PL
The purpose of the essay is to analyse the historiographical images of genocides in three parts of Africa: the Congo Free State, the German South-West Africa and the Kenya Colony. The article concentrates on three books, recently translated into Polish: Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya; David Olusoga, Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust. Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. The comparative review of these books clearly shows that genocides in Africa were not “invented” by Africans, like most people think, but transmitted by Europeans. Remembering these facts is important in the process of “decolonising the mind” – breaking the intercultural stereotypes and changing the social identity of former colonists and colonized people as well.