The boys from Naija/2

This was September 1986 and I was on my way to Russia on a scholarship to study Medicine. Usually most Nigerian students, and indeed most students from Sub-Saharan Africa, dream of travelling abroad to continue with their higher education once they finish their secondary schooling. For those whose parents can afford it these dreams sometimes do come true. And many of them end up in the different Universities of Europe and North America. But only very few are enthusiastic about going to study in the Soviet Union.
“Russia?! Who on earth would want to go Russia with all this business of communism?!” most people would ask.

The problem is that nobody seemed to know exactly what was going on behind the so called “Iron Curtain”. And because of this general lack of access to accurate information, there was a lot of exaggerations and scare mongering going on; for instance, a lot of people believed that once you got to the Soviet Union that you were gradually brain-washed and then indoctrinated with a lot of harmful Communist ideologies.“ They want to turn you into a Communist puppet or at least a revolutionary…“ some people would say. Or they would ask “ how many people come back from there and are able to fit in to normal society when they come back?“.

It was also believed that because of the Communists loathing for the Western way of life that life in Russia was very frugal and stripped of the opportunities for those frivolous engagements that students everywhere in the world are want to exhaust themselves in as part of their extra-curricular exertions and that everybody just exists bereft of that “joie de vivre” associated with youth. “When you come back from Russia, you’ll be a complete mugu!”. Some would say. Mugu, is one of the Nigerian pidgin English words for a fool.

But people who had actually been there came back with a somewhat different story. Like the “Uncle” who had taken me to the Murtala Mohammed Airport that day. He was actually a very close relation of ours from the same village, and had studied Engineering at the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow about ten years earlier. And much as he accepted that life in Russia could be difficult, he had discounted a lot of the things that people were saying as being the products of propaganda from Capitalist apologists. Whatever that meant. My uncle liked such words, but to me that didn’t make him strange in any way. It made him sound educated.“Brain-wash you indeed. That‘s farcical!” he would say. “They’ll teach you about communism and their way of life. But they don’t force you to accept any of their views. They have as much right as the West to defend their views with as much propaganda as they wish. And It’s left for you to choose if you want to sympathise with their ideologies or not…”I had wanted to ask my uncle if he was a Communist apologist. But I decided not to as it didn’t sound very respectful.