GUEST ARTICLE: Buried History- Zambia 🇿🇲 was the 1st country in Africa to host white Refugees.
By Olivia Banda
These were Polish citizens fleeing the wrath of Hitler during World War II.
The initial group—often called the “Cyprus group”—consisted of 429 individuals who arrived in August 1941.
Because official refugee camps had not been built yet, they were hosted in local hotels, boarding houses, and Catholic missions like Kasisi.
By August 1945, there were a total of 3,419 Polish refugees settled in Zambia.
The total population was distributed across Zambia’s official refugee camps as follows:Â Ndola: 1,431 residents-the largest camp. Lusaka: 1,227. Chipata: 164.
The final group of 597 Polish residents settled Mbala, their settlement was the last and most remote refugee camp built in colonial Zambia.
Unlike other groups who entered Zambia from South Africa or Mozambique, the Mbala group traveled entirely through East Africa.
They arrived by ship at the port of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and took a train west to Kigoma, boarded a boat to cross Lake Tanganyika landing at the Zambian port of Mpulungu, then transported 50km to Mbala by military lorries.
They were secluded and forbidden from interacting with the locals, though sometimes hunger forced them to sneak out and exchange some of their clothes and valuables for food, one of their reported favorites being masuku.
Exactly 340 Polish refugees were officially permitted to remain permanently in Zambia after WW2 ended and helped build the nation’s early infrastructure.
Many of these refugees married locally and integrated deeply into Zambian communities. Today, there are Zambian families with distinct Eastern European surnames—such as Vikovitch—who trace their direct lineage straight back to these wartime evacuees.
The physical area where the camp once stood in Mbala is still locally known as the “Little Poland” township, and it features a road bearing the same name.
While most of the camp’s original mud-brick cottages were eventually dismantled or replaced by residential plots over the decades, the simple concrete monument in the picture below remains a physical reminder of the sanctuary provided to the nearly 600 Polish exiles.
A preserved Polish cemetery remains in Mbala, serving as the final resting place for the refugees who passed away during their stay.
The famous Moto Moto Museum in Mbala actively preserves physical artifacts, photographs, and oral histories from this unique era.
This cannot possibly be true. Britain encouraged a number of refugees from Eastern Europe to move to its colonies in Africa. That included South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia in those days. So Zambia, the former Northern Rhodesia, could not possibly have been the first in Africa.