Unequal refugeeness : Race, gender, and co-belligerence from Poles in colonial Africa to Ukrainians in Poland
Abstract
- Abstract
- en Refugee-receiving states do not live up to the universalist ideals of international refugee legislation but are selective and discriminatory. The case of Poland’s acceptance of Ukrainians while simultaneously building a border wall to keep out non-Ukrainians is an obvious case. Based on historical research on the British Empire’s policies towards European refugees, this article looks into a comparable moment when governments made an exception to their established anti-refugee policy and accepted certain groups of refugees. The British colonial administration in East Africa rejected Jewish refugees but accepted a specific group of Poles during the Second World War. This exception under war conditions was legitimized with an emphasis on the group’s gender, race, and connection to the co-belligerent Polish army. They were the white women and children of the Polish male soldiers fighting with the British against the Axis. The recent welcome for Ukrainian refugees in Poland followed similar lines of argumentation.
Description
- Full text
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Unequal refugeeness. Race, gender, and
co-belligerence from Poles in colonial
Africa to Ukrainians in Poland
Jochen Lingelbach
1,
1Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (African History), University of Bayreuth, 95440 Bayreuth, Germany
Corresponding author. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (African History), University of Bayreuth, 95440
Bayreuth, Germany. E-mail: jochen.lingelbach@uni-bayreuth.de
Abstract
Refugee-receiving states do not live up to the universalist ideals of international refugee legis
lation but are selective and discriminatory. The case of Poland’s acceptance of Ukrainians
while simultaneously building a border wall to keep out non-Ukrainians is an obvious case.
Based on historical research on the British Empire’s policies towards European refugees, this
article looks into a comparable moment when governments made an exception to their estab
lished anti-refugee policy and accepted certain groups of refugees. The British colonial admin
istration in East Africa rejected Jewish refugees but accepted a specific group of Poles during
the Second World War. This exception under war conditions was legitimized with an emphasis
on the group’s gender, race, and connection to the co-belligerent Polish army. They were the
white women and children of the Polish male soldiers fighting with the British against the
Axis. The recent welcome for Ukrainian refugees in Poland followed similar lines of ar
gumentation.
Keywords: race; Poland; colonialism; Ukraine; war; history; refugees
… [the Polish refugees] are the wives and families of some of those gallant, indomitable Polish soldiers who
are fighting with the Allied forces in the Middle East. To them we owe a duty. To look after their wives and
families will be a pleasure.1
This is why we are proposing to activate the temporary protection mechanism to provide them [Ukrainian
refugees] with a secure status and access to schools, medical care and work. They deserve it. We need to do
that now.2
1
East African Standard (hereafter EAS) 30 June 1942: ‘Refugees from Persia,’ Editorial.
2
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the Commission, speaking at the European Parliament on 1 March 2022
(European Commission 2022a).
Received: 22 March 2024. Revised: 15 October 2024.
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Journal of Refugee Studies, 2025, 38(3), 674–689
https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feae089
Advance Access Publication Date: 30 December 2024
Original Article
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1. Introduction
When some 20,000 Polish refugees started arriving in the East African harbours in 1942, the colo
nial public was astonished. For years, the colonial governments and established white settlers
had successfully fended off any attempts to settle poor white refugees from Europe into the colo
nies and now they welcomed them with open arms. Apart from some—mainly Jewish—residents
who had lobbied for the acceptance of persecuted Jews from under the German Nazi yoke, the
colonial establishment had been firmly against hosting any sizeable number of refugees from
Europe. This sudden turn-around needed some serious explanations and the leading white
settler-dominated Kenyan newspaper did just that in an editorial cited above. The main reason
given was the refugees’ connection with the ‘gallant’ Polish soldiers who were fighting with the
Allies against the Axis forces threatening Britain and its Empire. Added to this, the editorial and
colonial officials underlined that these were mainly women and children. It was a ‘duty’ and a
‘pleasure’ to host them. Their whiteness needed no further explanation, but their non-
Jewishness was stressed to appease possible anti-Semitic opposition. A few days later, it was
written in the same paper: ‘The refugees are mostly catholic, probably 90 per cent of them’.3 The
sudden turnaround in refugee policy had to be explained.
Some 80 years later, I was reminded of this history when Poland welcomed Ukrainian refugees
after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Governed since 2015 by a right-wing govern
ment, the Polish state followed an increasingly aggressive anti-refugee stance. In national poli
cies and on the EU level, the Polish government was arguing against the acceptance of refugees,
aiming especially at Muslims and people of colour (Klaus and Szulecka 2023). This trend intensi
fied in the year 2021 when refugees started arriving at the Polish–Belarusian border and were
portrayed by Polish government politicians and media as ‘weapons’ in a ‘hybrid attack’ by the
Belarusian and Russian regimes (Adam and Hess 2023). This rhetorical armament against unde
sired, mostly non-European people on the move was accompanied by the fortification of the bor
der with barbed wire, the declaration of a state of emergency, the deployment of military units,
and the construction of a massive fence (KreRpa and Judzinska 2023). However, while Polish bor
der guards were illegally pushing back people along the Polish–Belarusian border, the country
opened its border to the Ukrainians fleeing the war and welcomed them warmly. Despite the lon
ger history of violent Polish–Ukrainian conflict, in the wake of the Russian attack, only the fring
iest right-wing groups in Poland tried to stir up anti-Ukrainian sentiments. Poland suddenly
became one of the top refugee-hosting nations in the world. The whole European Union made an
unprecedented move, abandoned its policy of closure for this particular group of refugees, and
activated its Temporary Protection Directive granting protection to all Ukrainian citizens. Barely
more than a week after the Russian invasion, the EU Commission’s president, Ursula von der
Leyen, declared: ‘Europe stands by those in need of protection. All those fleeing Putin's bombs
are welcome in Europe’ (European Commission 2022a). While the enthusiasm may have faded in
the meantime, in the first days after the full-scale invasion, Polish civil society was firmly sup
porting and welcoming Ukrainian refugees.
