Racism is another war front for African students stuck in Ukraine

Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Ojonugwa Zakari was trying to pretend life was going on as normal in her university halls. She’d woken up early, showered, and was brushing her hair, when the first mortar shell exploded.

“I don’t think anything prepares you for war – it was like my heart stopped beating,” she says, speaking over a crackling line from Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, just 30 miles from the Russian border. “I was thinking, is this real?”

As panicked students fled to a bunker, where they hugged each other and tried to confirm what was happening, Ms. Zakari, a medical student from Nigeria, had another grim realization. With Sumy State University located just a stone’s throw from the invading country, the closest ways to safety would be hundreds of miles west or south to the borders of Poland, Moldova, Hungary, or Romania.  

As those huddled began discussing how they might flee on WhatsApp and Telegram groups for international students – one sixth of the university’s students are foreigners, mostly from India and sub-Saharan Africa – another fear cropped up, one that some Black people say is ever present in Ukraine. 

Reports of racism against those fleeing Russian attacks gripped the students who felt frozen in place.

A Black mother and baby forced to give up their train seats. A young Black man beaten after waiting hours in line in subzero temperatures. A group of terrified Black African students, repeatedly refused entry to a safe haven, traversing hundreds of miles in search of another border. These were among the stories reported by Nigerian nationals to consular officers.

Indian national papers carried reports of students who say they were viciously beaten by Ukrainian and Polish border guards. And dozens of similarly frightening incidents had begun circulating on social media.

The reports were part of the reason Ms. Zakari had hesitated to flee earlier, choosing instead to stock up supplies and hunker down. Now, as the students whispered among themselves – was that machine gunfire in the streets? – she realized she had no chance of leaving.

Widespread reports of mistreatment

Nine days after Russia began bombarding Ukraine from the air, land, and sea, more than a million people have fled across international borders to safety. Among them are tens of thousands of African nationals who have been swept up in a war far from their own homes. 

While overwhelmed neighboring countries have largely welcomed those pouring into its borders, the African Union said Monday that it was also disturbed by widespread reports of African citizens being beaten, thrown off trains, or simply refused the right to cross borders. 

“Reports that Africans are singled out for unacceptable dissimilar treatment would be shockingly racist and breach international law,” the AU said in a statement. Allegations of racist mistreatment have been leveled against Ukrainian, Polish, and Hungarian border guards.

“We hear about the racism going on at the Polish border. We that are caught here are worried that we might face this racial problem when we finally manage to make it to the  border,” says Ms. Zakari. “It will really be bad if that happens after all this stress that we are currently going through.”

Like about a dozen other stranded African students and their parents who spoke to the Monitor, Ms. Zakari says she felt only the presence of the international media – or, ideally, of United Nations officials – would guarantee her right to safe passage once at the Ukrainian border.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, said March 3 it would begin evacuating some 5,000 nationals from Ukraine and neighboring countries.

Ironically, Ukraine has a long history of racial diversity – alongside one of discrimination. Many African nations have complicated ties with both Russia and Eastern European countries dating back to the Cold War, when the continent’s newly independent countries largely allied with the Soviet bloc against their former Western colonizers.

In recent decades, Ukraine has been seen as a cheaper alternative to Western Europe and the United States, making it a popular destination for students from across Africa and India. Now, its besieged cities are home to around 20,000 Indian students, while Morocco, Nigeria, and Egypt account for 16,000 more students. 

Western media sets racist tone 

But accusations of deeply entrenched racism go beyond Ukraine’s borders – beginning with the way the war is being reported by Western media outlets.

Peter Dobbie, an Al Jazeera English anchor, was criticized for using comparisons of Arabs and North Africans in his descriptions of Ukrainian refugees, and the network apologized for his comments.

“What is compelling is that just looking at them, the way they’re dressed,” he observed. “These are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war. These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa. They look like any European family that you would live next door to.”

In other cases contributing to this tone, appeals to humanity have been based on the fact Ukraine is a white, Western nation.

“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair and blue eyes being killed every day with Putin’s missiles and his helicopters and his rockets,” David Sakvarelidze, Ukraine’s former deputy general prosecutor, said, unchallenged, in a BBC interview on Saturday.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry initially dismissed allegations of racism by border officials as “Russian disinformation.” But as both the number of reported incidents – and an ensuing backlash, which has been particularly ferocious on social media – continued to increase, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said March 3 it had set up an emergency hotline specially for African and Asian students.  

Garba Shehu, an adviser to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, praised the “generosity of spirit of the Ukrainian people” that currently enables some 4,000 Nigerians to study there. 

“We also appreciate that those in official positions in security and border management will in most cases be experiencing impossible expectations in a situation they never expected,” he added. 

“But, for that reason, it is paramount that everyone is treated with dignity and without favor.” 

Some African countries have begun slowly evacuating their citizens, although efforts have been patchy as airspaces remain closed.

For parents at home on the continent, the days have trickled by as they anxiously await news.

Ibrahim Umar, a 52-year-old lawyer in Kaduna in northern Nigeria, said he had barely slept after hearing about the war. Eight thousand miles away, his 19-year-old son Usman, a medic at the University of Dnipro, fled Tuesday after his student lodging came under fire. 

The family scraped together money for him to get a train ticket to Poland. But on arrival, five days later, more agonizing news came.

“We were happy to hear that they had arrived at the border safely, only for him to call me back saying that Polish officials were selecting only white people and allowing them into Poland, and that Black people were not allowed,” Mr. Umar says of his son’s odyssey.

Again, the Umar relatives organized another round of fundraising for the younger Mr. Umar to head to Romania – where, again, the student was turned away.

“At this point the boy was crying, I was crying, his mother has been crying since the war broke out,” says the elder Mr. Umar. Eventually, his son was able to cross the Hungarian border.

“We took these kids abroad to study because of the problems we have with our universities here. But now it’s war and racism we get in Europe,” he says.

Imagine having “time to be racist”

As news arrived March 3 of the first major Ukrainian city being captured by Russia, Ms. Zakari, the Nigerian medical student, said she and her fellow foreign students felt their morale slipping.

But Ms. Zakari, who has ventured briefly out to the town twice to top up food and water, says where once there were daily running gun battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces, now the city’s empty streets are chilling – and both residents and students believed any attempt at fleeing would be too dangerous. Hungry Russian soldiers were looting shops and houses in the region, local press reported.

After another night of fierce bombardment, Ms. Zakari said today that her group’s water supply is good for just two days. But she was finding solace with her fellow international students, sharing hopeful news and funny memes as they tried to keep their spirits up. The university’s Nigerian student union had made a video appeal for all African students to be safely evacuated, which students from Angola to Zambia were disseminating among friends, family, and consular officers. 

Her only hope, Ms. Zakari says, is to get to a western border town safely once the fighting calms down – and then pray she isn’t stopped because of the color of her skin.

“Imagine that you’re in the same situation as everyone else, and you still have time to be racist,” she says, her voice breaking on the phone.