African and British proposals on Jewish refugees

This chapter examines British proposals to settle certain categories of European Jews in East and West Africa before and after the outbreak of the Second World War. It pays particular attention to the politics and controversies that engulfed those proposals, and the reactions their implementation provoked from colonial administrators, British settlers, and colonized and sovereign peoples in the two regions of Africa. The chapter argues that the idea of creating a homeland for some of Europe’s persecuted Jews on African soil through the settlement of Jewish refugees with agricultural and medical expertise received mixed reactions. Support and opposition came from people and governments that had initially been empathetic to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany, but later recoiled from receiving them as refugees. In the end, politics, policy, land, and climate ensnarled an aspiration that could only be partially pursued, but eventually abandoned. It is also a study of the brittleness of human empathy.