In a remote part of western Uganda, just south of the Murchison Falls National Park, tucked outside the village of Nyabyeya, stands an incongruous building: the Our Lady Queen of Poland Church, standing on a small hill overlooking the surrounding forest. This Catholic church was constructed between 1943 and 1945, its white walls built to resemble a European cathedral, with crosses adorning its roof. The inscription at the church entrance is written in four languages — Polish, English, Latin and Runyoro, the local language. The graveyard contains a disproportionately high number of children’s graves, many of whom seemingly died at birth. A few raised mounds dotted across the cemetery indicate the final resting places of people whose names are now lost to history.
This is the site of a former refugee camp, where over 3,000 displaced Poles made their homes during World War II. Visiting the erstwhile Nyabyeya settlement and church, one is struck by its remoteness, even with modern road infrastructure. During the one-hour drive from Masindi, I passed savanna vegetation, villages and farming plots set against a hilly green backdrop. Here, Barbara Porajska lived for five years, as she recalled over 40 years later in her autobiography, “From the Steppes to the Savannah,” published in 1988. She wrote about lessons in the Nyabyeya settlement school, singing in the children’s church choir and befriending Farasico, the young man her parents employed as a housekeeper. Her memoirs reveal the hardship endured by Polish refugees, their reactions to a radically new environment, and the tension between their camaraderie with the local population and the insidious effects of white supremacy and racism.
The church and cemetery are almost all that is left from this little-remembered event in Ugandan — and African — history, when the country took in over 7,000 displaced people in total from Poland between 1942 and 1948. They lived in relatively isolated communities in remote settlements, far removed from European expatriates already living in Uganda. With the help of African laborers, they built their own schools, hospitals and church, constructing self-sufficient communities that were managed by the British protectorate government and guarded by African soldiers, known as “askaris.” The Poles developed ostensibly friendly relations with the African Ugandans with whom they interacted in the camps. However, a closer look at the sources shows that beneath this veneer lay the same structural racism that was pervasive throughout the British Empire.
The summer of 1939 remained etched in Barbara’s memories as “the very last, carefree summer of my childhood in my native Poland,” she wrote. Life as the 10-year-old knew it then changed overnight: The onset of air raids killed her beloved dachshund Gogo, and her cousin Roman was killed by a bomb on a train. When her home region of eastern Poland was invaded by the Soviet Union, her private Catholic school became secular. Gone was the iconography of Mary and Jesus, replaced by “portraits in ugly frames of Lenin and Stalin, red paper flowers and red paper ribbons.” Most sinisterly, her father, an enemy of the Soviet Union, was arrested.
In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which essentially carved up Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. For Poland, this entailed being divided in two: The west became Nazi-occupied, while the east became Soviet territory. The USSR wasted no time in deporting those it regarded as anti-Soviet, targeting Poles from across the social spectrum. Between 1939 and 1941, 300,000 Polish citizens were forcibly displaced and sent to remote areas across the USSR, either to “corrective” labor camps or to settlements where they endured forced labor. Women and children were sent to work on remote farms. Porajaska and her parents and older sister Ala had lived a comfortable middle-class life in Lvov — now Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine — until the Soviet invasion in 1939. Her father, chief commissioner of the Lvov police force — and therefore a prime suspect as an anti-Soviet threat — was arrested almost immediately and his family did not hear from him for almost a year. Barbara, Ala and their mother were sent on a long journey across Soviet Asia, moving from kolkhoz to kolkhoz — working in these agricultural collectives that consisted of state-run farms operated by peasant labor.
This precarious situation officially ended on July 30, 1941, when the Sikorski-Mayski agreement between the USSR and the Polish government-in-exile in London was signed, following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union the previous month. The accord, among other terms, stipulated the release of all Polish citizens forcibly displaced across the USSR, as well as the Polish army joining the Allies in the war against Hitler’s Axis. Due to the need for troop enforcement in North Africa, Polish soldiers, along with their families, were transferred to Iran from March 1942 onward. Barbara and her family faced precisely this fate after reuniting with her father, who joined the Polish army after his release from prison. Arriving at the Iranian port of Pahlavi (known today as Bandar-e Anzali), they were met by British army officials. From there, they were transferred inland to Tehran, before being moved from camp to camp across Iran. While still enduring discomfort in those settlements, the situation was infinitely better than what they had experienced in Kazakhstan and Russia. Although technically civilians, as families of soldiers, they were transferred to camps for management and administrative purposes by British authorities.
