“If Siberia had been darkness and cold and marked by death and deprivation, Africa was heat and color and life”: How the same continent of Africa demonised in the Polish-British Joseph Conrad’s raving racist Heart of Darkness novella just 40 years earlier (1902) saves the lives of over 30,000 desperate Polish refugees forced from their homeland in east Europe during the 1939-1945 war

(Polish refugees fleeing the 1939-1945 war from their homeland in Europe safe in Tengeru, Tanzania, 1946 ... photo credit: Jonathan Durand, director, Memory is our Homeland –documentary on the history of these over 30,000 refugees from Poland in east/southern Africa, 1942-1952)

1. Abdi Latif Dahir, “The little known story of the Polish refugees who fled to East Africa during World War II”, Quartz Africa, 16 May 2019,

https://qz.com/africa/1620841/the-polish-refugees-in-tanzania-during-world-war-ii/?fbclid=IwAR1Pz1QG6Wv-eBlCfBzq5XfxAwhW3A4ZiCGYOTSRCWgARy64-EXeC_ltNVE (accessed 17 May 2019)

2. On Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, see Chinua Achebe’s incomparable exposition,

“An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, background and Sources Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, London: W. W Norton and Co., 1988, pp.251-261:

https://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2015/08/b.html

(Wayne Shorter Septet, “The all seeing eye” [personnel: Shorter, tenor saxophone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Grachan Moncur III, trombone, James Spaulding, alto saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliff, NJ,US, 15 October 1965)

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe