When Europeans Were Refugees In Africa
Today, when African refugees flee to Europe to seek asylum, they meet
with hostility at European borders. But there was a time, such as
before and during World War II, when European refugees flocked to Africa
to seek sanctuary. Our correspondent, Curtis Abraham,
has been touring some such refugee camps in Uganda, which for more than
a decade was home to thousands of Polish, Ukrainian and Russian World
War II refugees. Here is his story.
Going up that river was like travelling back to the
earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth
and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an
impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was
no joy in the brilliance of the sunshine. The long stretches of the
waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of the overshadowed distances…
And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It
was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable
intention.”
So says the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Conrad’s vividness and so-accurate description were not merely born out
of literary imagination – Conrad experienced Congo firsthand. He
captained a trading steamer on the Congo River in 1890 and 1891, before
the rubber boom, when ivory was still the principal item of trade.
On 21 December 1903, he wrote a letter to Roger Casement,
the British consul to the Congo Free State, whom Conrad had met while in
Congo personally investigating and exposing the evils of the rubber
trade. It was an evil that resulted in nothing less than genocide.
And although Conrad made little contribution to the actual
reform campaign, the barbarism of King Leopold’s imperialist ambitions
and the pogrom that took place in the heart of Africa is forever
encapsulated in the damning words which Kurtz, the dishonoured custodian
of the story’s Inner Station, utters as he lies dying: “The horror, the horror”.
What was unarguably the first genocide of the 20th century
would be overshadowed a generation later by the horrors of the
Holocaust and Stalin’s deportation camps. But history not only repeats
itself, it sometimes does so in paradoxical style. For Joseph Conrad was
a Pole born in the Ukraine, and it was the Poles (and to a lesser
extent, Ukrainians and Russians) who would seek refuge over a generation
later near the heart of Africa, fleeing the horrors of the Nazi death
camps and deportations.
Their journey to East Africa was nothing less than an epic
human odyssey. Through it all women had to endure the heartache of
losing their menfolk through war, deportation and imprisonment. Life in
most of the camps was miserable and dehumanising. The relatives, friends
and children of these exiles died miserable deaths from cold, disease,
accident, malnutrition, and broken hearts.
According to the writings of Rennie Montague Bere
(1907-1991), a Cambridge University-educated colonial officer in Uganda
who was later put in charge of the two refugee camps, there were an
estimated 35,000 Polish refugees in Eastern and Southern Africa.
The majority of the refugees originated from eastern
Poland, on the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact line (a defensive alliance signed
by Hitler and Stalin on 23 August 1939), just before the start of World
War II. Evidently, there were also a small number of Jews who managed
to flee Hitler’s tyranny to East and Southern Africa. According to Dr
Lwanga Lunyiigo, an African historian formerly of Makerere University in
Uganda: “The refugees from Europe [who stayed in Uganda] also included
Jews as well.”
