Although the coastal town of Bagamoyo is located about 70 kilometers north of Tanzania's capital, it has played an important role in the educational history and historiography of its southern neighbor Mozambique - and, surprisingly, in the GDR as well. Bagamoyo's importance lies in the fact that it was here that Mozambique's postcolonial education system was prepared: the secondary school of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, FRELIMO) was founded here in 1969/1970, and it was here that actors of international solidarity from East and West met to teach at the FRELIMO school. A handful of teachers from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were always present. The largely positive narrative about FRELIMO's anti-colonial school system remained alive in Mozambique after independence in 1975. In line with this narrative, the GDR leadership often referred on official occasions to the good cooperation between GDR teachers and the FRELIMO leadership in Bagamoyo as evidence of the GDR's long-standing anti-colonial commitment in Africa. However, the Bagamoyo region had been colonized by the Germans some 80 years earlier and forcibly incorporated into the German Empire (1885-1918). The first administrative capital of the colony "German East Africa" was called Bagamoyo (until 1891). A colonial government school was established here in 1895 and the local teachers and students were taught German as the colonial mother tongue by German colonial teachers. During this time, textbooks about the colony with titles such as "A Coffee Plantation in German East Africa" or "A Lion Hunt in German East Africa" circulated in the so-called motherland. How was this German colonial legacy of Bagamoyo (de)thematized by the educational actors involved during the period of socialist friendship between the GDR and Mozambique in the 1960s and 1970s? After all, the FRELIMO school was founded on the same (post-)colonial site and partly staffed with German teachers - this time, of course, with a completely anti-colonial impetus. Continuing in this vein, this article traces the lines of (dis-)continuity between the legacy of (East) German colonial education and FRELIMO's anti-colonial education project in Bagamoyo. The complex interplay of colonial legacies, anti-colonial ideals and socialist educational goals will be outlined using the educative activities of East German and other international teachers at the FRELIMO-school in Bagamoyo as an example. These activities included school lessons and military training, as well as practical activities associated with the maintenance of the school itself, such as farming, construction, or housekeeping. Reconstructing daily school life will also provide a rich reflection of the diversity of regional backgrounds and languages brought to the school by teachers and students. For this purpose, collected archival sources from the GDR and Mozambique, historical teaching materials, as well as interviews with contemporary witnesses from both contexts will be re-evaluated from a (hopefully) decolonial perspective. The focus will be on GDR teachers, their relationships with fellow teachers and students, their teaching methods, and the reports they sent back to the GDR, as well as the memoir literature they produced after 1990.

The paper asks how German colonialism was portrayed in GDR’s educational media and to what extent the colonial view of Africa was commented on. Can racial color-blindness be diagnosed in GDR’s teaching aids and what transformations can be noticed between 1950 and 1990? A link between the post-colonial world and the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) in the field of education was the 1982 founded boarding school in Staßfurt. Until 1988, 900 children and young people from Mozambique were educated in this “School of Friendship”. Although this educational initiative was coordinated with the FRELIMO government of liberated Mozambique (since 1975), the GDR designed the educational program largely on its own. The GDR maintained foreign policy relations with other African countries, but Its closest “friendship” was with Mozambique (Friendship Treaty 1979). Remarkably, in doing so the GDR development aid also related to an area with which colonial links had existed. At the beginning of the 20^th century, the German Empire pursued its colonial interests in a part of Mozambique. Slavery continued to play a role in “German East Africa”, as the German “protectorate” was called, between 1885 and 1918. But dealing with this German colonial history was somehow unproblematic in the GDR, because in the official narrative it was not the new socialist state but the former imperialist empire that had been the colonial power. The GDR’s state doctrine was explicitly formulated in terms of solidarity and the GDR supported post-colonial emancipation efforts. In this sense, the “School of Friendship” in Staßfurt was an exemplary place of post-colonial education and an object of prestige. Research has been conducted into which narratives were developed in the GDR after 1945 on German colonialism, how anti-colonial education initiatives in the GDR operated and which images and narratives they used. In addition, memories of numerous actors were documented both in the GDR and in African countries. Where discrepancies between claim and everyday life arise again and again. The accounts of contemporary witnesses make it clear that everyday racism was not uncommon in the GDR – including in relation to the Staßfurt school. As Jane Weiß, née Schuch, was able to work out, intercultural and diversity-conscious approaches were rather alien to the GDR’s education system. In ideological framing, “otherness” was frowned upon in schools and the collectivity (also uniformity) of socialist personalities was the formulated educational goal. Did a blind spot emerge in the field of tension between politically claimed “international solidarity”, barely practised integration and only infrequent confrontation with intercultural differences in everyday life? Did racist discrimination disappear from the former field of discourse because it should not exist according to official language? Was a self-reflective confrontation with German colonial history only the task of the other Germany (Federal Republic of Germany, FRG)? The paper therefore asks how this colonial history of Germany was addressed and dealt with in GDR educational media such as textbooks and educational films.