The inequality of this ‘bifurcated’ border regime became glaringly obvious (Adam and Hess
2023). The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, noted on 21
March 2022:
We have ( … ) witnessed overwhelming acts of welcome and compassion as neighbouring coun
tries, particularly local responders, have opened their hearts and homes to Ukrainians ( … ) while
I am humbled by the outpouring of support we witnessed by host countries and communities,
we also bore witness to the ugly reality that some Black and Brown people fleeing Ukraine—and
other wars and conflicts around the world—have not received the same treatment as Ukrainian
refugees. (UNHCR 2022)
3
EAS 3 July 1942, ‘Polish Refugees from Persia’.
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The most obvious illustration of this discriminatory behaviour was the treatment on the bor
der of Africans who had been studying or working in Ukraine before the war and fled along with
thousands of Ukrainians from the Russian attack (Kingston and Ekakitie 2024). The other group
was Ukrainian Roma who, unlike other Ukrainians, did face discrimination upon arrival in
Poland (Mirga-Wojtowicz et al. 2022). In addition, Syrians fleeing the same Russian bombs as
Ukrainians were not welcome. Chechen refugees are another interesting case as they fled
Russian state aggression but are largely Muslim. They were the largest refugee group in Poland
before the Ukrainians arrived but encountered an increasingly hostile Polish border regime from
2016 onwards (Stummer 2016; Szczepanik 2018; Klaus and Szulecka 2023: 479).
The question I want to answer with a look into history is: What explains this glaring differ
ence now and then? And how did officials legitimize their obviously discriminating behaviour? I
am not the first to try to explain the discrimination and a central aspect to explain this is racism.
The accepted refugees are considered White, the ones who are condemned to freeze to death or
drown are largely seen as Black or Brown. This has been rightfully criticized by many observers,
emphasizing the racialized logic of the preferential treatment of Ukrainians in Poland and the
workings of First-World border regimes as ‘racial borders’ generally (Achiume 2022; Balogun
2023; Zessin-Jurek 2023). While this does explain the discrimination in part, I argue that it is
more complex and other interrelated factors play a role in determining the delineation between
‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ refugees (see also Holmes and Casta~neda 2016). Answering calls
for historically grounded refugee studies (Marfleet 2007; Gatrell 2017; Kleist 2017; Banko et al.
2022) I analyse the discursive strategies around the acceptance of Polish refugees in East Africa
during the Second World War to shed light on recent developments in Poland’s refugee policy. I
propose this diachronic comparison of discourses around refugees as a way to bring insights
from refugee history into fruitful conversation with refugee studies’ focus on more recent forced
migration movements. I am not arguing that it is the same in the past as now, but I show the
similarities in governments’ explanations of their selective acceptance of refugees. Especially
the gendered relation with the military forces fighting against a common enemy is an aspect
that can be found today as well as in the imperial refugee regime of the past (on the latter see
Lingelbach 2022a). Looking into the history of Polish refugees in British colonial Africa shall serve
to highlight some of these issues and the intersection of race, gender, and war. I argue that the
changing geostrategic situation of the war led governments to host demarcated refugee groups
who were perceived as white and had a gendered relation to the soldiers fighting against the
common enemy.
This article will start with some theoretical considerations about the unequal treatment of
refugees and its history. In the second section, I will delve into the history of the Jewish refugees
who tried to enter Kenya to escape Nazi persecution before explaining the massive shift happen
ing when the mostly non-Jewish Polish refugees were warmly welcomed. Based on these histori
cal observations, I will relate the legitimizing rhetoric to current discursive strategies explaining
the unequal treatment of refugees in Poland. I will do this along the lines of race and gender, cul
minating in the discursive figure of the white ‘womenandchildren’ of the co-belligerent brothers
in arms as exceptionally deserving refugees.
2. Explaining unequal refugeeness
The universalism of the international refugee regime is an aspirational ideal that was never
achieved. As historians and legal scholars have made clear, the parochialism of the United
Nations refugee regime and the 1951 Geneva Convention was there from its beginnings in the af
termath of the Second World War (Gatrell 2013; Behrmann 2018; Krause 2021; Lingelbach
2022b). In his forceful and influential critique of the refugee regime and refugee studies,
Bhupinder Chimni lays bare this inequality in the international protection for refugees (Chimni
1998). Calling out the ‘myth of difference’ Chimni argued that during the global expansion pro
cess of the refugee regime around the 1960s wave of decolonization, its applicability was at the
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same time restricted. While newly independent states in the Global South pushed for the univer
salization and extension of the global refugee regime (Rahal and White 2022: 350), others limited
its provisions. This limitation was based on the claim that the new ‘Third World refugees’ were
different from the Europeans for whom the legislation and institutions were initially set up.
Building on Chimni’s work, Lucy Mayblin showed in the case of the British discussions about the
applicability of the Geneva Convention to the colonized that the colonial legacy of this difference
was intentionally there. British officials in the 1950s were not reluctant to assist non-European
refugees, but they were convinced that ‘a line must be drawn at access to fundamental rights’
(Mayblin 2014: 432).
Despite this parochialism and flawed practice, the UN-centred international refugee regime
did establish at least the ‘aspirational’ fiction of equal rights without discrimination. As
Claudena Skran describes it:
In the international refugee regime, the humanitarian principle had an aspirational quality and
the assistance norm set a very high standard—assistance for all refugees without discrimination
on the basis of race, religion, nationality, creed, strategic importance, or any other factor not di
rectly relevant to the needs of the refugees. (Skran 1995: 272)
Earlier legal instruments for refugee protection in the interwar years did not have this univer
sal aspiration and only covered delineated groups of refugees. The simultaneous activation of
the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive for the Ukrainian refugees and the ongoing hollowing
out of refugee rights seem to take us back to this earlier stage.
The idea that states discriminate between refugee groups is the basic assumption of political sci
entist Lamis Abdelaaty’s book Discrimination and Delegation (2021). Based on a broad comparative set
of cases she states: ‘Each country also discriminates among refugee groups, welcoming some and
excluding others’ (Abdelaaty 2021: 4). Examining the differences in the reaction of states to the in
flux of refugee groups, she argues there are two puzzles to be solved: The first is discrimination.
