This innovative multi-archival study explores the myriad and unexpected connections between the USSR and Mozambique during the last decades of state socialism, decolonization, and the Cold War. Drawing on documents and oral histories in three languages, Elizabeth Banks explores how leaders, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens used diplomacy, culture, fishing, debt, trade, and delegation exchange to build Mozambican–Soviet connections throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Socialist connections like these played a key role in the process of post-colonial state-building, and fundamentally shaped the lives of individuals in the second half of the twentieth century. As Banks shows, symbolic promises of solidarity wrestled with shared material constraints to render visible international connections more valuable. These same dynamics helped cement credit relations as the core of Soviet development provision during late socialism, ultimately undermining the struggle for alternative forms of economic sovereignty during decolonization.
‘Elizabeth Banks skilfully shows that socialist solidarity is not made in drunken toasts to friendship of nations but in nitty gritty agreements to provide everything from rifles to technical advisors to fishing nets. With deep research in archives from Maputo to Moscow, Banks offers a truly original history of Soviet-Mozambique relations, one that sheds light on the antimonies of revolution across the postcolonial world.'
David Engerman - Yale University
‘An important addition to the growing literature on Soviet relations with postcolonial nations in Africa. By utilizing case studies on trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchanges, Elizabeth Banks explores the matrix of international socialist solidarity and the intricacies of postcolonial nation-building in Mozambique.'
Choi Chatterjee - California State University
‘Using difficult-to-access archival materials and interviews, Elizabeth Banks provides a fascinating study of socialist Mozambique and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Beginning with a history of diplomacy and financial exchanges, she expands that approach with reports on the divergent expectations of cultural exchanges, women's groups, the 1980s Olympics, and Soviet rights to harvest shrimp from the Mozambique Channel, resulting in a comprehensive record of those important decades.'
Kathleen Sheldon
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