Britain did not want the Poles to stay in Iran for too long, because they were becoming liabilities in the war. The settlement camps were located too close to the war theaters and the presence of refugees made the existing food shortages in Iran even more severe. In a memorandum in July 1942, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden proposed moving the refugees to British territories in eastern and central Africa, to the Union of South Africa and to India. Uganda was one of the African territories chosen by the British government to host the refugees to “do its bit” for the war effort. The country was in a convenient location, far from the front lines. In later correspondence between the headquarters of the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Geneva and the Colonial Office in London, it is clear that the British protectorate government in Uganda was reluctant to receive any refugees, arguing that the country was unsuitable for European settlement, given its official position as a protectorate, rather than a colony. Hubert Arnold Curtis, the IRO regional representative for eastern and central Africa, based in Nairobi, also intimated in a letter to the headquarters that he suspected that British officials in Uganda were personally prejudiced against Poles, explaining their unwillingness to accept them.
Most Poles were terrified at the prospect of moving to Africa, with fears of “savages” and “cannibals” at the forefront of their minds. Lucjan Krolikowski, a Polish seminarian also sent to East Africa, recalled in his book “Stolen Childhood: A Saga of Polish War Children” that women with children especially harbored fears based on racist stereotypes. “Would resettlement somewhere near the equator in an unhealthy climate, among wild animals and half-wild people, not exhaust the last remnants of their children’s strength?” he wrote. “And would it not be altogether detrimental to the children?”
Along with 19,000 other Poles headed for the African continent, the Porajska family departed from Karachi, the closest port to Iran from which ships set sail for East Africa, arriving in Kenya in November 1942. The Polish refugee community — mostly women and children — settled across the British imperial territories in Africa. By 1944, Tanganyika, now Tanzania, and Uganda had received 6,250 refugees each, the highest in all of Africa. Northern and Southern Rhodesia — now Zambia and Zimbabwe — accepted 2,850 and 1,350, respectively. Kenya was home to 780 refugees at the time, while the South African Union hosted 500 refugee children. Their settlement across the continent was coordinated by the East African Refugee Administration in Nairobi.
And so on Nov. 9, 1942, the 13-year-old Barbara Porajska stepped off a boat — “The California” — at the port of Mombasa, on the coast of the British colony of Kenya. She was ready to begin a new chapter with her family in East Africa, after years of hardship and displacement from Poland. From Mombasa, Barbara and her family began the long journey inland via train through Nairobi and Eldoret in Kenya, before reaching Namasagali in Uganda. There, they boarded a barge on the Victoria Nile, sailing to Masindi port in western Uganda, where they were picked up by lorries. From there, they were driven through savanna grasslands and thick rainforest, before reaching their final destination in Nyabyeya.
In Uganda, the Poles were settled in two camps: one in Koja, present-day Mukono District, close to a Lake Victoria peninsula, and the other in Nyabyeya, 15 miles from Masindi and just south of Murchison Falls National Park. The Porajska family was housed in the Nyabyeya settlement. Both camps were very remote geographically, far from any major urban areas or centers of power. This choice was made intentionally by the British administration in Uganda, arguing that the Poles needed to be settled where large swaths of empty land were available.
Before the arrival of the Polish refugees in Uganda, 3,000 African laborers cleared large sections of forest in Nyabyeya and Koja to construct huts for the settlements. In her memoirs, Barbara describes the “couple of hundred natives [struggling] with nature, hacking with big, broad knives at trees, bushes, tangled roots and two-metre-high elephant grass.” Nyabyeya housed over 3,600 Poles, while Koja was home to 3,000, with each camp run by both Polish and British officials. It was not long before they developed self-sufficient communities in both settlements, each containing a hospital, schools, a church, a community center and a post office. Across the East African camps, some women found employment outside the camps as housekeepers for European expatriate households, as cooks in hotels or as storekeepers and clerks in the army. These were semiskilled jobs that no European in East Africa would do but were commonly performed by either Indians or sometimes Africans.