When do states accept and when do they reject refugee groups? The second is delegation. When do
states delegate refugee reception (especially refugee status determination) to UN organizations?
Summing up her findings, Abdelaaty observes that states either turn refugees away, accept them
or hand over the decision-making procedure to international organizations.
Abdelaaty (2021: 10) identifies interstate relations and ethnic affiliation as the core variables for
understanding these differences: ‘policymakers will adopt generous policies when refugees are
fleeing a hostile state and share the policymaker’s ethnic identity. They will adopt restrictive poli
cies when refugees are fleeing a friendly state and do not share the policymaker’s identity’. In this
definition, ethnicity is to be broadly understood and can include language, race, or religion—what
ever is important politically in the host country. Proximity between refugees and host society
increases the likelihood for refugee groups of the constituency of the host country’s leadership to
be accepted. The related argument concerning international relations between the sending coun
try’s government and the receiving country observes that it is more likely that states accept refu
gees fleeing from a hostile government. This makes three possible combinations: Refugee groups,
who are fleeing a hostile state and share some ethnic affinity with policymakers are welcomed.
Refugee groups who flee from a friendly state and do not share the ethnic affinity get rejected. In
conflicting cases, the refugee status determination is delegated to UN institutions.
To sum up, discrimination between refugee groups is a common phenomenon and geostrate
gic considerations as well as socially constructed markers of identity (like race, nationality, reli
gion, class and gender) play a role in this. Let us keep this in mind regarding our cases and now
jump back to the Second World War in Africa where we can observe related issues playing out.
3. Jewish refugees hindered from entering Kenya
In 1938, amidst a growing number of applications for entry into Kenya, the colonial government
set up a special board to deal with Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. As one official summed it up in
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an internal report after the war: ‘During 1938 the Principal Immigration Officer was perturbed by
the increasing number of applications coming from Central Europe—chiefly from parties of
Jewish extraction—for permission to enter Kenya.’4 The Immigration Board was supposed to re
view and advise on the treatment of refugees who were applying for entry into the colony.
However, this did not result in more permissions or preferential treatment on humanitarian
grounds. Quite the contrary, the Kenyan Immigration Restriction Ordinance was instead
amended in late 1938 to give officials more power to keep ‘undesirable persons’ out, aiming pri
marily at lower-class Jews without sufficient capital (Kennedy 1987: 89).
While the Board was set up as a reaction to the increasing number of applications by Jewish
refugees, Kenyan colonial officials were quick to declare that they did not discriminate. In
November 1938, the Kenyan Principal Immigration Officer George Pritchard Brown cautioned the
immigration officers in Mombasa, Kenya’s principal port of entry. They had been asking arriving
immigrants whether they were Jewish and categorized them accordingly as ‘Jewish refugees’. For
Pritchard Brown, this was too blunt because Kenyan policy was officially not discriminating ‘on
grounds of race or religion’. The Mombasa border officers were instead ordered to simply catego
rize them as ‘refugees’ although it was quite clear to the authorities whom they were talking
about.5 Once more this shows the importance of ‘labelling’ and classification for refugees (Zetter
1991; Glasman 2017).
In the internal correspondence, the main argument for excluding the Jewish refugees was
that they could not return to Germany and were thus likely to stay permanently and could be
come a charge to public funds if they did not find gainful employment. Due to the anti-Semitic
Nazi laws, Jews became ‘de facto stateless’,6 and British officials in Kenya were aware that they
could not deport them back to Germany once they had been admitted. While this was not stated
openly, anti-Semitism did play a role in the rejection of Jewish refugees—in the same way that
most other countries in the world refused to accept German Jews, epitomized in the infamously
failed Evian Conference of 1938 (Arendt 1958: 282; Caestecker and Moore 2010).
The chairman of the board stated in retrospect about a scheme proposed by well-established
Jewish residents to accept more refugees: ‘With some difficulty we held off more entrants at that
time and the scheme lapsed at the beginning of the war.’7 The board rejected all other proposals
for group settlements, ranging from a group of thirty people to another plan that was supposed
to bring 10,000 refugees from Hungary. Only a few hundred individuals managed to enter Kenya
to escape Nazi persecution. As a result, only very few found a safe place in East Africa or else
where on the continent (Shapiro 2002; Kasper-Holtkotte 2019). With the outbreak of the war in
1939, all refugees from Germany were considered enemy aliens and interned or barred
from entering.
Next to anti-Semitism, opposition against Jewish immigration was also argued on the
connected matters of class and race. An illuminating example of the widespread anti-refugee
sentiment among Kenya’s white settlers can be seen in a 1936 book by the British Kenyan settler
Evelyn Brodhurst-Hill. Defending white settler domination in Kenya against reformers and critics
in Britain, she spoke out vehemently against any plans for accepting refugees from Europe into
the colony. She claimed instead to represent ‘the point of view of the settler, who is not in favour
of the introduction of “poor whites” into a “black country”’ (Brodhurst-Hill 1936: 126). After citing
some other examples, she made her stance clear on the possible acceptance of Jewish refugees
fleeing the worsening condition under Nazi rule. It is worth quoting at length here:
[some people] want to make Kenya the dumping ground for yet another distressed minority or
misunderstood section of the earth's teeming millions … something like 50,000 persecuted Jews
4
Kenya National Archives (hereafter KNA): BN/46/63/11, Member for Health and Local Government to Attorney
General, 23 November 1946.
5
KNA: BN/46/62, p. 79, G. Pritchard Brown, Ag. Principle Immigration Officer, Nairobi to Immigration Officer,
Mombasa, 5 November 1938.
6
KNA: AG/7/8, p. 19A, ‘Minutes of the 6th Meeting of the Immigration Board held on Monday the 14th November
1938, at 9 am,’ Nairobi.
7
KNA: BN/46/63/11, Member for Health and Local Government to Attorney General, 23 November 1946.
