Abstract
In 1942, the first Polish refugees, once residents of the Eastern territories of pre-war Poland, arrived at the ports of Dar es Salaam and Mombasa. They had been deported and sent to forced labour camps in Siberia soon after the Soviet Union had occupied those lands in Poland in 1939. Jochen Lingelbach’s book offers insight into a phenomenon known only locally, despite its global dimension: 20,000 Polish refugees found asylum in Africa between 1942 and 1950. The Eastern European profile, if not ‘oriental’, for some of this group of refugees disrupted a literally black and white, colonial order characteristic of the imperial model. Lingelbach takes the reader through this unusual story, skilfully blending ‘global history’ approaches, refugee-, postcolonial- and subaltern studies with gender perspectives and national (Polish) history. Given his background in African studies, the author brings a fresh perspective, approaching each of these disciplines, particularly the historiography of Poland, in an admirably novel way.
The material is divided into five thematic chapters. Repetitions are few and far between, and can be attributed to the fact that each chapter constitutes a fully-fledged, standalone study. For a start, the author explains nearly flawlessly—though it remains unclear who ‘free deportees’ were (p.22)—where Polish refugees in Africa came from. They were mostly families of deported men, now soldiers of the Polish army; in 1941 those soldiers were pardoned by Joseph Stalin, who wanted to use them as reinforcements in the ongoing war with Germany. Western allies felt obliged to help the relatives of Poles they had fought with against Adolf Hitler; that sense of obligation towards co-belligerents seemed much stronger now than in the earlier case of Jewish civilians desperate to escape Nazi Germany. Polish families were placed in African and Indian colonies. Women and children represented the majority of the refugees. This additional dimension of the story provides Lingelbach with an opportunity to analyse refugees’ attitudes towards masculinized colonial and welfare culture. Unquestionably, the findings of this analysis debunk the stereotype of a passive refugee: the so-called ‘womenandchildren’ – a term coined by Cynthia Enloe.
Demonstrating remarkable prowess in using both archival materials and interviews conducted in Africa, Lingelbach analyses the complicated position of ‘Poles as in-between group’ (p.188) in the colonial societies of Uganda, Tanganyika, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Kenya. Polish refugees had to negotiate between roles assigned to them by the settlers, ranging from ‘European allies’ to ‘social concern’ to ‘rivals’. The ways the indigenous population perceived them varied, too: ‘powerless refugee prisoners’, ‘approachable whites’ or ‘fellow Catholics’ to some, they appeared as ‘European masters’ to others. Refugees from Poland lived comfortably and were well looked after, yet they felt the stigma of being considered a threat to ‘the image of white superiority and thus colonial rule’ (p.28) by their European hosts. There were concerns that their refugee status as ‘poor whites’ might undermine the prestige of the white race as the one establishing the colonial order. These concerns were further fuelled by the prior prejudice that Western European settlers in Africa had against Poles.
Bubbling with intellectual flair, the third chapter examines the discrepancy between those perceptions and the ways that Polish refugees positioned themselves in a new social context, offering a thought-provoking reading of Polish history as a colonial history. Coming from a country long oppressed by imperial powers—Russia, Austria, and Prussia—and now identified as ‘class enemies’ by Stalin, Polish refugees had often been involved in the colonisation of the Eastern lands of the Polish State established after 1918 (they were even dubbed ‘colonists’). Alongside farming families, the Polish refugees in Africa included academics and members of aristocratic families. Having themselves suffered from oppression, some of those refugees living under banana-leaf roofs in Africa felt a sense of affinity with indigenous people; others adopted roles of missionaries, educators, or ‘European masters’. In any event, the status of those ‘on the edges of whiteness’ made the refugees a problem after the war. Finding their position increasingly threatened, colonial rulers took advantage of the post-war regime, happily relocating Polish refugees to metropoles, afraid to jeopardize the ‘attributes’ of a white man. Local memory of their presence is mainly restricted to Polish churches and graveyards (e.g. in Tengeru and Masindi).
Lingelbach’s use of particular terms and concepts, such as ‘refugee’, is both faultless and intentional. He examines their construction and fluid nature, adding multiple perspectives to his impressive analysis. In the course of a daring exploration of the effect that a sudden change of geographical and social context had on Polish refugees, the author deftly removes multiple and often overlapping layers of bias (orientalism, racism, antisemitism), as well as imposed or assumed labels and identifiers (nationality, class, race, religion, gender); sometimes they had already come off by themselves under those unusual circumstances. His multi-directional analysis provides an uncompromising insight into boundary-making processes. A fascinating study of the emergence of refugees’ status in modern societies, this work demonstrates that the post-war refugee regime relied as much on regional (European) as on racial categorisation; it also shows that going beyond Eurocentrism can produce truly inspiring historiographical outcomes.