Historian Rustam Alexander looks back at the 1960s, when the USSR, amid Africa’s decolonization, sought to build influence on the continent through Soviet education. African students were invited to study under slogans of international solidarity, friendship among peoples and social mobility, but in practice many quickly lost their initial illusions.
The article draws a parallel with Russia’s current policy in Africa, saying the authorities are promoting the image of a “friendly great power,” while the Russian Orthodox Church expanded its presence to at least 34 countries between 2022 and 2025. It also says Africans are being recruited for work at defense plants and for participation in the war against Ukraine.
One example is Everest Mulekezi of Uganda, who arrived at Moscow State University in October 1959 on a six-year scholarship. Instead of the support he expected, he encountered cramped dormitory housing, harsh living conditions and persistent communist indoctrination. He later left the USSR and in October 1960 continued his studies in the United States.
Beyond propaganda, the article says African students faced travel restrictions, bans on national associations and disapproval of contacts with Russian women. The most acute problem, the author argues, was racism.
A turning point came with the death of 29-year-old Ghanaian student Edmond Assare-Addo, whose body was found in Khovrino in December 1963. TASS said there were no signs of violent death and claimed he froze after drinking alcohol. But two Ghanaian medical students who attended the autopsy said there were bruises on his hands and knees and a wound under his chin. Among students, suspicions spread that he may have been killed because he planned to marry a Russian woman.
“African students are beaten every day,” one participant told Soviet Education Minister Vyacheslav Elyutin after police dispersed the demonstration in Moscow.
After the incident, about 500 African students staged an unauthorized march carrying signs that read “Stop killing Africans.” Historian Maxim Matusevich describes it as the first such demonstration in the USSR since 1927. New conflicts followed: in the mid-1960s, 800 students held a week-long strike, and in Lviv an attack on a Nigerian student in a dormitory escalated into a mass fight. The author concludes that Soviet-African “friendship” was burdened from the outset by ideological and cultural contradictions that left many of those who came to study deeply disappointed.