At the very time Nikita Khrushchev was slapping black backs at the U.N. and telling Africa's delegates that the Soviet Union is their world's best friend, three African students decided to tell the world how they had been treated in the Soviet Union. In an open letter to the heads of all African governments, the three youths—all medical students—charged last week that they had been victims of "constant discrimination, threats, restrictions of our freedom, and even brutality," while they studied at Moscow University.
Nigeria's Theophilus Okonkwo, Uganda's Andrew Amar and Togo's Michel Ayih were among the first 1,000 students to arrive in Russia after the Communists began wholesale recruiting of African students three years ago. Turning up in Frankfurt last week, they told reporters that they and scores of others were leaving Moscow "disgusted" at Communist pressure. "Students from all over Africa and the Near East," they said, "are finding in Moscow that they are merely being used as agents of Soviet power politics." They said that students from 14 African countries met secretly in Moscow before they left and authorized them "to present our case against Communism when we arrived in the West."
Chief point of their case was that there is no freedom for African students in Moscow. They found themselves forced to submit to political indoctrination, forbidden to band together in their own African student associations "like Africans have at universities everywhere." They were watched wherever they went by young Russian Komsomols, who even shared their dormitory quarters. Their big trouble started when they tried to complain of Russian racism. Their Communist sponsors were incensed when they reported that a young Somali student was beaten unconscious last May when he asked a Russian girl to dance with him. Soviet authorities even called a meeting to persuade African students to deny the story. When Ayih not only refused to cooperate but joined in fresh complaints to the university rector and to the Ministry of Culture, he was expelled from the Soviet Union. Amar and Okonkwo decided to leave, too.