This article positions blackness in state socialist Poland as an integral and prominent part of the history of the socialist public sphere.Footnote 1 The historiography of everyday life in the Polish People’s Republic still tends to present it as more or less hermetically sealed from developments of the global Cold War.Footnote 2 Simultaneously, there is a growing interest in eastern Europe’s connections with the “Third World.”Footnote 3 Yet, the experience of racialized minorities in socialist Poland is still in need of further analysis.Footnote 4 Unlike in the US and in global Black thought, the notion of blackness in the Polish media was neither ubiquitous nor associated with danger and the antithesis of whiteness.Footnote 5 Blackness in state socialist Poland was treated in a selective and insular manner, accentuating the country’s declarative anti-colonial self-image and its inevitable limits. While parts of the society under state socialism were aware of and receptive to international influences, interactions between Poles and Black people of African descent were relatively limited.Footnote 6 By the late 1970s, most of these individuals were students from African countries who came on fellowships to Poland as part of the larger Soviet-led global socialist scholarship program for what was then called the Third World, of which Poland was part.Footnote 7
This article engages with the construction of and dynamic around blackness in the state socialist public sphere by analyzing the visit of Ghanaian politician Kwame Nkrumah to Poland in 1961 and the Polish career of US basketball player Kent Washington in the early 1980s. While the cases are different in terms of the historical and political moments in which they are embedded, they can reveal how major media outlets familiarized blackness—encapsulated in the figure of a highly visible and successful Black man—in a way that combined visual concreteness with abstract, political values.Footnote 8 Nkrumah’s visit took place during a peak of socialist internationalism, when Poland sought to position itself as an ally of newly decolonized societies. The public gaze constructed Nkrumah as a figure affirming Poland’s solidarity with African liberation struggles that supported its ideological self-image as an anti-racist and anti-imperialist state. Almost two decades later, Washington’s arrival in Poland reflected how geopolitical socialist solidarity with the Global South had been fading.
Drawing on national and regional newspaper reports, archival material, oral history interviews, and a memoir, this article asks, how did the mass media represent blackness? What were the implicit promises that came with how blackness was constructed in the state socialist public sphere? What are the limits of the kind of conditional inclusion the cases suggest and, as a result, how did it resonate within Black communities past and present? The article challenges the assumption that race was an irrelevant category in socialist societies and shows that blackness was both visible and politically significant in communist state narratives. It traces Poland’s engagement with blackness from the anti-colonial rhetoric of the early 1960s to the cultural fascination with late 1970s African-American sport. Finally, it raises questions about the function of racial representations in societies that positioned themselves as racially inclusive yet reproduced racialized discourse in more subtle ways. Doing so, this article contributes to ongoing discussions of race in eastern Europe, Cold War geopolitics, and more general implications of the socialist past for the shaping of racial imaginaries.