Porajska attended lessons, which were taught in Polish, at the secondary school in Nyabyeya, where her subjects included English, French, Latin and music. A Polish missionary who had been living in Uganda since before the war donated school supplies to support the children’s education. Nyabyeya also had a youth club with a gramophone and a piano transported from Kampala, the Ugandan capital, which provided ample entertainment for Barbara and her friends. She was an enthusiastic member of the Girl Guides movement — which, along with the Boy Scouts, flourished across all the Polish settlements in Africa — and sang in the community church choir, as she fondly recounted in her memoirs.
After a year of holding Mass in the open air under a tree, the camp community decided it was time to build a church. The Porajskas “gave as much as [they could] afford” to the community donation collection for its construction. After a site blessing by the priest, African laborers began building, which took two years. “It [looked] so solid,” Barbara wrote, “that I [began] to wonder if we [were] ever meant to leave Masindi.” One can understand the refugees’ happiness with the church: Standing on the steps overlooking the valley, one is struck by the lush backdrop of the forest and blue sky, with the only sound coming from the wind rustling through the trees. It must have been an idyllic place to worship.
The Polish community regularly interacted with the African Ugandans they encountered in their settlements. The camps offered economic opportunities for Ugandans to work as housekeepers or groundspeople, or to sell produce. There are no written accounts by Africans of the Polish presence in Uganda, so we cannot be completely certain of how this period in history was perceived. The Luganda-language newspaper Matalisi praised the Poles for their nondiscriminatory conduct toward Africans in an article published in October 1942. In a 2011 interview with the Ugandan broadcasting channel NTV, Amos Kabwijamu recalled selling mangoes to the Poles in the Nyabyeya camp, and could even remember a few Polish words that some of the refugees taught him. The Porajska family employed a young man, Farasico, as a housekeeper, who quickly mastered conversational Polish. In turn, Barbara attempted to learn Swahili, and her “first attempt to talk to him in his native tongue [met] with his delight and uncontrollable laughter.” Some Polish women in both Nyabyeya and Koja developed romantic relationships with some of the African askaris stationed to guard the camps — unsurprising, given the number of single women in the camps. Sexual relations between Polish women and African men across all the camps on the continent were not unusual, much to the consternation of British officials.
Despite such reports of friendliness between the communities, a closer examination of Polish-Ugandan relationships reveals the entrenched anti-Black racism that had cemented white supremacy in colonial Africa. This is notable in Porajska’s own memoirs, in which her descriptions of Africans evoke images of the “noble savage,” a racist stereotype perpetuated and internalized by Europeans in the colonial period. Porajska describes Africans’ visible otherness: “their teeth, exposed in a broad grin, are sparkling white but their smooth, shiny skin is much darker than expected.” In spite of what she calls her “friendship” with Farasico, a 20-year-old man, she still describes him in a patronizing manner as a “boy” in her memoirs. When she heard him singing, she initially thought “he [was] praying to one of his many gods.”
Her reflections highlight pervasive racism. “We later learned that he is a Christian and, like us, worships only one God and the muttering is not a prayer but a jungle song,” she recalled. Farasico, it seems, was well aware of the nature of his relationship with the Porajskas, which Barbara noticed: He “[knew] he [had] to keep his distance; we, the white race, [were] the masters and … he never [entered] the hut without permission.” Another child refugee in Africa reflected, as an adult: “I learned to be a racist. For no other reason other than being white, I could travel first class on the train while native Africans could not.”
The Polish refugees occupied a curious in-between status in Uganda. The British government in Uganda — and in other territories — had constructed a tripartite racial hierarchy, with white people at the top, Asians in the middle and Black people at the bottom. The presence of white Polish refugees disrupted this hierarchy, as they were considered peasants by the British in Uganda — even though the Porajskas, for example, had been part of Poland’s middle class. The Poles arrived in East Africa completely dispossessed of almost all belongings, lending them the status of “poor whites.” They did not fit into conventional colonial settler society, which largely consisted of Britain’s upper classes. It was partly for this reason that the settlements in Uganda were constructed so remotely: to minimize the disruption that the Polish presence would cause to the racial and social hierarchy. On a trip through Masindi, the white Kenyan settler Elspeth Huxley expressed her curiosity at seeing white peasants: They lived in huts “mud-built in native style, and it was strange to see white faces instead of black ones peering out of the doorways.”
