When speaking about the grand utopian visions of the immediate independence period in Mozambique and Africa more generally, it is easy to focus on the passion or the folly, the hope or the naivety, the potential or the violence, the sadly frequent ability to utterly ignore reality in favour of a dream of the future. What makes Tanja Müller's book, Legacies of Socialist Solidarity: East Germany in Mozambique especially interesting is its focus on the actual people chosen to be the exemplars of such projects; those who went from the vanguard of the future to the detritus of a failed social experiment in just a decade or so. Through an extensive use of life histories, Müller describes the lives of adolescent Mozambicans who were chosen from all walks of life to be trained in East Germany as members of the future socialist elite. They spent years away from their families to be taught professions that Mozambique often did not really need, but whose leaders hoped would exist in the shining nation of the future. Drawing from Bourdieu's work on the dialectic of education and Yuval-Davis's analytic categories of belonging, Müller traces efforts to create through specific forms of education the homem novo (new man), the new national subject who would form the foundation of the socialist society.

The author provides a detailed description of life in East Germany, both what the students came to love about the former GDR and the trials, such as the subtle and sometimes shocking racism (especially the murder of one Mozambican student). Contrary to descriptions of the admittedly politicised education provided by the GDR to the citizens of ‘friendly’ nations as an unrelieved totalitarian nightmare, the author provides a far more nuanced picture. By carefully tracing the students' lives, Müller balances moments of heavy-handed indoctrination, with the opportunities that people from comparable backgrounds could have never hoped for. The students' post-GDR lives were a litany of broken promises, where their ambitions often remained unrealised and their degrees were not fully recognised as they returned to a nation whose leadership had already abandoned them. For most their reward for completing their education was to be conscripted into the army at the airport when they returned home. However, Müller argues that the students continued to base their identities on concepts of being ‘German’ and ‘Socialist’, but in a system that came to value neither.

These arguments are largely convincing and based on a wide range of carefully collected interviews and life histories. There are areas that the book could have explored more fully. The question remains on how successful the effort to create the socialist ‘new man’ was, precisely because Müller's respondents were denied their place in the vanguard upon return. A wider comparison to other educational ventures in Mozambique and through other socialist nations, all of which had the construction of the ‘new man’ at their heart, could be of use here. Do the values of the ‘new man’ based on solidarity and valuing the collective over the self, survive precisely because they became an oppositional form of identification among those who were promised so much and given so little? Despite the fact that a wider focus may have benefited this book, it remains an important and compelling read, and one whose message should be remembered when we hear of future utopian schemes, be they the new man of socialist nationalism, or the entrepreneurs of the ‘Africa rising’ narrative so commonly heard today.