Kwame Nkrumah’s Visit and Limits of Representation
In the form of Black communities and individuals, blackness in Poland had already been present in the strictly controlled public sphere and media from the outset of the communist regime.Footnote 9 One of the most notable instances of a Black figure at the center of media attention was Kwame Nkrumah’s first and sole official visit to Poland, which took place from July 25–28, 1961, and before his planned visit to Hungary. After Ghana’s independence in 1957 and the year of Africa in 1960, Polish foreign policy experts directed their attention to Ghana’s history and economy and Nkrumah became an influential politician.Footnote 10 This new interest was animated by Poland’s strategic desire to have a share in Ghana’s economic development. It is against this backdrop that the Council of State and the Government of the Polish People’s Republic invited the president of the Republic of Ghana to visit Poland.Footnote 11 Nkrumah’s visit was connected to his visit to the Soviet Union and his interest in the socialist path of modernization. In that sense, his visit to Poland also stood for his general political and economic visions for an independent and postcolonial Ghana.Footnote 12 These combined state-capitalist economic tools with the socialist path of development and sought out potential investments, solutions, and political contacts on both sides of the Iron Curtain.Footnote 13 During his stay in Poland, Nkrumah had meetings with, inter alia, Aleksander Zawadzki, the Chairman of the Council of State, and Józef Cyrankiewicz, the Prime Minister of Poland. During the visit, both delegations reaffirmed the importance of the set of bilateral agreements signed on April 19, 1961 in Accra.Footnote 14
Nkrumah received a level of media attention that was unprecedented for a Black politician in state socialist Poland. For example, the death of Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, which some news outlets reported and condemned, received less coverage. Nkrumah’s biography was the subject of analysis in a variety of media outlets aimed at different demographic groups. The mass daily newspaper that was also an official party outlet, Trybuna Ludu (People’s Tribune), prepared its readers for Nkrumah’s official visit by presenting him as Osagyefo (the liberator) and leader of the Casablanca Bloc:
The leading spokesman of awakening Africa, a prominent representative of the African liberation movement. Kwame Nkrumah belongs to that wing of the movement which takes the most progressive stance on the issues affecting Africa and the world … many well-known leaders of the Black Continent, including the ruling circles of Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Algeria … are identified with this wing.Footnote 15
The same article presented Accra as a metropolis and center of Black anti-colonialism. On many occasions, journalists described and illustrated Nkrumah’s visit in a manner that aligned with the prevailing pictorial conventions of the state socialist public sphere. In a detailed biographical article titled “Nzeme Boy” from the important weekly news magazine Polityka (Politics), the author frequently referred to Nkrumah by his first name.Footnote 16 As might be expected, despite an unambiguously positive portrayal of Nkrumah and a forthright critique of Eurocentrism, the article also appropriates Nkrumah as a symbol of a new and free Black Africa, aligning him exclusively with the socialist bloc.Footnote 17
The Ghanaian delegation visited Oświęcim, the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, the socialist flagship city of Nowa Huta, and Kraków, where, according to the official press release, “they were warmly welcomed everywhere and had the opportunity to see the feelings of warm friendship and affection that the Polish people have for the Ghanaian people and their leader President Dr. Nkrumah.”Footnote 18 The media meticulously documented his journey, allowing readers to see Nkrumah receiving flowers from children in Kraków, being bestowed with the Order of the Grand Cross of the Restored Polish Republic and his journey in a car with Aleksander Zawadzki on a parade in Warsaw, where enthusiastic locals greeted him.Footnote 19 Despite the formal setting of the meetings and interactions, the images of Nkrumah humanized him by showing him smiling while holding flowers, waving at cheerful people, and holding hands with top Polish politicians.Footnote 20 The media coverage presented him in a dignified manner and on par with his Polish counterparts. Other articles portray Nkrumah as a pivotal and powerful figure in the anti-colonial movement, alongside figures such as Hồ Chí Minh. Accra, Ghana and Nkrumah—as a real and idealized space and political figure—became a synecdoche for Africa’s decolonization on the ruins of European empires and the potential for new trade relations with the newly independent states. While behind-the-scenes negotiations were underway, the press portrayed Nkrumah as an amicable symbol of the attractiveness of the socialist project in Black and independent Africa, and of the promise of a racially just order under socialist tutelage.Footnote 21