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from a particularly chilly part of Central Europe, and they were in the limelight for a time as po
tential settlers—that dreadful Hitler, poor miserable people, so persecuted, so frugal &c. (we knew
all the catchwords and the formula by that time and considering how sympathetic most people
were with the Jews in Germany, anything might have happened!). (Brodhurst-Hill 1936: 126f)
While Brodhurst-Hill might be an extreme case in her condescending tone, there was a long-
standing opposition among the British settlers and administrators towards poorer Whites as well
as against non-British. From the 1920s onwards, Jewish immigrants to South Africa were increas
ingly perceived as impoverished Eastern Europeans and not as wealthy settlers bringing invest
ment. In this period, the image of the problematic ‘East European Jew’ emerged as an ‘undesired’
migrant (F. Wolff 2014: 194, 197). Generally, poor Whites posed a challenge to the colonial divi
sion between Blacks and whites and images of white superiority. Prominently in South Africa,
but also elsewhere, established settlers and colonial administrators were concerned about the
emergence of a poor white class and took precautions against this threat (Cooper and Stoler
1997: 4–11; Mlambo 2000; Terreblanche 2002). The colonial governments in East Africa did not
want to arouse the settler opposition and endanger the fragile colonial social order.
The reluctance to accept refugees into the colonies was not limited to East Africa. When the
Foreign Office approached the Colonial Office in December 1940 and asked if they could accom
modate refugees from allied nations, the refusal was clear. Colonial Secretary George Lloyd re
plied in a sympathetic tone, but clearly negative in the matter: ‘I am afraid that there is little
that the Colonial Empire could undertake to do in providing asylum for friendly aliens, however
desirable such action might be in principle’.8 John G. Hibbert, the so-called ‘refugee expert’ in the
Colonial Office summed it up in a note: ‘The possibility of settling refugees in the Colonial
Empire has been exhaustively explored on a number of occasions during the last seven or eight
years’.9 The two refugee groups for whom the Empire was ‘raked over’10 to find options to reset
tle them had been first Assyrians from Iraq and then Central European Jews. In both cases, only
a few individuals were accepted, if any, at all.11 The consensus in the British administration of
the 1930s was clear: The colonies were no place for refugees.
4. An unexpected welcome for Polish refugees
In 1942, in the middle of a massive war threatening the British Empire and its metropolitan core,
something remarkable happened. The British colonial administrations in East and Central Africa
opened their doors and accepted nearly 20,000 destitute refugees from the Polish rural periphery.
In contrast to earlier efforts to fend off Jewish refugees, some of them even received a warm wel
come with music, snacks, donations, and speeches. Michael Marrus noted on the group: ‘In strik
ing contrast to what was claimed about the Jews, namely, that there was no room anywhere for
them, space was somehow found for the Polish civilian exiles, seen as cobelligerents against
Hitler’ (Marrus 1985: 246). What led the colonial governments to accept this particular group?
To understand this episode, we have to go back to the beginning of the war. After the German
attack on Poland in 1939, the Soviet army occupied the country’s eastern part, as agreed in the
Hitler–Stalin Pact. In the winter of 1940, the Soviet authorities started deporting thousands of
Polish citizens from the Eastern part of the country (what is today Western Ukraine and Belarus)
to labour camps and special settlements in Siberia and Kazakhstan. After the German attack on
the Soviet Union in 1941, the London-based Polish government-in-exile and Moscow reached an
8
National Archives of the United Kingdom: Public Records Office (hereafter PRO): CO 323/1750/12, p. 5, George
Lloyd, Secretary of State for the Colonies to Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary, 10 January 1941.
9
PRO: CO 323/1750/12, p. 1, ‘Settlement of Refugees in the Colonial Empire’ by J.G. Hibbert, Colonial Office, n.d.
10
PRO: CO 323/1750/12, p. 2, George Lloyd, CO to Ernest Bevin, MP [Secretary of State for Labour], 12
December 1940.
11
PRO: CO 323/1750/12, p. 1, ‘Settlement of Refugees in the Colonial Empire’ by J.G. Hibbert, Colonial Office, n.d.
According to Hibbert, the Iraqi Assyrians were supposed to be resettled to Brazil first, but when this scheme col
lapsed, the alternative was British Guiana until this also proved unfeasible. Settlement schemes for Jewish refugees
from Nazism were examined in preparation of the Evian Conference, but showed only very limited results, e.g. 25
refugees to Kenya and ‘a few dozen’ to Northern Rhodesia or Nyasaland.
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agreement including the release of all Poles in the Soviet Union to form a Polish army and join
the Allies in the defence against the German aggression. Eventually, this army was transferred
to British-controlled Iran where they arrived over the Caspian Sea in 1942. Most men of fighting
age (and some women) joined the Polish Army fighting under British Supreme Command against
the fascists. But to the surprise of the British officials receiving the Poles in the port of Pahlavi,
some 40,000 destitute civilians were arriving with the soldiers in Iran. Realizing they had to take
care of them in order to have the soldiers fighting with them, the British set up tented camps in
Iran. The Foreign Office informed Churchill in a note: ‘The morale of these troops could hardly
be good had those with wives and children been compelled to leave them behind in the USSR’
(cited in Sword 1994: 68). Due to logistical problems, the proximity to a strategically crucial war
area and the danger this brought, British strategists in the Middle East decided that the civilians
had to be brought somewhere else. They tried to find any place in the world but eventually
ended up with the British colonies as the only available option (see Lingelbach 2020).
Nearly 20,000 refugees stayed from 1942 up until 1950 in the British colonies in Africa. Most of
them were in Tanganyika and Uganda, some in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and a few hun
dred in Kenya and South Africa. They lived in refugee camps in relative comfort and were privi
leged by their whiteness. At the same time, the colonial authorities were not happy with the
newcomers, isolated them, and considered them dubious, potentially transgressive, and there
with dangerous for the boundaries of whiteness and thus the colonial order of society
(Lingelbach 2020). In this suspicion, they followed arguments earlier brought forward in opposi
tion to the Jewish refugees. Blocking out the Poles was, however, no option available to the colo
nial governments.
