None of this was lost on the Polish Press Agency, whose journalists were tasked with documenting their African guests. The aim was to look beyond stereotypes of exoticism and present sisters, brothers and friends who could just as easily live in Polish society. The festival was the catalyst for a decades-long series of Polish press photographs showing people of African descent (PAD) visiting and living in Poland. Bartosz Nowicki, a Polish photographer and curator who currently lives in Wales, has spent the past few years researching these archive photos from the period 1955-1989. He recently curated an exhibition, Afro PRL, which highlighted the long-standing connections between white Poles and PAD, a memory that is often forgotten in contemporary Poland.
Nowicki’s exhibition revealed the myriad ways in which PAD stood alongside white Poles during the communist era. The World Festival of Youth and Students was simply a starting point, after which students from Africa were encouraged to study at Polish universities — as well as elsewhere in the Soviet sphere of influence. This was most keenly emphasised in Poland following the events of 1960, when 17 African countries declared independence from colonial rule. The arrest and murder of the Congo’s first democratically-elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was widely covered in the Polish press, alongside solidarity protests in Warsaw. Photos from these demonstrations show Polish students hand-in-hand with PAD. According to Nowicki, this was — in part — a technique to depict a humane Poland in contrast to a brutal West. “They were really fighting against the Americans on the level of race,” he explains. “You could see how horrible American race rhetoric was, look what was happening to the people — lynching, and so on.” [...]
The photos also highlighted to the Polish public that young people from Africa were now studying and living in Poland. “You realise that most of the images from the period, even if they are not about university or about studying, are actually of African students,” Nowicki tells me. After carrying out a year-long induction at the Polish Language Centre for Foreigners in Łódź, overseas students were free to attend Polish universities. PAD formed a large part of this contingent, starting off with around four students in 1958 and growing to a peak of around 2,000 in the 70s. Their photos were regularly displayed in Polish newspapers, albeit in an exoticising manner. [...]
Omolo suggests that while Poles may have less contact with non-white people — compared to those in countries such as the United Kingdom, France or Germany — this does not entirely explain why PAD experience racism in Poland. Instead, he believes that Polish people have often been exposed to literature and screen media that demean those from the African continent, thereby perpetuating the idea that white people are superior. For Omolo, this makes Poles more likely to believe negative, unfounded stereotypes about PAD, such as those espoused by the PiS party leader, Jarosław Kaczyński. “When Kaczyński said that Europe should not accept refugees from Africa because they’re carrying some diseases that are not in Europe — most of them bought it actually,” Omolo recounts. “What about Poles who visit Africa and come back? Are they not coming with some protozoa?”
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