Despite socialist Poland’s efforts to portray itself as a racially tolerant society, contradictory experiences shaped the everyday reality for Black people—mostly students from Africa—and other non-white passing minorities in the country.Footnote 22 They developed a sense of belonging to Polish society while encountering various forms of othering, which created and intensified their feelings of exclusion.Footnote 23 Unlike Nkrumah’s exceptional and glorified status, students’ “ordinary” blackness and masculinity were not associated with political power and idealized postcolonial revolution, for their blackness and everything that came with it was what Frantz Fanon frames as an inescapable fact of life.Footnote 24 Their blackness was a real social condition that was always performed in relation to dominant whiteness and, as a result, had the power to shape or even determine their everyday interactions and lives. Students’ blackness was a social demarcation line as it often marked them as outsiders and possible threats to Polish women and, consequently, forced them to navigate the intricate race dynamics of late socialist Poland. As evidenced in the few testimonies on racist incidents, the promise of blackness constructed around Nkrumah was not necessarily extended to Black students.Footnote 25
Yet the media coverage of Nkrumah’s visit has the potential to resonate with contemporary audiences. To provide just one example, a Polish-Ghanaian journalist reflected on her ambivalent feelings when viewing the archival material on Nkrumah’s visit. She was moved to see an internationally recognized Black leader received with honor by white people in 1961, having been used to seeing Black men depicted as gangsters or warlords. This bewilderment is magnified by the absence of her Ghanaian father, which she has felt throughout her life, and her sense of uprootedness from Ghanaian culture.Footnote 26
Kent Washington and the Conditional Inclusion of Blackness
The global Cold War was a robust phenomenon, characterized by a strong cultural component that manifested itself also in the form of a war of symbols.Footnote 27 The lifting of the Iron Curtain and increased interaction between citizens from state socialist countries and those from western Europe and the US were often tied to international sporting events.Footnote 28 The 1958 Polish-American athletics meeting took place on August 1–2 in Warsaw, against the backdrop of the post-Stalin thaw in the USSR and the Soviet-led socialist bloc. The meeting attracted an audience of over 100,000 people and remains one of the largest events of its kind in the history of athletics.Footnote 29 The US men’s team and the Polish women’s team won their respective competitions and, importantly, the US had many Black athletes.Footnote 30 For the socialist authorities, the triumph of athletes from socialist countries in sporting arenas was a rationale for proclaiming the superiority of socialism over capitalism. As a result, the media depicted the athletes as heroes and their popularity in society granted them the status of celebrities.
It is precisely the way in which the sports career of Kent Washington—the first Black American professional basketball player in Poland—unfolded that makes it so distinct from the case of Nkrumah’s visit.Footnote 31 Washington’s presence in the media reflects a different moment in late state socialist Poland’s global outreach, as the public sphere was less preoccupied with the postcolonial reordering of the 1960s and more with fading consumer socialism.Footnote 32 Washington’s first visit to Poland was in 1976 as a member of the University of Southampton team that played basketball matches against various clubs throughout Poland. Following a game in the city of Lublin, Zdzisław Niedziela, the coach of Start Lublin was so impressed with Washington’s performance that he convinced him to relocate to Poland in 1979, where he resided until 1983. There, he played for three seasons with Start Lublin (1979–81) and two with Zagłębie Sosnowiec (1981–83). Washington was a three-time bronze medalist in the Polish Basketball Championship and was voted the best player in the 1979/80 season by a poll of Sport magazine. As a result, he attracted immense attention from both local and national sports media.
