The Forgotten Greek Diaspora:
Greeks in Zimbabwe and Tanzania

Fotis Papadopoulos holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute's Department of History and Civilization. He completed his undergraduate degree and master's thesis in History at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, specializing in contemporary Greek history.

Research Keywords: Colonial History; Decolonization; Greek Diaspora.

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My research project traces the historical evolution of Greek communities in two distinct colonial environments in sub-Saharan Africa: Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania). It examines the experiences of Greek-speaking migrants of multiple regional origins and shifting citizenships across an expanded chronological framework, from the early phase of European colonization in the 1890s to the start of decolonization in the 1960s. Rather than treating Greek migrants as self-evident colonial settlers (based on their current affiliation with Europe), the project asks how individuals who arrived without an imperial background or prior colonial experience were gradually transformed into colonial settlers embedded within the colonial hierarchical systems of power.

Looking back on the development of this project, I have come to think of Greek communities in sub-Saharan Africa as part of a “forgotten” diaspora—not in the sense of an undocumented or obscure historical subject, but as one that has been rendered uncomfortable within dominant narratives of Greek history. This framing emerged not as an original premise of my dissertation, but through the research process itself. When I first began working on the topic, Greek communities in Africa were largely absent from academic discussions of the Greek diaspora, appearing at most as marginal references, usually in relation to Greek communities in Egypt.

At the same time, informal conversations with academics, friends, and acquaintances in Greece repeatedly suggested something different. While many initially expressed unfamiliarity with this history, they often recalled family stories, hometown connections, or acquaintances who had lived in Africa—most commonly in Congo, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, or Zimbabwe. These encounters led me to reflect on the discrepancy between public historical narratives and dispersed personal memories, and to see this migration history not as a niche phenomenon, but as one that had gradually faded from historical memory.

In retrospect, I have also come to understand this process of forgetting as closely connected to the colonial context of these migrations. Greeks who returned to Greece from African colonies between the 1970s and 1990s—often following nationalization policies or the erosion of their privileged position after independence—frequently minimized or obscured their colonial pasts. In the political and cultural climate of post-dictatorship Greece, associations with colonial societies were often viewed unfavorably. While these observations extend beyond the formal evidentiary scope of my dissertation, they have shaped how I now situate the project within broader questions of Greek diaspora connections with colonialism in 20 ^th century.

At the core of my project is an analysis of settler formation, i.e. how someone becomes settler. Rather than assuming Greek migrants’ eventual “whiteness” or settler status, I examine how colonial state structures, settler norms, and everyday practices regulated conduct toward Indigenous populations and reclassified Greeks as privileged Europeans. The project’s extended chronological scope and comparative framework are central to this argument. In the early colonial period (1890s–1910s), Greeks were often racialized as non-white, undesirable, or marginal migrants by both British and German colonial authorities. By the post–Second World War era, however, Greek and Cypriot communities in both colonies had largely consolidated their position as settlers who, despite lingering social prejudices from British settlers, enjoyed material security and broadly supported colonial governance as a means of safeguarding their privileges.

Comparing two distinct colonial regimes—a semi-dominion settler state in Southern Rhodesia and a League of Nations Mandate (later UN Trusteeship) territory in Tanganyika—allows me to demonstrate that this transformation was not site-specific but structurally produced. Across differing imperial contexts, Greek communities were incorporated into colonial hierarchies in ways that ultimately aligned them with settler colonial power, revealing how empire could manufacture settlers even among populations initially excluded from imperial belonging.

Methodologically, the project combines archival research in British and German colonial records with Greek-language sources, including Greek state archives, community publications, memoirs, photographs, and oral testimonies. This multilingual and cross-imperial approach allows me to trace both official classifications and how colonialism materialized ‘on the ground’ and the everyday lives of Greek migrants/settlers.

The project contributes to ongoing efforts to expand the scope of Modern Greek studies beyond its traditional geographic boundaries. By placing Greek migration within African colonial contexts, it foregrounds the entanglement of Greek migration with imperial power structures and racial/class hierarchy, positioning Greek communities not only as migrants but, at specific historical moments, as participants in settler colonial societies. The case of Greek settlers demonstrates that inclusion within “European” or “white” categories was neither automatic nor uniform, but the outcome of historically specific processes shaped by class, labor, respectability, and political alignment with colonial authority. In this way, the project contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to complicate binary distinctions between colonizer and colonized by examining marginal European groups.

Beyond academia, the project also has a public dimension. In contemporary Greece, discussions about the country’s historical relationship to colonialism remain limited outside academic contexts. When they do emerge, they are often framed through narratives of marginality or non-involvement, or they present Greece’s purportedly ‘anticolonial’ or non-imperialist stance as self-evident. By examining Greek participation in colonial societies, my research seeks to open space for more critical and nuanced discussions of this history, and to explore how Greek-speaking populations were, at times, implicated (in)directly in broader imperial structures.

One of the central challenges shaping my work, and that of many scholars working on non-national histories, concerns the question of research funding. I have been fortunate to receive financial support from the European University Institute and the Greek grant authority (IKY) that enabled me to conduct research across multiple countries. However, this experience has also made particularly visible the extent to which such work depends on sustained institutional funding, which remains unevenly accessible, especially within the field of historical studies.

Projects that move beyond nationally bounded frameworks often require engagement with dispersed archives, extended periods of travel, and the ability to work across linguistic and administrative contexts. As a result, the capacity to produce transnational, global or comparative histories is closely tied to material conditions that are not equally available to all researchers and states. This raises broader questions about whose histories can be written, and under what conditions, at a time when funding for humanities research has become increasingly constrained.