While colonial officials and settlers were still concerned about the refugee influx, the Poles
did receive a warm welcome upon arrival. On a stopover at the Nairobi train station, white set
tler women and wives of colonial officials organized a reception with a live band, fruits, sand
wiches, and cakes for the refugees (Lingelbach 2022b: 15–6). In Tanganyika, the administration
organized the colony-wide collection of toys for refugee children for their first Christmas in the
camps.12 In Lusaka camp, one refugee later remembered to her astonishment ‘The war is so bad,
how can they give us so much meat?’ (Chappell and Milek 2004: 158). After the suffering, hunger,
cold, disease, and death in the Soviet camps, the Poles enjoyed a rather privileged position. At
least materially, the living standards in the refugee camps were better than that of many of their
African neighbours. For many of them, the material standards in the refugee camps were even
better than in their home villages in peripheral Eastern Poland (Lingelbach 2020: 210).
After years of fending off refugees, the sudden turn-around needed explaining, however. In
June 1942, pending the arrival of the refugees in East Africa, Nairobi’s most important, settler-
dominated newspaper published an editorial on the issue. Complaining that the government did
not inform the public sufficiently about the incoming group, they outlined the circumstances:
On inquiry we elicited the important fact, which changes the complexion of the problem pre
sented, that they are the wives and families of some of those gallant, indomitable Polish soldiers
who are fighting with the Allied forces in the Middle East. To them we owe a duty. To look after
their wives and families will be a pleasure.13
The important point emphasized here was the refugees’ gendered relation to the brave Polish
fighters. Just to illustrate the urgency and precarious situation of the Empire at that time in the
war, let me highlight a small quote from the next day’s editorial on the situation in Egypt.
Describing the military situation in North Africa and the Soviet Union, the newspaper warned:
‘This reverse on the southern flank of a vast battlefield stretching from the Nile delta to Kharkov
is disappointing and even alarming’.14 The Axis’ advances in Egypt and towards the Caucasian
oil fields were a direct threat to the future of the British Empire and indirectly led to the
12
Tanzania National Archives (hereafter TNA) 69/782/4, Neil Stewart, Commissioner for Aliens & Internees,
Daressalaam to all Provincial Commissioners, 19 November 1942.
13
EAS 30 June 1942, ‘Refugees from Persia,’ Editorial.
14
EAS 1 July 1942, ‘The Battle for Egypt,’ Editorial.
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acceptance of the refugees into the colonies. The Middle East was crucial for the British Empire
and the other Allies as well. It was imperative to keep the logistical support for the Red Army
flowing through the Persian Corridor (the weapons, vehicles, food, and other material supplies
given to the Soviets through the US Lend-Lease Act), protect the Soviet oilfields and the Suez
Canal to keep communications open with India. In this critical situation, reinforcements by the
Polish soldiers were more than welcome.
It was the connection to the soldiers that made the British Empire and its colonial officials ac
cept the civilian refugees, and this connection was stressed extensively. This is the reason why
the East African Standard went to such lengths to explain that these were not the kind of desti
tute Eastern European refugees like the ones they eagerly kept out earlier. The British Ministry of
Information made another release in September 1942 reporting on the ‘rousing reception’ the
‘Polish women and children’ were given in Nairobi. The report went on: ‘Speeches made at the
reception stressed the high appreciation felt for the magnificent services rendered by the Polish
troops for the Allied cause, and sympathy for the extreme hardships suffered by the Poles in the
determined fight for the liberty of their country’.15 It was an explanation through two motiva
tions: military and compassion. The head of the colonial refugee administration in East Africa
even noted in retrospect that its activities were ‘actuated more by military and strategic consid
erations than by humanitarian as it was imperative to remove these refugees from Persia’.16
While the refugees lived a rather comfortable life in the camps, their status was nevertheless
ambiguous, and the colonial authorities kept them as far as possible away from disturbing the
colonial social order. Their Catholic religion and Eastern European peasant-class background
made them potentially transgressive and a classificatory problem in societies resting on the
sharp distinction between a poor Black majority and a rich and powerful small white ruling
class. After the war, most Poles refused to go back to a by-then Soviet-dominated Poland. The co
lonial governments were clear that they did not want to settle the refugees permanently in the
colonies and insisted on the temporariness of their sojourn. Eventually, most of them were
allowed to go to Britain and joined the demobilized soldiers there. In 1951, the last Polish refugee
camp was finally closed, and only a few individuals were allowed to stay on (Lingelbach 2020).
5. Exceptionally deserving refugees: race, gender, and
co-belligerence
I argue that we can observe the lines of argumentation deployed to legitimize the selective refu
gee hosting in the British colonies spelt out comparably in the recent history of Poland concern
ing Ukrainian refugees. There are multiple intersecting explanations at work of which the most
important are race (partly coupled with religion), gender, and co-belligerence. The condition of
war and the existence of a common enemy is the underlying strategic rationale, but the legitima
tion is additionally argued in gendered and racialized terms. In both cases, we can sum up that
the hosting societies supported the white brothers in arms by taking care of their women and
children. I will first address race, then gender, and finally bring the two together in connection
with the status as co-belligerents. Throughout, I will draw on historical and recent examples.
5.1 Race and the eastern borders of Europe
Race is no stable, given property of persons, but constructed relationally (Steyn 2001: 5). There is
no whiteness without Blackness. This difference has to be constantly created and reproduced
and is ‘fundamentally asymmetrical’ with whiteness describing the position of privilege
(Frankenberg 1993: 236). However, it remains historically specific, who occupies this position,
where its boundaries are drawn and this always intersects with other categories of difference. As
the cases of the Poles in Africa and the Ukrainians in Poland show, the question of who belongs
15
PRO: CO 323/1845/24, ‘Polish Women & Children in Nairobi’ by Ministry of Information, 10 September 1942.
16
Bodleian Libraries: Commonwealth and African Collections, Oxford, s. 1366/9, ‘The East African Refugee
Administration’ by Charles Lamb Bruton, no date.
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to the privileged position of whiteness can shift in response to strategic considerations and local
social circumstances (for a related case in postwar Australia, see Persian 2017). Some people
who are seen as inferior/different/other can become privileged/equal/same if the circumstances
make this opportune. Questions of class and religion play intersecting roles in this context.