The case of Washington illustrates the disparate perceptions of blackness contingent on his intersectional positionality, namely his gender, social status, fitness, and nationality. Trica Danielle Keaton examines ways in which Black people are often incorporated into socio-political structures, yet simultaneously marginalized or exoticized due to their race. Black American citizens, particularly in France, describe their experiences of being welcomed and accepted in French society.Footnote 33 While this inclusion is contingent on specific conditions or contradictions, these narratives demonstrate the acknowledgment of these individuals for their competence or socially valued contributions, as well as their US nationality. Although their status as US citizens is a prerequisite for inclusion, and despite a degree of acceptance, these individuals are never fully accepted as their racialized identities continue to influence how they are perceived and treated, particularly in the context of the prevailing racial dynamics experienced by others from racialized groups. This could be applied to Washington too: he was valued for his basketball skills and implicitly for embracing socialist ideology of race-blindness as an African-American person. After détente, the relaxation of the visa regime in the 1970s and in the context of the political crises that came with Solidarity and martial law, by the last decade of state socialism in Poland, the US was not merely a vilified political enemy, but a cultural reference point. Washington’s US nationality intersected with basketball as a cultural and social phenomenon. Many regarded basketball as an integral part of US identity and a symbol of “American life.” Harris Koku Mawusi (b. 1953, Have Etoe, Ghana) who arrived in Gdańsk in 1978 to learn Polish and pursued his studies in the same city and eventually secured employment with the Port of Gdynia Authority, enjoyed watching sports in the 1980s and remembers learning about Washington’s career in Poland and feeling proud of a Black athlete bringing “American standards.”Footnote 34
It was under these cultural conditions that Washington became part of Polish professional sport communities and gained local popularity. Yet the articles never explicitly mentioned his race, although his inclusion was linked to his identity as a talented African American athlete. The local press referred to him as “the first American,” “the black-skinned American” or “the Negro.”Footnote 35 The journalists admired him for his strength and talent and assumed he had “natural physical ability.”Footnote 36 In 2022, Washington published a memoir, Kentomania: A Black Basketball Virtuoso in Communist Poland, a strikingly positive account of a Black American’s reception in a country where the notion of race-neutral society clashed with racialized perceptions of Black African “others.”Footnote 37
Washington’s basketball career had an influence on prevailing perceptions of blackness.Footnote 38 The association between blackness and superiority over white individuals in the media’s portrayal of Washington was almost pervasive as journalists expressed admiration for his proficiency, resolve, and commitment.Footnote 39 While reinforcing the intersectional framing of Black men, such framing also gave Washington visibility in the media. In an article published in Tygodnik Demokratyczny (Democratic Weekly) in 1979 titled Pracowity jak Murzyn (Hardworking as a Negro), the journalist challenges this stereotypical belief that blackness was synonymous with exceptional physical exertion and that Black individuals were successful in sports merely because of their supposedly inherent superiority in terms of physical capabilities: “The power of talent … There is no doubt that Kent has basketball in his blood. He has been playing the sport since the age of 16. But even before that, he dabbled in track and field and American football, which he says is dominated by Negroes. The thing is, though, that the Negro is an incredibly hard worker.”Footnote 40 Simultaneously, the use of what is now an outdated and offensive term, Murzyn—which carries anti-Black, racist, and colonial semantic connotations—in relation to Washington’s perceived superiority and hard work subtly implies stereotypical and derogatory associations with notions of strenuous labor and the exploitation of Black people.Footnote 41
This is more pronounced in an article from the magazine Sportowiec (Sportsman) with the headline “I am not Kunta Kinte!” that refers to Washington’s rejection of the comparison made by fans during matches. “Kunta Kinte” is a reference to the protagonist of the 1977 television series Roots, first broadcast in Poland in 1979. It alludes to the harsh realities of enslavement in the US. By chanting “Kunta Kinte” during basketball games, fans drew a parallel between Washington’s African American identity and the enslaved character. Mamadou Diouf, a Senegalese man residing in Poland at the time, recalled that because of the show’s popularity, Africans were referred to as “Kunta Kinte” in the streets of Warsaw.Footnote 42 Harris Koku Mawusi also recalled being addressed by the term in nearly every context, which he found exasperating and experienced as a form of racial prejudice.Footnote 43
Washington recalls that the Polish reception of blackness played a pivotal role in shaping his initial experience in Poland:
For many Poles, that was their first encounter with a black person. How I carried myself, what I ate and how I dressed was always being observed and judged… . Being a novelty in the country allowed me to bypass the possible racism that could have occurred otherwise. By that, I mean Polish people (especially basketball fans), were so overwhelmed by the intrigue of Ken Washington the basketball star, that my ethnicity did not matter.Footnote 44
Yet he also recalls: “Walking down my street to the bus my neighbours noticed and looked. Children would tap their mothers and point at me. On the bus traveling to town, more looks, pointing and often stares.”Footnote 45 Washington’s blackness stood for racialized otherness: it was exoticized, fetishized, and subjected to the “white gaze,” which was also the lived experience of “ordinary” Black people in Poland in the 1980s.Footnote 46 Despite his overall positive account of his “peaceful life” in Poland, Mawusi also recalled being regularly subjected to unpleasant treatment in a multitude of seemingly innocuous moments. For instance, during a visit to the zoo with a Polish acquaintance in the mid-1980s, the aggressive stares of visitors directed at Mawusi prompted him and his companion to leave the zoo.Footnote 47 For him and his Black friends, their blackness triggered racialized verbal attacks that were part and parcel of their daily lives. Even in contexts of apparent inclusion, Black and other racialized individuals were subjected to constant scrutiny, voyeuristic observation, and a form of social distance from the dominant white population, despite their star-like status.
