‘My interest strengthened when I read the book “Foreign students in Poland” I learned that the generous government of this country gives scholarships to Africans,’ wrote Poku from Ghana in a letter published in 1969 in The Polish Review, a magazine intended for export. The brochure Foreign Students in Poland, published by the Polish Agency ‘Interpress,’ was designed to be a guide for foreign candidates who wanted to study in Poland. It was distributed at Polish diplomatic missions, including those in Africa. Young people from African countries, who got accepted to universities in the Polish People’s Republic, arrived in Warsaw by planes and then traveled on to Lodz, where the School of Polish for Foreigners, which was part of the University of Lodz, had its premises. The condition for starting education at one of the Polish universities was the completion of a one-year Polish language preparatory course.

The first students from African countries came to Poland after 1956 when the thaw brought changes in the foreign politics of the Eastern Bloc, that led to an opening to the Global South. The scholarship offer of the Polish People’s Republic was part of the diplomatic relations that were gradually established with the new countries that were winning their independence at that time. In his article ‘Szkoła Przetrwania’ [School of Survival], Przemysław Gasztold mentions that between 1956 and 1975, 1145 people from the African continent graduated from the Lodz School of Polish. Over time, this number increased – in 1979 alone, more than a thousand Africans studied in the Polish People’s Republic. According to the scholar, the African students decided to continue their education in Poland because of their political inclinations, for economic reasons – they could not afford the expensive tuition fees in Western Europe, and finally, due to the recommendations of their friends who had already studied at Polish universities.   

From 1967, foreign students from Warsaw met in the club ‘Trzy Kontynenty’ [Three Continents], which was located in the building of the Grand Theater. It was also the place where the Polish-African Friendship Society, founded five years earlier, had its offices. ‘Trzy Kontynenty’ served as a disco, but also as a space for various events and political gatherings. According to Gasztold, seventy such meetings were organized there in 1973 alone, including a solidarity rally of Arabic countries against the politics of Israel. The club was closed the following year. In Lodz, the ‘Klub Nowej Afryki’ [the Club of New Africa] played a similar role in the social life of the international student community, and in Krakow – the club called ‘Kontiki.’

Some Africans chose to study at the film school in Lodz. Twenty-seven Africans studied there between 1959 and 1989, though only ten of them were from the sub-Saharan part of the continent, and among them, two – brothers Stanisław and Jakub Barua – were born in Poland, to a Polish-Kenyan family. It is worth mentioning that one of the graduates was Sao Gamba, the Ugandan artist who was admitted to the Lodz Film School in 1965. After returning to his country, he was forced to document the life of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. In 1979, he fled to Kenya and settled there permanently. It was where he made Kolormsk (1986), the first movie produced entirely by Kenyans. Over time, he devoted himself increasingly to the visual arts, especially sculpture and painting. When he died, his close friend Jakub Barua described him as the ‘African Bosch.’ In this masculinized environment, there was also one African woman – Beverly Joan Marcus from South Africa, who started studying film direction in 1978. The majority of the art students came from the Arabic countries in the North – from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. They were encouraged to study film in Poland because of the international recognition gained by the works of Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Skolimowski. Short documentaries made at the school and stored in the Archive of the Film School in Lodz ever since constitute a unique testimony to the sensitivity and experiences of students from the Global South at the time.

In 1961, the Iraqi student Abdul Khalik makes a nearly seven-minute documentary Studenci zagraniczni w Łodzi [Foreign Students in Lodz] with Wiesław Antosik behind the camera. ‘Look at them closely. They are future doctors, chemists, mechanical engineers. After coming back home, each of them will serve their country using the knowledge they acquired in Poland. And we will gain a considerable number of new friends,’ – says the voice-over in a similar manner to those from the film chronicles of the time. As a matter of fact, the entire short film is made in such a way that it resembles the style of the propaganda chronicle. The camera catches students from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa – first on the street, then during Polish language lessons as they struggle to pronounce foreign words under the guidance of an elderly teacher. These are mostly men. As they leave the classroom, we can see that most of them are wearing suits and ties, or at least jackets. The camera shows the young men trying to overcome language difficulties in a grocery store and when collecting the keys to their rooms at the student dormitory. Then the student short film focuses on the time spent in the dorm. We can see Ghanaian students who, instead of dancing the then-popular twist, perform their traditional dance dressed in patterned kente gowns. The Sudanese students, on the other hand, cook and eat dressed in white jellabiyas, with white turbans crowning their heads. The shots seem to be staged, and every single situation is met with common joy, on the verge of elation.

