Czechoslovak Forest Experts in Cold War Angola
Czechoslovak Forest Experts in Cold War Angola

Summary/Abstract: The first Czechoslovak pioneers of tropical and subtropical forestry appeared in the nineteenth century. Yet, only after the onset of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1948, in connection with the advancing decolonization of the Global South and the culmination of the Cold War, did the dispatch of forest experts in post-colonial countries become a targeted and centrally-controlled policy of Prague. The first educational institutions focused on tropic forestry and Polytechna, a Czechoslovak foreign trade corporation whose task was to send Czechoslovak experts abroad, were established in the late 1950s. By the mid-1970s, when Angola gained independence, Czechoslovak authorities already had considerable experience with the dispatch of their forest experts in the global South. Such experts became part of the extensive Czechoslovak assistance to new pro-socialist Angolan government. This article, based on interviews with the former Czechoslovak experts sent to Angola after 1975, complemented by archival documents, analyzes their individual trajectories and experiences to show how this policy looked in practice.

• Details
• Contents