A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: The Yugoslav workforce in Zambia
Zgodovina na Špici / History on the Edge
You are kindly invited to the new event of the History on the Edge series, which will take place on Wednesday, 6 November 2024 at 13:00, at the INZ premises or at the ZOOM link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86949706378
The lecture will be given by Rory Archer and Goran Musić, and the title of the lecture is “A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: The Yugoslav workforce in Zambia”. The lecture will be held in English.
A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: The Yugoslav workforce in Zambia
In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of Yugoslav men and women spent time as labor migrants in Zambia, Yugoslavia’s closest non-aligned ally in Sub-Saharan Africa. While their presence in Zambia was predicated on non-Alignment developmentalism, antiracism, anticolonialism and socialist self-management, the experience of being part of a privileged white community in postcolonial Africa could, in practice, easily diverge from this normative framework. Unlike their counterparts – ‘expats’ from Britain and other Western European countries, Yugoslavia’s active positioning as a key supporter of independent Zambia and progressive anticolonial groups in neighboring states, meant that Yugoslavs frequently operated from two positions simultaneously – as a white, relatively moneyed upper class but also as a progressive anti-racist ally of Zambia willing to assist in development and training in a ‘hands on’, albeit often paternalistic way. This talk aims to make sense of Yugoslavs’ ambivalent position in Zambia based on archival research and oral history interviews in both Zambia and (post) Yugoslav space.
