This is the second volume on relations between socialist Eastern Europe and Africa. In their introduction, they locate the book within the recent historiography on socialist internationalism, alternative globalization projects, and transnational histories of decolonization.1 The bulk of the book grapples with the Cold War period between the 1950s and 1980s, foregrounding politics, economic relations, development cooperation, military aid, anticolonial struggles, and other dimensions of East-South contacts, making the volume a genuinely valuable contribution to the literature. The heterogeneity of actors, approaches, topics, and countries is reflected in the volume’s subdivision into three sections: “Lusophone Connections”, “Southern African Entanglements”, and “Euro-African Complexities”. These headings spark curiosity rather than set a clear-cut agenda given the obvious overlaps between them.

Many of the contributors build their arguments on previously untapped archival documents, mostly from one or more Eastern European countries, sometimes triangulating these materials with documents from Western or African archives as well as oral history interviews. Scrutinizing Anglophone, Lusophone, Francophone, and Slavophone contexts, the authors cover an impressive spectrum of views and actors, bringing to bear a range of methodological approaches.

Sergej Mazov’s take on Soviet military aid to Nigeria during the Biafran war and Radoslav Yordanov’s analysis of Libyan engagements with Warsaw Pact countries are steeped in the long-standing tradition of histories of international relations, with Yordanov’s chapter standing out for his empirically rich portrayal of economic intra-bloc competition on the Libyan market. Co-editor Fonseca, in his own chapter, offers an impressively painstaking analysis of transfers from Eastern European socialist states secured by Angolan anticolonial parties in the early 1960s that will be, in and of itself, of great use for future research in this area. Spotlighting a multilateral setting, Robin E. Möser examines one of the more unlikely and surprising instances of diplomatic sympathies in the late 1980s: the friendly interactions between Soviet and South African negotiators in the run-up to Pretoria’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Challenging established views on the broader panorama of Cold War endgames, Chris Saunders reinterprets the dismantling of apartheid in Namibia and South Africa by arguing that Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union played a role less as actors (for example, through the Soviets’ military support for the African National Congress’ (ANC) armed wing, which peaked in 1989/90) and more as a context. In his view, it was the collapse of communism that made the transition to democracy possible.

Other chapters elucidate the experiences of non-elite actors who played a crucial role in building and maintaining East-South relations but were often at the receiving end when strategic alliances broke down. Barbora Menclová investigates the work and lives of Czechoslovak experts in postcolonial Angola with a perceptive eye. Matteo Grilli’s chapter details how rank-and-file members of the Basutoland Congress Party (BCP) recalled their transitory sojourns in Cairo and studies in Eastern Europe while navigating a peculiar predicament: the BCP leadership sought scholarships from communist-ruled countries while purging alleged communists from its own ranks. In general, Grilli argues, the Soviet bloc was the BCP’s most precious ally, even though the BCP offered little in the way of ideological or political allegiance in return. Ana Moledo’s multilayered investigation of relations between trade unions from Lusophone Africa and the communist-oriented World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) unveils the key role of the French communist Maurice Gastaud at the WFTU’s African Workers’ University in Conakry while demonstrating that the WFTU’s support for anticolonial movements from Angola remained limited in material terms, not least because of the rifts between various trade unions and the organizations they were affiliated with. Both Moledo’s and Grilli’s contributions thus also provide compelling angles when considering Cold War bipolarity or multipolarity.

The Sino-Soviet rivalry, as the most notorious intra-socialist conflict of the 1960s, is mentioned frequently throughout the volume and is a core concern in two chapters. João Fusco Ribeiro shows persuasively how the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), under its leader Jonas Savimbi, gradually built its narrative that external assistance by the Soviet Union or the Organization of African Unity (OAU) jeopardized the anticolonial liberation struggle. UNITA’s (rhetorical) turn to self-reliance dovetailed with Maoist ideologemes and served to discredit its main rival, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), along with its leading sponsor, the Soviet Union. Ribeiro’s chapter also shows how UNITA poured scorn on exile politics by investing in ties with China and the US as well as Western European and African countries. Alexandr Voevodskiy, drawing on reports from Moscow archives, shows that in this context of Sino-Soviet competition, representatives of African liberation movements such as the MPLA, the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), the ANC, the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), and the South West Africa National Union (SWANU) held attitudes extending from explicit partiality to cautious neutrality and indifference. While some of these spokespersons tried to evade the topic, others frankly criticized communist infighting or tried to defuse conflicts, taking on the role of impartial arbiters in order to advance common goals. The Soviets tried to make these various positionings of African liberation movements legible vis-à-vis their own interests and assumed an increasingly intolerant stance towards sympathizers with Maoism.

Both Ribeiro and Voevodskiy highlight the fluidity and fragility of alliances, not only between East and South but also among African actors. This is a point also hammered home by Nemanja Radonjić in his chapter on the 1962 All-African Students Conference in Belgrade, where Yugoslav authorities tried to consolidate their country’s anticolonial prestige in the context of proliferating conferences, carefully curating the event to circumvent Cold War divides. Radonjić also delves into logistics when he explores Belgrade as a “transnational space” (p. 267) and “node” (p. 270) in a global network of anticolonial routes, a hub that interfaced with other gateways such as Cairo and enabled Africans to attend the conference.

Finally, one chapter employs a visual history approach. In her exploration of image production by and for FRELIMO, Alba Martín Luque argues that Tanzanian gatekeeping and suspicion of Western journalists paved the way for the embrace of Titoist aesthetics within the Mozambican liberation struggle, generating images that were then deployed in an attempt to sway international audiences by demonstrating FRELIMO’s military efficacy, popular support, and humanitarian activities. With its complex, multilayered analysis (written in flowing prose) and its cautious but wide-ranging conclusions, this chapter embodies the potential of a transnational visual history of decolonization. Like other contributions, such as Moledo’s, it also reflects a broader and highly welcome trend in the field: the probing of East-South relations not as a separate, isolated bundle of connections pitted monolithically against a Western-dominated current of (neo)colonialism and globalization, but rather as a strand of relations that intersected and overlapped with other currents and that was itself highly fractured. One can only hope that chapters like those by Luque and other authors in this volume will inspire more scholars to finally lay to rest simplistic models of univectoral causality seeking to trace Eastern European “influence” in Africa.

Since the first volume jointly edited by Dallywater, Fonseca, and Saunders was published in 2019, geopolitics has changed, leaving its mark on academia, as well, and constraining cooperation across borders. As the editors note in the introduction, two Russian authors withdrew their joint contribution for fear of being misunderstood by the academic public. The book’s final chapter (authored by Ulf Engel and Chris Saunders) on reverberations of the recent past in the contemporary political landscapes of Ethiopia and South Africa is an effort to come to terms with Cold War legacies and their bearings on the present.

While the volume as a whole does not aim to advance a distinct historiographical argument – any such endeavour would probably be ill-fated given the range of topics discussed – the volume Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa is an excellent collection of essays, grounded in thorough research, that demonstrate the value of a diverse set of methodological approaches and that, in some cases, put forward new hypotheses as well. The book will be a highly rewarding read for scholars of decolonization, East-South relations, and the Cold War. It is thus good news that the editors are planning to publish a third joint volume in the near future.

Note:
1 Current volumes representing these overlapping fields include James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Steffi Marung (eds.), Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, Bloomington 2020); Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, Blessing-Miles Tendi (eds.), Transnational Histories of Southern Africa's Liberation Movements, London 2020; Su Lin Lewis, Nana Osei-Opare (eds.), Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World. Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization, 2024.