AGBOOLA BROWNE: BORN YORUBA DIED A POLISH HERO

AGBOOLA BROWNE: BORN YORUBA DIED A POLISH HERO

August Agboola O’Browne (22nd July 1895 – September 9, 1976) Celebrated Polish Jazz percussionist believed to have been the only black participant of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
The only black member of WWII Polish Nazi resistance. He survived the brutal war in which 94% of Warsaw residents were either killed or displaced, and continued living in the ravaged city until 1958.

Though born in Lagos to Wallace and Josefina Agboola, Very little is known about his early life in Lagos, but he stowed away to the UK aboard a British merchant ship, with the help of his father who was a longshoreman on the ship. In Britain, he first joined a small British travelling theatre group and ended up in Poland in 1922, at 27 first in Krakow & later moving to Warsaw. It is uncertain if he went to Poland with the theatre group, what informed the choice and why he chose to live there. In Warsaw he became a professional musician and drummer and worked in clubs including Ziemenska, then warsaw’s most famous club . His first album, recorded in 1928, made history, for he was the first West African jazzman to achieve this. He married a Polish woman, Zofia Pykowna; they had two children – Ryszard (Richard) in 1928 and Aleksander (Alexander) in 1929.

Apparently in 1949, he had applied to join the polish veteran association, in his application form he revealed that he was a member of the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy who fought in the Invasion of Poland in 1939, defending besieged Warsaw, and defended the country in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. He also revealed that he operated as an insurgent during the uprising, under the code name ‘Ali’ in a unit of the battalion Iwo led by one Corporal Aleksander Marciński, code-name “Łabędź” (“Swan”).
Before the uprising, he had been an operative in the resistance, distributing illegal propaganda material & sheltering refugees from the ghetto. Another participant of the same uprising confirmed that he saw a black man at the Head Quarters of the battalion “Iwo” at ulica Marszałkowska 74 (74 Marszalkowska Street), possibly in the communication section but he could not remember the exact personal data of the black insurgent.

The Germans put down the uprising brutally. It is quite remarkable that he survived unscathed, despite standing out on account of colour. This was an insurgency in which, of about 50,000 fighters that took part, approximately 18,000 of them were killed & about 25,000 wounded. After the war, he continued to live in the wreaked city, working with Warsaw’s Department of Culture & Art. He continued with work as a professional musician in the evenings in the clubs.

He moved to England in 1958, & continued his life as a musician in London’s jazz district. Where he died at 81, in 1976 and is buried in London’s Hampstead cemetery. His only surviving offspring is 61 year old Tatiana, his daughter from his second marriage. She says her father never talked about what had happened to him and she knows very little of his background in Poland or his early years in Lagos.

In 2019, a monument honouring his role in the Polish resistance was unveiled in Warsaw.
At the event, the Mayor of Warsaw Rafal Trazaskowski said; “…according to my knowledge, he’s the only black Warsaw insurgent – a Nigerian man who became a Warsaw citizen.”
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Credit: BBC News, Nigeria Nostalgic Project