Scènes de la vie quotidienne des coopérants de la RDA en Afrique: normes de comportement et transgressions

This contribution focuses on the everyday life of GDR development workers, more precisely on their behaviour as revealed in situations where the codes of conduct were transgressed. Such transgressions are addressed in the records of Party meetings and in personal evaluations of development workers who had become "cases". This contribution is based on such material from the archives of the State Security and of the Party in Berlin. The files show us scenes from the life of the development worker gone astray. These dossiers containing files of personal examination, records of party meetings and of disciplinary cases, deal with breaches of the rules concerning contacts with foreigners, deviant behaviour, infringing the norms of socialist lifestyle, irregularities in family life, all kinds of aberrations likely to tarnish the image of the GDR. They also concern behaviour judged as "racist" towards African counterparts. This material shows Development staff involved in educational processes. This contribution evaluates these disciplinary cases, ranges them in groups and in syndromes of illicit behaviour and discusses the efforts of education and self-education in mission administered by the Party collective. It concludes with an outline comparison with the life of development workers of the rival Germany and a reflection on the conceptualisation of this group of itinerant "developers". The time frame encompasses the last two decades of the era of global competition of systems, the 1970s and 1980s, when the newly independent Portuguese colonies and Ethiopia took centre stage in the GDR's African policies.