If we take into perspective the longer history of East-Central Europe, we see that Poland had
been a diverse space up until the Second World War and its aftermath. Poland had been a multi
cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-confessional patchwork. To be sure, there was
friction, discrimination, and conflict, but in any case, the population of the interwar years was a
diverse mix. About one-third of the population of the Second Polish Republic before the war were
members of an ethnic minority group. The Second World War and its aftermath put an end to
this diversity and led to a homogenization never seen before (Zielinski 2009). This homogeniza
tion was the outcome of the murder of most of the Jewish population by the German Nazis and
the post-war ‘disentanglement’ of populations including the expulsion of the Germans and the
Ukrainian–Polish population exchange (Gousseff 2011; Reinisch and White 2011). From then on
wards, the Polish nation became a rather ethnically homogeneous Catholic, Polish-speaking soci
ety. The communist years saw no large-scale immigration into Poland, and from the 1990s
onwards, Poland witnessed a strong labour emigration out of the country. In many Western
European countries, Poles encountered discrimination themselves. The largest group migrating
to Poland in recent years were Ukrainian migrant workers, increasing since the beginning of the
military conflict with Russia in 2014 (Gorny 2019; Klaus and Szulecka 2023: 473).
In the eyes of British settlers and officials in Africa, the whiteness of the Eastern Europeans
was in doubt. However, the connection of the Poles to the armed forces and the need to contrib
ute to the Imperial War Effort made it imperative to accept them. In contrast, Jewish refugees
fleeing Nazi persecution had no army, and widespread anti-Semitism among the British settlers
made them seem dangerous. The Polish officials in Africa emphasized their whiteness continu
ously. For example, the Polish government-in-exile Minister in the Middle East, Henryk
Strasburger, stated in an interview with a Kenyan newspaper in 1944: ‘The Poles really belong to
Western Europe—we have what is called Roman culture’.17 Public performances of high culture
and folklore from refugee troupes, like traditional dances, classical music, or theatre shows,
emphasized the commonality and Europeannes of the Poles. The music school in Tengeru
camp in Tanganyika may be the most prominent example. Under the leadership of Lwow
Conservatorium graduate Jadwiga Marko, it had over 150 students who sometimes performed
for white settler audiences in neighbouring Arusha town.18
The Europeanness of the Ukrainians was likewise in doubt for a long time. The Polish quasi-
colonial domination of the Eastern borderlands (so-called Kresy) in the interwar period and the
conflicts over the eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic led to strong antagonisms between
Poles and Ukrainians in the area (Bakuła 2007). The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern
Galicia committed by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War fuelled this conflict
even more (see Gross 1988; Snyder 2003). Since the 1990s, bilateral relations got better, and
Poland supported Ukrainian independence from Russia. Echoes of the earlier antagonism resur
faced again in Polish debates about the commemoration of the massacres and the role of
Ukrainian nationalists therein. Apart from this, larger numbers of Ukrainian migrant workers
did low-paid jobs in construction, domestic, and service work in Poland. Polish–Ukrainian rela
tions were not always unproblematic, but Russia’s full-scale attack made all this fade into
the background.
While race may not be the determining factor in Polish–Ukrainian relations, there are strong
discourses of ‘Eastness’ in East and Central Europe, whereby the eastern neighbour is con
structed as less civilized (Zarycki 2014; see also L. Wolff 1994; Bakic-Hayden 1995). Instead of ra
cial binaries, complex ethnic and religious boundaries and ideas of civilizational superiority do
play larger roles in the region as recent scholarship shows (see Kalmar 2023). In Polish nationalist
17
EAS 15 April 1944, ‘Polish Minister’s Impressions of His E.A. Tour.’
18
Głos Polski 2 December 1945, p. 9, ‘Szkoła muzyczna w Tengeru.’
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self-constructions, Catholicism is central and the country is seen as the last bulwark of
Christianity against the Muslim and Orthodox threat from the East (Snochowska-Gonzalez
2012). With the Russian attack on Ukraine, this idea of the bulwark got a new urgency and the
Western European discourse on Ukraine changed. While Ukrainians were ignored, belittled, or
seen as dubious by most people in the EU, this changed in 2022. Ukraine became Western civili
zation’s last bulwark against Russian barbarism, shifting the boundaries of Europe further east.
In this process, the whiteness of Ukrainians was emphasized and their Europeanness was under
lined (Balogun 2023: 2–3).
The figure of the bulwark between European civilization and Asian barbarism persists despite
its changing geographies. American author Louis E. van Norman wrote in 1907: ‘For four centu
ries Poland was the bulwark of Europe against the floods of barbarism from the East’ (Van
Norman 1907). Drawing on a quote from Victor Hugo, he described Poland as ‘The Knight among
Nations’ protecting the frontier against the Asian savages. In today’s European discourse, this
frontier runs along the frontline in Ukraine and further North along the Polish–Belarusian bor
der. As the Ukrainian speaker of Parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk put it in a speech at the
European Parliament on 1 March 2022: ‘I would like you to understand that today Ukraine is
defending the border of the civilised world’ (European Parliament 2022). Even more recently,
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk argued for the continuing fortification of the Poland–Belarus
border in February 2024: ‘This is a question of the survival of our Western civilization’ (Tilles
2024). The discourse remains the same, only the supposed line between civilization and barba
rism is shifting and today includes Ukraine, which has taken over the role of the ‘Knight
among Nations’.
5.2 Gender and womenandchildren as deserving refugees
Both groups are usually portrayed as consisting exclusively of women and children. To start
with the numbers, the Polish refugees in Africa were 47% women, 42% children and youth, and
only 11% men (Lingelbach 2020: 133). The Ukrainians in Poland in 2022 showed nearly the
same composition and were 49.4% women, 42.6% children, and 8% men (World Health
Organisation and Statistical Office of Poland, Rzeszow 2022). The statistics thus indeed show a
dominance of women and children, albeit some men are among them as well. The unwanted
refugee groups are instead gendered as male in current anti-refugee discourse with the non-
white Muslim young man portrayed as the ultimate danger (see Bloch 2023). In the moral panic
that erupted in Poland when some migrants entered through Belarus in 2021, the people were
described as dangerous ‘weapons’ in ‘hybrid warfare’ sent by Belarusian dictator Lukashenko
(Zessin-Jurek 2023: 108–9). Although they were simply seeking safety from war and misery
elsewhere and consisted not only of single men, they were portrayed as invaders sent by the
enemy. Only civil society groups and oppositional media emphasized their humanity as well as
the presence of women and children among the refugees (Bloch 2023: 45; Pietrusinska 2022). In
East Africa, the Jewish refugees were relatedly seen as a danger, although a more subtle one.