Whether as a revered leader or an international athlete in state socialist media, the examples of Nkrumah and Washington reveal that blackness was predominantly and officially associated with postcolonial political empowerment or individual success in sport embodied by able-bodied men. Within the historical moment of overzealous support for national liberation struggles and new economic opportunities for Poland in Ghana, the press revered Nkrumah as epitomizing a new and liberated Africa. Nkrumah’s brief but important visit was seen as a harbinger of a bright socialist future in Africa; a promise of global peace in a world without racism under the socialist banner. In the case of Washington, the esteem for his basketball abilities did not extend to complete social inclusion beyond the boundaries of his athletic persona and his symbolic value. The fact that a Black US basketball player chose to live and work in Poland—not the US—presented Poland in a more favorable light than the US, where Black people were subjected to everyday racializing experiences.
In both cases blackness was instrumentalized—Nkrumah for geopolitical legitimacy and Washington for his US symbolic capital. While the case of Nkrumah set an unrealistic standard for Black political leadership, Washington’s case raised the bar for conditional inclusion in that it served as a cultural spectacle rather than a political statement, as evidenced by the experience of everyday racism by “ordinary” Black individuals at that time. Although they were embedded in distinct contexts, these two emblematic cases show that blackness in the state socialist public sphere in Poland was neither absent nor static. Although representations of blackness were episodic and occasional, they were also highly visible as they, together with the meanings of blackness, fluctuated over time and were used for various purposes depending on the specific socialist zeitgeist.
The bar for the visual incorporation of blackness in socialist Poland was usually unrealistically high. It was conditional but also contingent on the status and the shifting political global interests of Poland and the eastern bloc, rather than driven merely by a genuine commitment to racial inclusion. While this shift reflected changing political and economic priorities and the subsequent decline of the urgency associated with decolonization, it also exposed the limits of Poland’s claims to racial innocence. The idea of postcolonial or African-American blackness became politicized and part of a larger geopolitical and idealized narrative about postcolonial socialism, race, and sport. The acceptance of this narrative was contingent upon the continued engagement of blackness as a resource for state and non-state actors propelled by geopolitical purposes and self-presentation. Blackness in state socialist Poland, while glorified through the myth of anti-colonial and supposedly anti-racist contexts, was at the same time abstracted into a spectacle of exceptionalism that unintentionally contributed to the reproduction of the racializing dynamics.
Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ is a research associate (wissentschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in the Global History Division at the Free University of Berlin, where she holds a DFG-funded project, “Global Cultures of Socialism after Empire: Connected Histories between Poland and North Vietnam.” Linh’s research focuses on the connections between the Polish People’s Republic and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam following 1955 with a particular emphasis on history of everyday life. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Cahiers du Monde Russe, East European Politics and Societies, and Geschichte und Gesellschaft, as well as in edited volumes.
Margaret Ohia-Nowak is Associate Professor in the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. Her research focuses on blackness in central and eastern Europe, anti-Black discourse and representations of blackness, and the Afro-Polish women’s movement. Her most recent monograph is Antyczarny rasizm. Język-dyskurs-komunikacja (Lublin, 2025). She is currently examining racial bias and racializing discourses in AI-based Polish large language models.
Open access