The life of foreign students is portrayed quite differently in the short film Reserve dla cudzoziemców [Reserve for Foreigners], made by Tunisian student Fayçal Hassairi a year before the fall of communism. The students wear neither ties nor traditional garments, and the takes do not seem staged, but recorded somewhat ‘by the way.’ A nearly four-minute film is a meditation on loneliness and homesickness. The protagonists seem to be trapped inside the university campus, separated from the outside world. One of them says that he would like to learn Polish by talking to Poles, but he is not allowed to invite Polish friends. The openwork decoration in the shape of a globe covered with a network of meridians and parallels that the camera shows brings to mind the image of prison bars. ‘My life here is monotonous, I miss my family, my country. It is really difficult here,’ says the other voice. The film ends with the image of a door being closed, with a sheet of paper glued to its surface: ‘Outsiders not allowed.’ Hassairi seems to ask: Who is actually an outsider here?

Perhaps the most touching theme of documentary shorts made by students is the intercultural family. The film Adopcja [Adoption], realized by Moroccan student of film direction Mostafa Derkaoui in 1968, tells the story of Agnieszka – a little girl of Polish-Kenyan origin, who lives in an orphanage in Lodz. When the camera focuses on the playing child, we can hear the carer talking to potential adoptive parents in the background. The woman explains that the Polish mother gave up her child because she married a Polish man. However, she does not mention what happened to the girl’s Kenyan father. After a brief exchange, the couple decides against adoption. Years later, Derkaoui would mention in an interview published in 2021 that he hired an acquainted couple to shoot the short, and they enacted the dialog he had written for the purpose of the film. After Derkaoui finished shooting, he found out that the Polish couple had adopted Agnieszka. ‘This film was cursed by the school. They were afraid it would convey a racist image of Poland,’ he summarized.

In 1980, Beverly Joan Marcus made a documentary short showing the difficult and dull life of a multicultural student family. Poczekaj, poczekaj [Wait, Wait] is a story about the everyday life of Patrice, a student from South Africa, who is raising a few-month-old baby together with his Polish partner. In the film, Marcus divides Patrice’s routine into tending the fields as part of a student agricultural internship and the time he spends in a tiny room where the whole family lives. The camera placed at one point of the room captures the overwhelming claustrophobia. The bare essentials have been crammed into a very limited space – a small table, a cupboard with a camping stove on which something is almost always cooked, a narrow bed, and a radio. The life shared by Patrice, his partner, and their child, apart from rare moments spent outdoors, revolves around these few pieces of equipment. The conversations over the baby’s head show that the relationship is going through a difficult time. The short film ends with a poignant silence as the couple shares a meal.

In the 1960s, African students become the protagonists of the reportages published in the aforementioned The Polish Review. One of them is Libertine Appolus, a student from South-West Africa, today’s Namibia. In 1969, Appolus was the first African woman to receive a Polish diploma from the Warsaw Medical Academy, thus becoming the first woman doctor in Namibia. In 2005, she would be appointed Deputy Prime Minister of her country. In the late 1960s, the magazine published two reportages on Polish-Congolese marriages. The first, from 1967, shows a church ceremony and a wedding party documented by Janusz Rosikoń. In the second, from 1969, Jan Morek captures the daily life of two couples with young children. Yet another issue features the Polish journalist from Życie Warszawy, Urszula Ghebru who is married to PhD Kefle Ghebru, who obtained his doctorate in agriculture – the couple is planning to settle in Ethiopia. These three reportages have one thing in common and that is the conviction that the ultimate place of residence of the portrayed couples is one of the African countries. Such was, in fact, the assumption behind the scholarship programs, often co-financed by African states. Educated professionals were supposed to supply the local market with specialists in their field. The propaganda style, presenting only the positive side of intercultural relations, leaves out the difficulties that the couples must have faced. The image of intercultural relationships described and photographed for the purposes of The Polish Review differs from the one that emerges from the student shorts.

