International solidarity in the GDR and transnationality: an analysis of primary school materials for Namibian child refugees

Abstract

As part of a solidarity project between the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), approximately 430 Namibian children were brought to the GDR from 1979 to 1989 to be trained as an elite for a future liberated Namibia. The children attended school in the GDR until they were brought back to Namibia in August 1990. The school lessons intertwined topics about Namibia and SWAPO with the usual GDR school curriculum. The linchpin of this intertwining was the socialist ideal of international solidarity. This article uses an objective-hermeneutic analysis to show how the school materials produced transnationality.

Keywords:

• international solidarity
• GDR children from Namibia
• transnationality
• school materials
• refugees

Notes

1. We would like to thank Cornelia Schweppe and the reviewers for their helpful comments on this article.

2. All translations from German in this article are done by the authors.

3. Namibia became an independent state on 21 March 1990. While occupied by South Africa, the country bore the name “South-West Africa” (Krause, 2009). In this article we speak of Namibia to refer to the country in both periods.

4. The phrase “GDR children from Namibia” is in circulation in academic, media, and everyday discourses. It is used to indicate the people who were then children and adolescents. As we are part of that discourse, we use that phrase, though we put it in inverted commas: the individuals were children at the time, but are now adults, and they have taken heterogenous life paths, meaning that the label, which suggests a homogenous group, is problematic.

5. Since the spring of 2013, our group at the University of Mainz has been analyzing the biographies of the “GDR children from Namibia” from a transnational perspective (Witte, Klein-Zimmer, & Schmitt, 2013). Our focus is on the issue of biographical spheres of experience in a lifeworld characterized by a varied range of cross-border interconnections. Our research approach consists of a combination of biographical research and lifeworld ethnography (Honer, 1993; Schütze, 1983).

6. We define Black and White not as natural properties but as social, discursive constructs. We capitalize Black and White to indicate their social, political, and racial construction, and dissociate ourselves from any biological classification (Arndt & Hornscheidt, 2009).

7. Polytechnische Oberschule, a secondary education institution.