Victor Faustino, born in northern Mozambique, spent his childhood and early youth as a refugee in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, before returning to Mozambique at the age of 16. In July 1981, as part of an agreement between the GDR and the People’s Republic of Mozambique, he came to Wiehe in northern Thuringia, where he trained as an agricultural technician and mechanisation specialist. In 1989, he began a degree at what was then the Karl Marx University in Leipzig, graduating in 1993 as an agricultural engineer specialising in tropical agriculture. He then completed vocational training as a communications electronics technician. He has lived in Erfurt since 1999. As an amateur radio presenter, he has been hosting the programme »African Spirit« on Radio FREI in Erfurt for 25 years. He is a founding member and chairman of the board of the Mozambican Association in Thuringia e.V.

Josepha Kirchner is a qualified cultural studies scholar and urban planner. She wrote her Master’s thesis on contract labour in the GDR, using Weimar as a case study. Her aim was to give the contract workers themselves a voice and to find out what it was like for them to live and work in Weimar. To ensure that the stories she had collected did not disappear into a university filing cabinet, she and a small team exhibited the results of her research at the KET-Halle in Weimar in December 2022. She subsequently worked for the Saxony-Anhalt Industrial Heritage Network on a critical reappraisal of industrial history at the Ferropolis site.

Sabine Felber is an artist, sociologist and freelance photographer. She lives in Berlin and regularly works abroad. Her photographs document social environments and people in international cities such as Berlin, Hong Kong, Paris, Beijing and Sydney, amongst others. She combines photography and digital storytelling to create autobiographical self-portraits. In 2025, she staged the exhibition »See my Story. Copyright by Madgermanes« at the Mozambican-German Cultural Institute in Maputo, which will be shown in various cities in eastern Germany in 2026.