‘Russia sends African students to war’

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My report takes as its starting-point an article by Adekunle Sulaimon published in the Nigerian newspaper The Punch on June 10th.

Sulaimon’s article is based in part on a report sent out the previous day by the internet news agency Bloomberg and titled “Russia is Sending Young Africans to Die in its War Against Ukraine.”

Despite its collossal misgovernance under Putin, Russia still boasts many fine universities.

There are world-renowned institutions of Science and Technology, and of course there is the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow (Lumumba was the Congolese liberation hero who was assassinated by the CIA).

This is the university where several of my former NUL colleagues did their post-graduate studies.

Many will remember the irrepressible Tsiu Selatile (nicknamed Force) who carried out his postgrad studies in Economics there (many a discussion we had at the NUL Staff Club trying to refine Marx’s definition of “ideology”– a tricky business).

There are at present around 37 000 African students in Russia. Why so many, one might wonder, given the perennial problems that the country poses: a brutal winter climate; a difficult language to learn, given that it has its own alphabet; a hideous history of racism, dating back to the pogroms (the word is Russian) – the genocidal slaughter of Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Partial answers might be that it’s a relatively cheap country in which to live (compared to those of western Europe) and it’s probably easy to get a study visa.

One of today’s major humanitarian crises is Russia’s attempt to take over Ukraine in a brutal war that has brought down on them international condemnation, though some African governments have remained “neutral.”

It says something about the scale of the clampdown on dissent in Russia that the war goes on, despite the fact that — as estimated by the UK Ministry of Defence — Russia lost more than 1 200 troops a day last month.

The Russian military are enlisting convicts from prison to swell their numbers; once they’ve served their time on the battle front and if they survive, these convicts are pardoned for their crimes and let back into society: murderers and rapists back on the streets.

In addition, and even more shamefully, the Russian government is compelling thousands of African migrants and students to go to war as a condition for visa renewal.

According to the Nigerian journalist Adekunle Sulaimon: “These troops suffer especially high casualty rates because they are increasingly deployed in risky offensive manouevres to protect more highly trained units.”

Three days after Sulaimon’s report The Punch published an article by another Nigerian journalist, Gift Habib, titled “Russia denies recruiting Nigerian students for Ukrainian war” (for Nigerian, read African).

Habib records: “labelling the reports as fake news and entirely unfounded, the embassy emphasized the potential damage such misinformation could inflict on the educational cooperation between Russia and Nigeria.

That phrase “educational cooperation” is interesting; it’s an all-too-familiar cheap rhetorical strategy to use a phrase referring to a noble concept when one is on the defensive.

The Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has stood by the Russian denials, but that only speaks of their own negligence.

What to do from far-off Lesotho? Well, clearly, Basotho should think twice about heading to Russia for their studies.

And it would be really good if Lesotho politicians could spare a few moments from their other concerns (the sort of concerns that Muckraker writes so damningly about) to check up on the welfare and whereabouts of any Basotho students known to be in Russia, and, at the level of Pan-African concern, to marshal some form of diplomatic protest at the military enlistment, maybe through the African Union.

Chris Dunton is a former Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.