Talk:Bwana Mkubwa

A fact from Bwana Mkubwa appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 13 July 2011 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the mining settlement of Bwana Mkubwa received thousands of Polish refugees who arrived in Northern Rhodesia during World War II?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2011/July.

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Number of Refugees?[edit]

The "18,000" number cited for the refugees seems a bit excesssive. I can't find a correct number, but looking around snippets here and there, it seems that number might refer to Polish refugee relocation to British East Africa as a whole rather than Bwana Mkubwa in particular. The cited website itself says the Bwana Mkubwa camp was only built to hold around 1,000. (that number apparently comes from "Tales of Zambia", 1996). So this 18,000 seems questionable.

Some attempts:

(Rotberg book) says Northern Rhodesia as a whole (three camps, Abercorn, Lusaka and Bwana Mkubwa) took 500 refugees in 1942, and an additional 3500 in the end of 1943. Can't find numbers for 1944 or 1945.

snippeting around Lewis H. Gann (1964) says 3,000 in Northern Rhodesia

Jackson (p.235) cites a number 4,000 for Bwana Mkubwa alone (although he doesn't cite other camps; methinks he might mean Northern Rhodesia as a whole)

this refers to +13,000 for all of East Africa

Snippeting around the East Africa High Commissioner's report it seems that the first census at the end of the war there were 15,000+ Polish refugees in all of East Africa, of which around c.3,000 were in Northern Rhodesia. It also reports that in late 1948, most had left, and by late 1948 there were only 14 left in Northern Rhodesia (4,197 in East Africa as a whole) and that the Bwana Mkubwa camp had been shut down by this time.

So I don't know exactly what number to put there. Or maybe just loosen the language to leave it imprecise ("over a thousand", "a few thousand", "Bwana Mkumbwa was one of the main camps used to receive several thousand (over 4,000?) Polish refugees that arrived in Northern Rhodesia"?) Walrasiad (talk) 13:23, 8 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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