The fact that most of the refugees were women further unsettled the highly patriarchal white colonial society in Uganda, especially as some of them willingly had sexual intercourse with African askaris. As Lingelbach argues, this voluntary transgression of the boundaries of whiteness posed a threat to the community and colonial social order, especially since the role of white women in colonial Africa lay in the preservation of white culture and bearing white children. Polish women who slept with African men were labeled “prostitutes,” confirming British stereotypes about the promiscuity of Eastern European peasant women, whose sexuality was seen as requiring control.
In February 1944, the Koja Camp Commandant reported two Polish women who had slept with African men in writing: “Not only do cases of this kind lead to a bad reputation being undeservedly given to Polish people as a whole … [but] I cannot help feeling sympathy with a young African Policeman whose character is ruined by the experienced importunities of a degraded street walker from some Polish town.” Assuming that the relations between the Polish women and African men were consensual, the sexism in this statement is blatant, especially as the commandant also recommended the immediate removal of the two women from the camp. There were no reports of children leading from these relations between Polish women and African men in Uganda, though this certainly happened in other African countries.
The Polish refugees did not stay in Uganda for long, and were never permitted to settle. When World War II ended in 1945, Uganda’s British administrators had no interest in hosting Polish refugees any further. They were dealing with enough problems with African demands for independence, and saw the community of Poles increasingly as a burden. The IRO took over refugee administration and arranged for the Poles’ departure from various African countries and resettlement elsewhere. Very few wanted to return to Poland, given that it was now part of the Soviet bloc, and a large number wanted to stay in Uganda. Eventually, the Polish communities settled around the world in countries including the United Kingdom, Australia and France. A handful remained in Africa. The IRO closed the Nyabyeya camp and sent the remaining inhabitants to Koja, which, in turn, was dissolved in 1951. The Nyabyeya settlement was converted into the Nyabyeya Forestry College in 1953, which still stands to this day. The remaining refugees in Koja included the very old, infirm or mentally unwell, who were eventually transferred to the Tengeru camp in Tanganyika. The Porajskas were among the refugees in the Nyabyeya settlement who relocated to Britain in 1948. Even before leaving, Barbara was looking forward to the individual independence once they left the settlement, excited for her family to lead “its own individual life, managing their own affairs the way it [suited] them.” Permanent settled status in East Africa was never on the cards for the Polish refugee communities.
The descendants of the Polish refugees in Uganda are scattered all over the world. Public history projects by diverse Polish communities, online blogs and articles indicate a large level of interest from descendants in engaging with this part of their history. The Polish Embassy in Nairobi plays a key role in preserving this memory: It funds the maintenance of the church and graveyards in Nyabyeya and Koja, and organized an exhibition on the Polish refugees held at the Uganda Museum in 2018. In 2021, together with the Polish development organization Polska Pomoc, the embassy financed the construction of a maternity ward at the Nyabyeya Health Center, in gratitude to the community that hosted the refugees over 70 years ago.
In the years following WWII, Uganda hosted refugees fleeing the Sudanese Civil War in 1955 and others from Rwanda in 1959. Ugandans themselves are no strangers to fleeing conflict: During the years of the brutal dictatorships of Milton Obote and Idi Amin from the 1960s until the 1980s, many found sanctuary in the neighboring countries of Kenya and what is now South Sudan. That the country has itself produced countless refugees might partly explain its contemporary openness to receiving them. Uganda today hosts more refugees than anywhere else in Africa, and is the third-largest host country in the world, with 1.6 million refugees from countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea. In 2021, the country briefly took in Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban. Many analyses of this policy cite the Polish refugees as the case study that sparked Uganda’s modern-day generosity, although the comparison is inaccurate.
While the Polish refugees are a part of Ugandan history, they are not a precursor to the country’s contemporary refugee policy. Their story, instead, illuminates the power structures in this part of the world at that moment in history. Though the Poles were displaced from everything they knew and forced into poverty, they still benefited from — and perpetuated — a system built on white supremacy. Today, their churches and graveyards remain, though their presence is largely forgotten. Yet their history is a reminder that displacement is not just about where people go, but about who is allowed to belong, and on whose terms.
