A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa

As a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, Socialist Yugoslavia stood `between East and West` (aligned neither with Soviet-style central economic planning nor the capitalist West), setting much stock in its economic, diplomatic, and cultural relationships with the `Third World.` The newly independent African countries became Yugoslavia`s primary allies in the Global South. This study of Yugoslav companies` workforces in Zambia explores everyday dimensions of Yugoslavia`s links with postcolonial African societies. It is the first research to systematically connect class, labor, and race into studies of the Yugoslav region`s ambiguous relationship to the Global South through a social history lens. Amid recent scholarly interest in state socialist Europe`s global entanglements, historians have re-examined Yugoslavia`s links with Africa to understand how Yugoslavia cast itself as a development and modernization expert, how Yugoslavs made sense of encounters with Africans, and how writers, diplomats, and technical experts put Yugoslav Non-Alignment ideology into practice. At the same time, scholars have revisited the social and cultural history of labor in Yugoslavia, studying how workers understood Yugoslavia`s distinctive socio- economic ideology of `workers` self-management.` Yet the histories of the tens of thousands of blue- and white-collar workers employed by Yugoslav self-managing enterprises in Africa have still not been explored. This project advances knowledge about Yugoslavia`s `socialist globalization` and the Yugoslav working class through the example of two Yugoslav companies in Zambia, one of Yugoslavia`s main African partners. The first case study is Belgrade engineering giant Energoprojekt, which constructed Zambia`s flagship postcolonial infrastructural projects, such as hydroelectric plants, roads, and government buildings. The second case study focuses on the network of repair shops set up across Zambia by the Yugoslav truck and bus manufacturer FAP (Fabrika automobila Priboj). Both enterprises employed Yugoslav and Zambian workers side by side. Methodologically, the study will be grounded in a combination of archival research and oral history in former Yugoslavia and Zambia. The research seeks to reveal the effects of the operations in the Global South on Yugoslav workers` relationship to the self-management system and its values, as well as how Zambian actors perceived their connections with Yugoslavia. It will look at labor relations on the ground and highlight how daily life and work enacted an intimate, embodied, and spatial politics of race. The study thus breaks new ground in labor history, development history, and critical race studies by connecting two domains that social history still separates, postcolonial Africa and state socialist Europe.

The historical research project, "A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: A Connected History of the Yugoslav Workforce in Zambia", which was based at the University of Vienna from 2022 to 2026, shed light on the everyday dimensions of economic, diplomatic, and cultural relationships between newly independent Zambia and socialist Yugoslavia. The study broke new ground in labor history, development history, and critical race studies by connecting two domains that social history has long separated: postcolonial Africa and state-socialist Europe. It examined how Yugoslavs and Zambians made sense of their encounters within the framework of the Non-Aligned Movement, seeking to create new forms of global connectedness beyond the geopolitical divisions between the "capitalist West" and the "communist East". One of the major achievements of the project was its ability to examine these "East-South" exchanges from an African perspective by conducting extensive archival research and gathering interviews in Zambia. The research team established cooperation with Zambian scientific institutions and scholars, resulting in joint publications and reciprocal study visits. Team members at the University of Vienna designed five postgraduate courses that sparked students' interest in African and Eastern European labor topics, while two Zambian research assistants enrolled in and graduated from MA programs, in part thanks to training received through the project. The project team was also active in connecting with various institutions and scholars to organize one regional workshop and two international conferences. The first conference, held in Slovenia in September 2024 in collaboration with the Science and Research Center Koper, brought together 18 presenters from Europe and Africa to discuss economic cooperation among self-professed developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. The second conference, organized in September 2025 in Linz in collaboration with the International Conference of Labor and Social History (ITH), gathered more than 50 participants and will result in a conference-edited volume on labor and decolonization. Project researchers were able to publish five journal articles in prestigious historical journals, two chapters in edited volumes, and one review, covering a range of topics from novel angles, including early contact between Zambian and Yugoslav trade unions, transfers of technology and knowledge in the transport industry and agriculture, exchanges of ideas in the realm of industrial democracy, everyday usages of language on the construction sites, and gender roles of Yugoslav specialists and workers in Zambia. Finally, the sources gathered during this research were used to develop and secure funding for another research project financed by the FWF ESPRIT scheme, dealing with transnational cooperation between the European automotive industry and the post-colonial states of Tanzania and Zambia - with a particular focus on the role of spare parts, wear parts and consumables in the functioning of road transport and the transport economy.