[Book Review] Remembering African labor migration to the Second World: Socialist mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics by Marcia Schenck, Springer, 2022, xxvii + 377, $49.99 (softcover), ISBN 9783031067785

Marcia Schenck’s Remembering African labor migration is an insightful book that represents a major addition to the entangled histories of post-colonial Africa and east-central Europe. The book presents the personal stories or, as Schenck puts it, the ‘collective biography’ of approximately 21,000 Mozambican and circa 2,500 Angolan workers who travelled to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to work in the 1980s. The labour contracts of these African workers, negotiated between the Angolan, Mozambican and East German governments, had a dual purpose: to help ameliorate the labour shortages in the GDR and to create a ‘vanguard’ working class for the industrialisation of Angola and Mozambique. These African countries sought the latter objective as they launched their own socialist modernisation projects following their achievement of independence from Portugal in 1975. The book is structured roughly chronologically. Chapters three, four and five deal with the ‘past’, describing the workers’ lives in the GDR, while chapters six, seven and eight examine their modern-day trajectories. The book contributes to a growing literature on ‘Second-Third’ world links and ‘socialist globalisation’, which challenges the depiction of isolation of the Eastern Bloc. However, the book goes much further, providing a nuanced view of the migrant experience from the perspective of non-elite actors in the ‘Third World’.