The Problems of paradise

Abstract

During the 1960s, East German leaders worked to enhance existing connections between East Germany and East Africa and to promote East German interests abroad, thus providing East Africans, specifically Kenyans, an alternative to British imperial paradigms of authority and a post-imperial influence. Utilizing five oral histories of the students themselves as a means to counter the scarcity of documents and fragmentary records, this article highlights the experiences of five Kenyan students in school, work, and dating in order to demonstrate the racism they encountered. Despite promises of equality and solidarity the Kenyan students’ experiences and encounters with varied forms of racism and a lack of socialist modernity served to compound the very real divisions between the Eastern Bloc countries and sub-Saharan Africa and demonstrate the weaknesses of any developing solidarity movement between the Second and Third world.