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A different class of refugee: university scholarships and developmentalism in late 1960s Africa
(2022)
Using documents assembled in connection with the 1967 Conference on the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African Refugee Problems, this article discusses African refugee higher-education discourses in the 1960s at the level of international organizations, volunteer agencies, and government representatives. Education and development history have recently been studied together, but this article focuses on the history of refugee higher education, which, it argues, needs to be understood within the development framework of human-capital theory, meant to support political pan African concerns for a decolonized continent and merged with humanitarian arguments to create a hybrid form of humanitarian developmentalism. The article zooms in on higher-education scholarships, above all for refugees from Southern Africa, as a means of support for human-capital development. It shows that refugee higher education was both a result and a driver of increased international exchanges, as evidenced at the 1967 conference.
A right to research?
(2023)
Paths Are Made by Walking
(2021)
Introduction
(2021)
“Why,” Francisca Isidro wonders, “did we have to leave our families and move so far away, only to come back as cooks, waitresses, sales assistants, and the like?” And she recalls: “We came back from our time in East Germany with professions that were not held in particu-larly high regard in Mozambique. Nobody understood why we didn’t return as engineers, doctors and teachers. ‘A waitress?,’ they would wonder. ‘Why, they could have become a waitress in Mozambique. Nobody needs to spend so many years in school for that.’”2And with that, Ms. Isidro puts her fi nger right on a misapprehension at the heart of an ambitious state-led education migration program that saw 900 Mozambican children attend the School of Friendship (Schule der Freundschaft , SdF) in Staßfurt in the district of Magdeburg, in what today is Saxony-Anhalt, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) from 1982 to 1988.3 Ms. Isidro returned to Mozambique as a trained salesperson for clothing, a profession she neither chose nor ever worked in again subsequently. Like her, these 900 children had to navigate the diverging values that particular environments bestowed upon knowledge. What they learned was interpreted diff erently in their home communities, at the SdF, and in their German host families