BOOK 2. Chapter 4: The Africans/1

In those days the foreign students in the USSR were encouraged to belong to a Union of students from their respective countries. And though the membership of these unions was considered voluntary, all the students ended up belonging to them. The leadership of these Unions was usually elected by the students themselves to represent them at meetings of the gorodsky soviet or town councils, which concerned their welfare in that town. And the gorodsky soviet, on their part, would represent the wishes of the government to them. In this way the gorodsky soviet was able to have access to...and supervise...the activities of all the foreign students in each city of the USSR.

The members of the Soviet were also voluntary. And they were usually representatives of the workers, peasants and soldiers in each town, all of whom would be Communist Party members and from whom delegates were drawn for the All-Russia Congress of the Soviet government.

In the year that I arrived Rostov-On-Don, the leadership of the Nigerian students Union planned to mark the Nigerian Independence day with a socio-cultural event, which they hoped would become the talk of the town for many months to come. Apparently this was going to be the first time in 3years that new Nigerian students were posted to Rostov and in such a large number! A total of 18 new students had arrived in two batches of 9 each. So there was need to organise a party that was not too flamboyant; which would give the authorities the wrong impression, yet prestigious enough to give the Nigerian population in Rostov a little bit of respect after their image had suffered a serious battering, which later resulted in 3 years of a strained relationship with the gorodsky soviet.

The story has it that the Nigerian students union did something unimaginably wrong; they had organised a peaceful demonstration along Engels street...the main street of the town, which passes through the city centre...carrying placards that were written in Russian and in English and demanding for one of their students to be released from jail.

The official story is that this incarcerated student, the then President of the Union, was a spekulant; somebody who engaged in the buying and selling trade. The story goes that he had gotten so rich from this illegal activity to the point were the authorities started to take a keen interest in him. This lead to his being caught in the act of trying to sell some tovari, products, to an undercover agent. And since this was considered an act of economic sabotage, the punishment was an indefinite spell in a Soviet jail.

But another version, one that the students prefer to believe, is that the authorities were concerned that the Nigerian students Union was becoming too challenging and that the leadership was refusing to listen...something that certainly had to be discouraged, even among foriegners...so somebody had to be made a scapegoat and the best candidate happened to be the very outspoken president. And he got himself framed.

The outcome of all this is that the Nigerian population in Rostov-On-Don was drastically reduced from well over a hundred students to less than 30 by dispersing the leaders of that demonstration to other towns, such as Baku and Tashkent and then making sure that no new students were posted to Rostov until most of the older “corrupted” students had graduated. They also made sure that the subsequent leadership of the Student Unions were properly vetted.

So this was the Rostov in which we had arrived; a city that had not seen any new Nigerian students in the preceding 3years and where the older students were battling to redeem their reputation as law abiding students. This was a city where most of the foreign students, especially the Nigerians, were still under a lot of scrutiny.