Abstract
The British colonies of East and Central Africa hosted about 20,000 Poles between 1942 and 1950. They occupied refugee settlements in Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and South Africa. The refugees’ complex interactions with the British, the colonial administrators of the hosting countries, and Africans, their complex position within a colonial world based on racial hierarchies, and the multifaceted roles of Polish women refugees, are some of the compellingly relevant themes in Jochen Lingelbach’s On the Edges of Whiteness.
Through a wide array of written and oral sources, and a multi-perspective approach, the author illuminates our understanding of the position of Polish refugees in colonial Africa that defies a Manichean understanding of them as colonized or colonizers. The book is structured around five thematic chapters. Chapter One provides clear background information on the Polish refugees’ presence in Africa. It sheds light on the reasons of their deportation from the eastern part of Poland by Soviet forces, the harsh conditions of the journey to Africa, and offers a detailed description of their settlements. The chapter informs us as well about the refugees who departed from the refugee camps and resettled in other destinations after the war and of those who stayed as residents in Africa. The author could have further developed this part by dealing, for example, with the refugees’ responses to the 1947 Polish Resettlement Act. Nevertheless, the chapter succeeds in providing the reader with the appropriate context for understanding the Polish refugee experience in British colonial Africa.
Chapter Two begins with a brief historical account that sketches the emergence of the international refugee organizations in the first half of the twentieth century. Lingelbach pays close attention to the International Refugee Organization (IRO). Interestingly, he highlights the differing approaches of the IRO representatives and colonial governments to refugees. While colonial officials were ‘paternalistic’, treating refugees in different ways depending on their national, ethnic, and racial ‘categorizations’, the IRO representatives had ‘a universalist outlook’ (p. 65). In other words, they recognized the fact that all refugees were entitled to their assistance. Yet the author rightly remarked that the IRO was basically a Eurocentric organization. Chapter Three focuses on some of the literature that dealt with German and Russian Soviet rule in Poland as a form of colonialism. The author moves on to draw a valid comparison between the situation of ‘colonized Africans and colonized Poles’ (p. 104). He suggests that the common experiences of oppression did not lead to strong acts of solidarity on the part of Polish refugees towards their African neighbors.
Chapter Four deals with three different roles of refugee women. By giving birth to children and maintaining Polish culture in exile, women served as stabilizers of the community. Nevertheless, Lingelbach clearly demonstrates that refugee women were regarded as a threat by male administrators when they transgressed what he calls ‘the social boundaries of race’ (p. 133). In other terms, women’s deviant sexuality was a major concern to Polish and colonial authorities. As a result, they sought to control women’s relationships with men from other nationalities such as Greeks and Italians and especially Africans. Polish refugee female sex workers who took African clients were particularly dangerous to the community, as an ominous threat to racial hierarchies and white superiority. The author’s reliance here on the work of Anne Mcclintock, Margaret Strobel, Will Jackson, and Ann Laura Stoler strengthens his analysis. His use of Harald Fischer-Tiné’s concept of ‘racial dividend’ is particularly germane. It not only convincingly elucidates the condition of Polish women refugees but also the status of the whole group. As they were white, Polish refugees received preferential treatment in colonial spaces that was denied to the Black population despite the former's marginal position. Highlighting the privileges of whiteness enjoyed by the Polish women in this way nuances our understanding of their agency in this colonial space. The final chapter examines the perspectives of the British administrators and settlers on the refugees, the refugees’ self-perceptions, and the attitudes of African workers and neighbours to them. While British settlers and administrators saw them as ‘subaltern whites,’ the Polish refugee elites viewed themselves as European allies in exile; Africans, meanwhile, saw them as ‘approachable whites’ (p. 219).
Taken together, the chapters offer persuasive insights into the ambivalent position of Polish refugees in their hosting countries and their complex interactions with the different actors of colonial societies. Lingelbach convincingly argues that they were similar to many subaltern groups such as the poor, criminals, and lunatics. They were, therefore, ‘located on the edges of whiteness’ (p. 257). In this respect, the book supports the findings of Harald Fischer-Tiné about the complex nature of colonial whiteness. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the author constantly uses the term ‘subaltern whites’ without a theoretical engagement with subalternity. The author succeeds, however, in avoiding one of the common pitfalls of Polish national histories by acknowledging the class, ethnic, and religious divisions that mark the group of refugees. Certainly, the book significantly contributes to refugee history, whiteness studies, and the history of colonial Africa during and after the Second World War.