In 1984, the weekly paper Odgłosy, published in Lodz, featured a reportage entitled ‘Stranger Among Poles’ by Joanna Sławińska, in which the author paints a portrait of the everyday struggle of Arab and sub-Saharan students with Polish racism. She reports on a situation described by a doctoral student at the Lodz University of Technology: A woman passing by, addressing her daughter, called him a ‘dirty little Negro.’ As it was written by Gasztold, African students in Poland fell victim to verbal abuse and brutal attacks. In the mid-1980s, an African woman who was thrown off a train had to have her leg amputated. The authorities condemned the assaults but with little effect. Citizen militia officers also happened to be the perpetrators. Moreover, students with dark skin often faced various forms of micro-racism – their different looks raised eyebrows. The students’ everyday experiences proved that the internationalist ideals elaborated on by the Deputy Prime Minister at the inauguration of the Polish-African Friendship Society had little impact on the Polish mentality. ‘Scholarship holders from Africa were not all enthusiastic in their assessment of studying at universities in communist Poland […] the overwhelming majority had to confront with various manifestations of racism and xenophobia,’ Gasztold notes, adding that at the beginning of the Transformation, only less than twenty percent of the African students surveyed considered extending their stay in Poland upon the completion of their education.

As it is fairly indicated by Magdalena Lipska and Monika Talarczyk, the editors of the book Hope Is of a Different Color. Global South to the Łódź Film School, published by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2021, the history of African students in Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries during the communist era has been marginalized for decades in the studies of decolonization and global interracial relations. The majority of scholars have focused on the dynamics between white and Black people shaped around the transatlantic slave trade and the tragic consequences of colonial conquests that devastated the cultures and traditional socio-political structures of the continent. Today, academics, writers, curators, and artists are dedicating more and more attention to the relations between the satellites of the Soviet Union and the African countries that won their independence in the second half of the 20^th century. African students who came to the Polish People’s Republic at the time breathed the air of another world, so to speak, and since exchanges with people living in the USA and Western European countries were limited due to political reasons, they became a kind of intermediaries of the Western lifestyle, which provoked not only positive reactions but also envy. Simultaneously, the encounter with the Polish People’s Republic and the experience of living in the country of real socialism was for Africans an important point of reference in their biographies after they had returned to their homelands. Although the plan to educate the left-leaning elites of the new African states, which was intended to strengthen the position of the Eastern Bloc in the long run, was not as successful as expected, it nevertheless resulted in the emergence of an alternative East-South geography in the history of global social politics.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, African countries lost their strategic position. As it was written by Ali Mazrui in his paper ‘From Slave Ship to Space Ship: Africa Between Marginalization and Globalization,’ published in 1998 in the African Studies Quarterly: ‘The end of the Cold War has reduced the internationalization of African education. The golden days of diverse scholarships for African students to study in Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, and Belgrade seem to be almost over and rival scholarships to study in Western countries have been drastically reduced.’ The political transformation that began in Poland in 1989 made the country embark on satisfying its ideological ambitions to join the community of Western countries. Although the pro-African enthusiasm that surged during the thaw faded already in the 1970s, the path to Polish education remained open to Africans throughout the entire era of the Polish People’s Republic. And that time ended with the fall of communism.

At present, a lot of people from sub-Saharan Africa are studying in Poland, which has been a member of the European Union for twenty years. However, they rarely receive state-sponsored scholarships, and in the years of the Polish People’s Republic, they made it possible to study also to those from underprivileged families. Today, foreign students more often cover their tuition fees themselves – and the amounts range from over a dozen to even a few dozen thousand PLN, depending on the chosen field of study and university. They often decide to study in English. Today, a specific area on the map that would be a common point of reference for African biographies in Poland, similar to the one Lodz used to be in the Polish People’s Republic, is nowhere to be found. To this day, in the center of Lodz, there is a reminder of the era when Poland demonstrated solidarity with the Congolese struggle for independence. The street, which was called Bystrzycka both before and after the war, was named in 1961 in honor of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who had been assassinated in January of the same year. After the street name, the area with student dormitories of the University of Lodz, the Medical University, and the Lodz University of Technology was soon called Lumumbowo.