Seeing his comrades-in-arms, a Mozambican factory worker living in a small Baltic city in East Germany wonders how they can “believe in the promise made by their government of a secure future of comfort awaiting them back home — unequivocally, uncritically”. 

Armando Dos Santos cannot imagine going back to Mozambique. His experiences fuel this doubt, and his backstory echoes a line from Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s debut novel, Memory of Departure: “As the years passed, we bore with rising desperation the betrayal of the promise of freedom.”