The Polish refugee group was almost exclusively described as female and thus supposedly in
need of protection.
As feminist International Relations scholar Cynthia Enloe emphasized, ‘womenandchildren’
are amalgamated into an indistinguishable category of innocence, vulnerability and victimhood
(Enloe 1990). In humanitarian discourse, womenandchildren are the epitome of innocence and the
object of care and protection. At the same time, they are deprived of their agency and treated as
speechless, silenced victims. As Lisa Malkki (1995: 11) argues, ‘women and children embody a
special kind of powerlessness’ crucial to the construction of refugees as ‘bare humanity’. In hu
manitarian and charity representations, refugees are deserving because they are innocent and
this innocence is best shown by focusing on women and children. Recently, this could also be ob
served in UNHCRs social media campaigns for Syrian and Ukrainian refugees (Ongenaert and
Soler 2024). The accepted refugee groups are gendered as female and thus seen as posing no
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danger to the dominant male groups in the host societies. Instead, they are portrayed as in need
of protection, control, and guidance.
Relatedly, being white and women opens the opportunity to potentially become part of the
dominant white, patriarchal society. As long as they do not transgress the boundaries of white
ness and respectability, they are no competition but even a possible enforcement. Indeed, about
200 Polish refugee women married white residents in Africa and therewith lost their nationality
(constructed as dependent on the male head of household) and increased the ranks of white set
tler society (Lingelbach 2020: 138–40). Likewise, most of the 500 Polish orphans who stayed in the
South African camp in Oudtshoorn continued their education in the country and joined the
White part of Apartheid South Africa. For Ukrainian refugee women and children, the possibility
of blending into European societies is given as well. Non-white refugees do not have the same
possibility of disappearing into Polish society (Balogun 2024).
5.3 Co-belligerence and connecting soldiers and refugees
The protection of the womenandchildren of the brothers in arms is portrayed as a contribution to
the common fight. As Nira Yuval-Davis pointed out in her work on gender, war, and nation:
‘Wars are seen to be fought for the sake of the “womenandchildren,” and the fighting men are
comforted and reassured by the knowledge that “their women” are keeping the hearth fires going
and are waiting for them to come home’ (Yuval-Davis 1997: 111). While women also fight in
wars, their supposedly ‘natural’ role is more often seen in the reproduction of the nation. The he
roic male soldier fights the enemy, but women are the reproductive core of the nation and thus
integral to the nation’s war effort. As women are an integral part of the fighting nation, the pro
tection they get abroad is a reassurance for the fighting men—in the case of the Polish refugees
as well as in the case of the Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
On his visit in 1944, Polish Minister Strasburger underlined the close connection of the two
parts of the Polish nation. The ‘needy’ Polish refugees in Africa and ‘the Poland which is fighting
with all the means at its disposal at the side (of) her allies’ and underlined: ‘They are the wives,
children and parents of the Polish fighting soldiers’.19 News stories of Ukrainian women visiting
their fighting soldier men in Ukraine are a recurrent topic in European media. Due to the geo
graphical proximity, Ukrainian women and children can regularly visit their fighting family
members and stay in contact through EU-facilitated free or price-reduced mobile phone and in
ternet options (European Commission 2022b). In contrast, Ukrainian men who tried to flee from
the war despite the ban to leave were portrayed as cowards and shamed in Polish state media
(Bloch 2023: 46–8). Their supposedly rightful place was on the frontlines. Likewise, Kenyan set
tlers criticized Jewish refugee men who were supposedly sitting idle in the safety of the colony.20
Some of them answered these accusations with a series of reader’s letters in the local paper
underlining the fact that they were not allowed to work or fight due to their status as ‘Enemy
Aliens’.21 The Polish refugees in Africa sent letters and parcels to the Polish soldiers reiterating
their close bond repeatedly. The Nairobi-based Polish refugee newspaper Głos Polski was sent to
the Polish troops as well, and its editors encouraged the refugees in the camps to report on their
activities to keep up the bond between refugees and soldiers.22 The relationship between the
army and the refugees was close and emphasized constantly.
This relationship with the army is what sets these groups apart from other refugees. Just like
Malkki observed concerning Burundian refugees in Tanzania, the Ukrainians were portrayed as
innocent. In contrast to other refugee groups, however, they were not constructed as depoliti
cized and ‘ahistorical, universal humanitarian subject’ (Malkki 1996: 378). As the Bulgarian
Prime Minister put it tellingly in March 2022, the Ukrainians are not ‘the usual refugee wave of
people with an unknown past’ (Adam and Hess 2023: 66). They are, like the Poles in the British
19
EAS 15 April 1944, ‘Polish Minister’s Impressions of His E.A. Tour.’
20
EAS 10 July 1942, ‘Refugees’ by John Williams, Kitale.
21
EAS 21 July 1942, ‘Refugees’ by H. Weyl, Kisumu; EAS 24 July 1942, ‘Refugees’ by ‘Give us the Chance’, Ol Joro
Orok; EAS 31 July 1942, ‘Refugees’ by ‘Refugee.’
22
Głos Polski 14 October 1945, ‘Z Osiedli’ p. 10.
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colonies, portrayed as having a very specific past and relation to an ongoing war and this legiti
mizes their preferential treatment. Both are no representatives of universal human suffering but
exceptionally deserving groups of refugees.
6. Conclusion
There are striking similarities between the acceptance of Polish refugees in the British African
colonies and the recent acceptance of Ukrainian refugees in Poland and the rest of the EU.
