Edward Kissi - Africans and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples

This book is an original and comparative study of reactions in West and East Africa to the persecution and attempted annihilation of Jews in Europe and in former German colonies in sub-Saharan Africa during the Second World War.

An intellectual and diplomatic history of World War II and the Holocaust, Africans and the Holocaust looks at the period from the perspectives of the colonized subjects of the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, as well as the sovereign peoples of Liberia and Ethiopia, who wrestled with the social and moral questions that the war and the Holocaust raised. The five main chapters of the book explore the pre-Holocaust history of relations between Jews and Africans in West and East Africa, perceptions of Nazism in both regions, opinions of World War II, interpretations of the Holocaust, and responses of the colonized and sovereign peoples of West and East Africa to efforts by Great Britain to resettle certain categories of Jewish refugees from Europe in the two regions before and during the Holocaust.

This book will be of use to students and scholars of African history, Holocaust and Jewish studies, and international or global history.

Edward Kissi is an associate professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of South Florida, United States.

This series includes in-depth research on aspects of economic, political, cultural, and social history of individual countries as well as broad-reaching analyses of regional issues.

Themes include social and economic change, colonial experiences, independence movements, postindependence governments, globalization in Africa, nationalism, gender histories, conflict, the Atlantic Slave Trade, the environment, health and medicine, ethnicity, urbanization, and neocolonialism and aid.

Power, Culture and Modernity in Nigeria

Beyond the Colony

Oluwatoyin Oduntan

African Testimony in the Movement for Congo Reform

The Burden of Proof

Robert Burroughs

Human rights in Sierra Leone, 17872016

The Long Struggle from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Present

John Idriss Lahai

Miscegenation, Identity and Status in Colonial Africa

Intimate Colonial Encounters

Lawrence Mbogoni

Displaced Mozambicans in Postcolonial Tanzania

Refugee Power, Mobility, Education, and Rural Development

Joanna T. Tague

Africans and the Holocaust

Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples

Edward Kissi

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

Edward Kissi

First published 2020

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Edward Kissi

The right of Edward Kissi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-19537-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-20301-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

The initial idea for this book came from an endowed Kent Family Lecture that I delivered on The Holocaust and Africa: Africa and the Holocaust, in March 2002, as a visiting assistant professor at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Thanks to Roman and Hannah Kent and my colleagues Deborah Dwork and Tatyana McAuley for that honor. Like many thoughts that come to mind in auspicious moments, the idea of exploring the lecture topic further for a manuscript dissipated quickly. It was not until March 2006, when I participated in a symposium at the Florida Holocaust Museum, at the invitation of Noreen Brand, and Ula Szczepinska, on the Legacies of Nuremberg, that thoughts about African responses to the Holocaust (and the Nuremberg trials) returned to my mind. Central to that interest was my own dismay at the absence of African voices and perspectives in Holocaust historiography, as well as the equal absence of Holocaust content in African historiography. I committed myself to starting something at the intersection of African and Holocaust historiographies. This is the product.

I could not have succeeded in this quest without the help of the University of South Florida (USF) where I teach and of the many people and institutions beyond it. The research money for this book came from USFs Humanities Institute and Creative Scholarship Grant in 2008 and 2010, respectively. With these internal research funds and through intermittent summer research between 2009 and 2012, I completed preliminary research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., and the Public Record Office of the British National Archives, as well as the British Library Newspapers in Colindale in the United Kingdom. I could not have found my way through Londons complicated underground and overland transportation networks or survived the citys weather conditions, without the help of my brother Alexander Oppong, who accommodated me in his home and accompanied me during his nonworking days to the Archives. I also thank Michael Haider, an Austrian diplomat I met at a conference in Salzburg, in 2012, for sharing some important information about Ethiopias relationship with Germany in the 1930s with me and for recommending key literature and contacts that opened new avenues of knowledge on the subject-matter of this book.

A semester research leave granted by the Department of Africana Studies, with the support of my colleague Chair Deborah Plant, in 2013, allowed me to travel to Ghana, Liberia, and Ethiopia to conduct the remaining archival research for this book. In Ghana, I enjoyed the hospitality of my brother Emmanuel Ofori and his wife Rhodaline Ofori who demonstrated the significance of our Ghanaian concept of family by accommodating me at no cost in their house during my three months of research at the Ghana National Archives. There, I was fortunate to have the assistance of the Archives staff, among whom Bright Owusu and Juliet Akuettey deserve special mention and gratitude. They searched for every file I requested and, in the toughest of circumstances, found new and relevant materials that I never thought even existed there. Beyond archival research, life in Ghana was made much more comfortable with the help of my friends George Adu, who took me to the archives daily in his taxi, and Lucy Tetteh and Mercy Gyekye, who lent their moral and material support.