‘Be confident, not puffed up – helpful, not slavelike.’ Czech women’s eyes on Africa (1910s–1930s)

European imperialism created the infrastructural, economic, and cultural preconditions for overseas tourism and shaped Western understandings of non-European regions through travel writing, racial discourse, and colonial imageries. This article examines how Czech women travellers between the 1910s and 1930s, coming from non-colonial state, perceived Africa and whether they reproduced, modified, or resisted dominant colonial imaginaries. The study draws on discourse analysis of published and unpublished travel writings, interpreted through postcolonial and gender perspectives. The analysis shows that Czech women travellers occupied an intermediate ‘second-class’ colonial position. Their tourist gaze framed Africa as a space of preserved pastness, authenticity, and ‘unspoiled’ nature, reinforcing temporal hierarchies between a modern West and a supposedly pre-modern non-European world. Their imperial gaze reproduced racialised knowledge and assumptions of European superiority, even when travellers expressed unease about colonial violence, segregation, and exploitation. Their voyeuristic gaze introduced eroticised visual fascination with African bodies, aestheticising skin, physique, and movement without fully crossing into explicit fetishisation. The study thus shows that non-colonial European actors also participated in colonial knowledge production, operating along two intersecting axes: a racial-imperial axis positioning them between Western colonisers and colonised populations, and a gendered axis situating them between Western women and Czech men.