Angola and Zambia during Namibia's struggle for independence from apartheid South Africa and taken to safety in the GDR.
The week in which the Berlin Wall fall was also the week in which Namibia's leftist SWAPO independence movement won the country's first multiracial elections.
For the children who had grown up in homes in the northern Mecklenburg region, the culture shock on returning to the desert state was immense. They no longer spoke local languages and were considered oddities both by black Namibians and the country's German- speaking minority.
By contrast, thousands of miles away in Vietnam, people who had studied or worked in the GDR were practically set up for life. Around 60,000 Vietnamese worked in East German factories during the 1980s, but Vietnamese students patronized East German universities long before that.
For the students, a German education was a ticket to a good job. Several current or former government ministers studied in the GDR.
'I learned a lot in Germany,' says landscape architect Tran Thi Thanh Van, 68, who studied in Dresden in 1980 and 1981.
German precision and level-headedness 'helped me to control my romantic Vietnamese nature,' she told the German Press Agency dpa.
Vietnam Railways CEO Nguyen Huu Bang, also a graduate of Dresden, still loves his 'Sauerkraut mit Haxe,' a traditional German dish of sour cabbage and ham hock, which is served at the Goethe-Institut cultural centre in Hanoi.
Nguyen says most of his hires are people who studied in Germany because, 'you just know they had a solid education.'
Back in Maputo, Thomas dreams of taking his family to see Erfurt, Germany's City of Flowers. By way of preparation, he is teaching them a few phrases. His six-year-old already knows 'Guten Morgen' (Good Morning).
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