Socialism means progress and thus also a distancing from colonialism. This line of argument was an integral part of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) socialist orientation. Concepts such as anti-imperialism, international solidarity and equality were deeply ingrained in its self-image. The importance of these values is emphasised by article six of the GDR constitution, which stipulated support for states in the fight against colonialism, and by the Ten Commandments of Socialist Morals and Ethics, which Walter Ulbricht proclaimed in 1958 as the duties of every citizen. Linked to this was a mandate for the education system which emphasised internationalism and patriotism as necessary personality traits to be aspired to through education. The youngest members of society should participate in shaping a socialist future under the assumption that there would be a world revolution. How this educational goal was to be implemented in the classroom has already been shown in research by Christiane Griese and Helga Marburger. However, the ideas of international solidarity and anti-imperialism were not only manifest in school curricula; other educational means also contributed to its popularization These approaches can be seen in GDR children's magazines, which increasingly took up international topics, especially from the 1970s onwards, and were directly embedded in the generation of the educational goal of international solidarity. In this way, they also fulfilled their general educational mission of shaping children's self-image in the spirit of socialist society and – through their close ties to the pioneer organisation – influencing the structure and organisation of children's lives. This paper examines the educational medium of GDR children's magazines to analyse the promotion of international and explicitly (anti-)colonial narratives to the youngest members of socialist society. The focus is on their intentions and normative references. Do these representations change over time and if so, how? How does an anti-colonial positioning of the GDR present itself, do the ‘own’ and the ‘other’ interact in dichotomous relationships or can we speak of an overcoming of Western Eurocentrism? Do the children's magazines ultimately contribute to the reproduction or overcoming of colonial discourses? The (post-)colonial world and the positioning of the GDR vis-à-vis it is made the subject of children's magazines in various contexts. It is not only the dialectical interdependencies between internationalism and patriotism that play a role in this; an analysis of the (anti-)colonial discourse in the children's magazines also helps to trace an image of childhood embedded in them. The children's magazines not only construct the (post-)colonial world and a certain image of the GDR, but they also contribute to forming a certain idea of childhood in the GDR and children as solidary-revolutionary subjects. The analyses thus not only form a valuable link to research that focuses on connections between the so-called "second" and "third world", but may also offer further reflections on the conception of socialist childhoods.

This paper aims at a translation exercise of different pedagogical schools and elements as they collided in the Sandinista revolutionary education system of the 1980s. By turning to educational documents and guides, to data from foreign advisers from Latin America and (Eastern) Germany (GDR), and to interviews with public functionaries of the considered time frame, I present Sandinista pedagogical programs as a transnational an anti-neocolonial effort of public education. In doing so, a focus will be set on the cultural and educational projects of the FSLN government, framing it within the revolutionary process and the growing shadow of the contra war; and on the contradiction between emancipatory politics and authoritarian tendencies, which deeply marked both the educational field and Nicaraguan society by and large during the revolutionary decade after the guerrilla’s triumph of 1979. For over 150 years, the political history of Nicaragua has been closely tied to the United States. From the 1850s invasion by a group of southern US-American mercenaries (who tried to re-establish slavery), through decades-long military occupations at the beginning of the 20^th century and economic dependency in the form of modern-day free trade agreements, the neighbor to the north has arguably been the most important foreign power in the political, social, and economic affairs of the Central American country. This complex and intense relationship has created a political condition in which anti-imperialist discourse and practice can be read as an anti-colonial struggle, driven by the fact that Nicaragua’s proximity to the U.S. establishes it firmly within this country’s “backyard”. Probably the most important chapter of said discourse and practice came about with the triumph of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, where the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional), a broad rebel front of left-wing nationalists, Marxist-Leninists, progressive Christians and moderate social-democrats took power under the inspiration of their namesake General Augusto C. Sandino, who had fought the US Marines occupying Nicaragua 50 years prior. The uprising, which military defeated the Somoza family dynasty, set up the frame of an 11-year-long social process that deeply changed the Nicaraguan state and its society, until the FSLN, turned political party, lost the 1990 general election to a conservative alliance that ushered in neoliberalism in the country. One of the most important of these changes involved public education: as the revolution unfolded, and while a new war —this time pitting the Sandinista government and army against US-backed counterrevolutionaries— increasingly wore out the revolution’s political and economic resources, the Ministry of Education insisted on the construction of a new public pedagogy, which should encourage revolutionary, nationalist and anti-imperialist values in both the youth as well as during literacy campaigns and in adult students. This education reflected the Sandinista’s eclectic ideological fundaments: it took inspiration both from Paulo Freire’s model of educación popular as an emancipatory an anti-authoritarian approach, and from the Eastern Block’s highly centralized education handbooks, focusing on the vanguard role of the governing parties in societies that were then part of “actually existing socialism”.