Governments gave both groups an exceptional welcome while they continued their general anti-
refugee policies. Even more striking is the similarity in the way that this exceptional welcome
was legitimized along racialized and gendered connections with the war. Building on Lamis
Abdelaaty’s work, I argue that both international strategic considerations and domestic opinion
do play a role in the discrimination between different refugee groups. In contrast to the model,
however, the accepted refugee groups received a warm welcome not primarily because they fled
from the enemy, but because they were connected to allied fighting armies. Additionally, this
connection was discursively produced in a clearly gendered way: Taking care of the wives and
children of the ‘brave’ male soldiers fighting ‘gallantly’ for the side of the hosting government
was portrayed by politicians and journalists as a contribution to the common war effort. Looking
into the current situation and past incidents of sudden turn-arounds in refugee hosting from
closed to selectively open doors, my argument here is that race, gender, and the fight against a
common enemy do play important and intersecting roles. All three have to fall in place at a mo
ment when the dominant actors in the hosting societies feel urgently endangered to produce
such a massive exception to established policies.
The discursive figure of the exceptionally deserving womenandchildren of the white brothers
in arms is the epitome of this intersectional argumentation. They are not simply deserving be
cause women and children are portrayed as helpless, speechless, and harmless victims par ex
cellence. They are more than the humanitarian object of bare life that needs to be saved. At the
same time, they are not only deserving because they are members of an allied nation in a com
mon struggle—a nation that is in the logic of enmity and co-belligerence a nation of tragic and
admirable heroes. And they are not simply white Europeans like the dominating actors within
the hosting countries. They are all this combined and therewith the multiple and intersecting
refugee groups for whom an exception can and must be made when it comes to refugee admit
tance. They are the group for whom the well-guarded and nearly shut door of the border needs
to be thrown wide open—just to close it again after them. Or in the above-cited words of Ursula
van der Leyen: ‘They deserve it. We need to do that now’.
Both the British Empire and the Polish state, like many other EU countries, had an entrenched
and firm anti-refugee policy. Both had just fended off other refugees when they suddenly made
exceptions for a specific, delineated group. The British colonial governments were clear in their
refusal to admit Jewish refugees from Germany or any other group in the interwar period. The
Polish government followed an increasingly harsh anti-refugee policy since the early 2000s. Both
made an exception without changing their overall policy. In both cases, this came in a moment
of vulnerability and fear from the threat by an advancing enemy—the British from Hitler and the
Axis forces, Poland, and the EU from Putin and the Russian forces. The war changed policies and
strategic considerations became paramount. In both cases, the welcomed refugee group was
connected to soldiers fighting the common enemy, consisted mainly of women and children and
was considered white.
Other people were not given the same welcome, even when they ran from the enemy like the
Jewish Germans fleeing the Nazis, Syrians and Chechens fleeing from Russian bombs, or African
students and Ukrainian Roma escaping from Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Due to anti-Semitism,
antigypsyism, anti-Muslim, or anti-Black racism, these refugees were not considered deserving
and worthy of acceptance and support. In Poland, they were considered dangerous ‘bogus’ asy
lum seekers with mere economic motives (Kmak 2015; Klaus and Szulecka 2023) or potential
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‘public charges’ in the case of impoverished stateless Jews in Kenya.23 In addition, they were not
directly linked to military forces fighting the common enemy. There needs to be a clear strategic
interest for the host governments, and the group has to be perceived as harmless.
Focusing on one case of selective refugee hosting from the 1940s and another one from
the 2020s shows the value of history for refugee studies. More than simply stating the similarities
between the two cases, the view into the past can help to contextualize what is going on in the
present. Oftentimes, the urgency and suddenness of massive refugee movements seem unprece
dented, and indeed, March 2022 was the very first time the EU Temporary Protection Directive
was invoked. However, as I showed here, earlier episodes of unequal treatment of refugees show
that the situation is not unique. Bringing together historical and recent observations helps us to
see the combination of factors coming together in the legitimizing argumentation for the excep
tions. Going beyond universalist appeals to human rights, the exceptional welcome is explained
through the specific deservingness of clearly delineated refugee groups based on strategic
considerations and their social, racialized, and gendered categorization. Combining history
and recent observations in one article may serve to illuminate changes and continuities in the
argumentation and advance the interdisciplinary exchange in the field of refugee studies.
Acknowledgements
This article profited deeply from the generous feedback by members of the ‘Internalizing
Borders’ research group at ZiF Bielefeld, especially Frank Wolff, Witold Klaus, Magdalena Kmak,
Sabine Hess, Levke Harders, Jens Adam, Maurizio Albahari, Volker Heins, Elissa Helms, Albert
Manke, Deborah Bunmi Ojo, Marijana Hamersak, and Mareike Gebhardt. I received valuable
feedback on an earlier version I presented at the ECAS Conference in Cologne in a panel orga
nized by Bolaji Balogun and Stephanie Rudwick. Finally, I want to thank the two anonymous
reviewers and the journal’s editors for their helpful comments and support. All remaining mis
takes and shortcomings are my own responsibility.
Conflict of interest. None declared.
Funding
This article is the outcome of research conducted within the “Africa Multiple” Cluster of
Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG,
German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy EXC 2052/1–390713894.
Substantial parts of it were written as a residential fellow in the research group “Internalizing
Borders: The Social and Normative Consequences of the European Border Regime” at the Centre
for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld.
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Journal of Refugee Studies, 2025, 38, 674–689
https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feae089
Original Article
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Subjects
People & roles
- Author(s)
- Lingelbach, Jochen
Origins & context
- Title
- Unequal refugeeness : Race, gender, and co-belligerence from Poles in colonial Africa to Ukrainians in Poland
- Publication type
- Article
- Language
- English
- Journal
- Journal of Refugee Studies
- Year
- December 2025
- volume
- 38
- issue
- 3
- Page start
- 674
- Page end
- 689
- Status
- Peer reviewed
- Relation
- Open Access Publizieren
Identifiers & sources
- Source ID (eref-/epub-)
- eref-91676
- ISSN
- 1471-6925
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