Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw: Translating eastern European experiences for an African audience

Abstract

This article discusses overlaps and dissimilarities between eastern Europeans’ and Africans’ subordinate position in relation to imperial powers from the perspective of a South African writer who lived in Poland. Lewis Nkosi’s subtle and ironic style outlines the burden of colonialism and cultural marginalization shared by Poles and South Africans, but also reveals the paternalism and condescension disguised by socialist slogans of solidarity with Third World nations. The complex relation between (post)colonial and eastern European cultures is informed by the Cold War.

Keywords:

• colonialism
• postcolonial studies
• antiapartheid
• eastern Europe
• Lewis Nkosi
• Cold War

Notes

1. See David Chioni Moore’s landmark article. For scholars of eastern Europe asking similar questions, see Vitaly Chernetsky and Adrian Oţoiu.

2. For South African activists who traveled to the Soviet Union, see Popescu 30 and Shubin 6. Eastern Bloc countries offered scholarships for African students from left-leaning countries. For an earlier generation of African American and West Indian intellectuals (Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson), see Kate Baldwin.

3. Bhabha (107–08), Spivak (21) and Attwell (19–21).

4. For a discussion of the overlap between east as the object of postcolonial studies and east as the Eastern Bloc, see Timothy Brennan and William Pietz.

5. See M. Keith Booker and Dubravka Juraga for the similarity between Russian and African cultural forms marginalized in the west.

6. Nkosi cites these numbers from Jan Panchonski and Reuel K. Wilson.

7. See, for instance, Ewa Thompson and Harsha Ram.

8. If both South Africa and Poland underwent imperial domination during the 19th and 20th centuries, Poles’ perceptions of Russia (and the USSR) complicate the comparison. Poles viewed their eastern neighbor as the purveyor of an inferior civilization, rooted in autocracy and despotism. See also Conrad, “A Note on the Polish Problem”, as well as the history of the concept of Mitteleuropa.

9. Nkosi’s cautious attitude is probably motivated by the Cold War climate: as a foreigner in Poland, he had to be guarded in his praise of the Solidarity Movement, which the USSR perceived as an anti-communist bastion.

10. Nkosi’s compact comment on “the jungle of highrise flats” illuminates the role of cultural distance in the process of othering: if eastern Europeans’ prejudices led them to associate Africans with jungle landscapes, Africans visiting the Eastern Bloc might have found the densely built high-rise quarters an equally alienating and anxiety-producing urban landscape.

11. The forms of racism in the Eastern Bloc deserve further attention. On the one hand, Polish society during the communist years was homogeneous, so there was obvious curiosity about black visitors. The Polish public often sympathized with the fate of colonized people, as exemplified by the success the TV series Roots (based on Alex Hailey’s novel) enjoyed in the 1980s. On the other hand, this very interest in the fate of African people, as exemplified by Ryszard Kapuściński’s journalism, has been rightly criticized as paternalistic and condescending.

12. In 1993, Chris Hani, general secretary of the SACP, was assassinated by Janusz Walus, a Polish immigrant affiliated with a right-wing movement.