On December 11, the stays of 23-year-old Zambian citizen Lemekhani Nyirenda lastly made it again residence to his household. A month earlier, the Zambian authorities had launched a press release on his dying in Ukraine, which raised extra questions than solutions.
Subsequently, it turned clear that Nyirenda, who studied in Russia earlier than being imprisoned on drug costs, had signed up for the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary firm, to battle in Ukraine in a bid to get a decreased sentence.
In a November 29 submit on the Russian social media platform VKontakte, Wagner founder Evgeny Prigozhin claimed he spoke to Nyirenda, who allegedly informed him he had volunteered as a result of: “You, Russian, helped us Africans achieve independence. When it was tough for us, you stretched out a hand to us and proceed to do that now. Wagner is saving 1000’s of Africans; going to warfare with you is paying again for at the least a few of our debt to you.”
However Nyirenda’s household has insisted on an investigation into his recruitment, suspecting he might have been coerced. Additionally they say he was wrongfully convicted; he had been working as a courier to assist himself whereas finding out in Moscow however was stopped and searched by the police, who discovered a bundle he was carrying with medicine in it.
Nyirenda’s dying and the way the Russian authorities dealt with it communicate to the evident hole between Russian official rhetoric and the way it treats Africans in actuality. Whereas it insists it has an anti-imperialist strategy to Africa, Russia has no qualms about victimising Africans on the continent and inside its personal borders.
An ‘anti-imperialist’ power
As Russia turned a world diplomatic pariah within the aftermath of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Africa’s significance to its international coverage and public relations has grown. The Kremlin has labored onerous to keep up a picture as an anti-imperialist power that helps the African battle towards (neo)colonialism – one thing Prigozhin referenced in his alleged dialog with Nyirenda.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and varied Russian authorities officers have additionally persistently made references to supposed Russian assist for African states’ battle towards colonial powers. “Our nation has at all times been on Africa’s aspect and has at all times supported Africa in its battle towards colonialism,” he declared in June.
This rhetoric has been prominently featured in Russian media and official social media accounts. On December 2, for instance, the English-language Twitter account of the Russian international ministry tweeted: “#Russia was among the many few world powers that neither had colonies in #Africa or elsewhere nor participated in slave commerce all through its historical past. Russia helped, in each attainable method, the peoples of the African continent to realize their freedom and sovereignty #EndSlavery.”
Connected was an image of a preferred Soviet-era political poster that includes an African man breaking the chains binding his arms together with the phrases: “Africa fights, Africa will win.”
The tweet displays the Russian authorities’s declare that it maintains Soviet anti-imperialist insurance policies in direction of the International South. Whereas participating in an ideological battle towards america in the course of the Chilly Conflict, the Soviet Union targeted its sources on constructing a sphere of affect in Africa.
The Soviets supported varied left-leaning governments and teams all through the continent and provided arms, navy coaching, and funds to anti-colonial actions in Southern Africa, together with Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa within the Seventies and Eighties. Soviet specialists went to varied international locations on the continent to coach residents of newly unbiased international locations in governance, know-how, and sciences. On the identical time, the USSR invited 1000’s of African college students to pursue increased schooling in varied Soviet republics.
The Kremlin’s use of Soviet-African relations to craft a picture of optimistic engagement with the continent has labored. African leaders and folks have largely embraced the Russian narrative on the warfare in Ukraine.
In the course of the UN Normal Meeting vote on a decision calling for Russia to take away its troops from Ukraine in early March, of 35 international locations that abstained, 17 had been African; and one of many 5 that voted towards was Eritrea.
Over the approaching months, numerous African leaders welcomed Russian international minister Sergey Lavrov to their international locations and reiterated their assist for Moscow.
The Russian authorities has additionally sought in charge the worldwide meals disaster exacerbated by the warfare in Ukraine on Kyiv – a story that has additionally been embraced by many Africans. In June, after receiving an official invitation from Putin, African Union President Macky Sall travelled to Russia to satisfy with the Russian president to debate the grain shortages.
A couple of weeks later, Russia struck a take care of Ukraine and the UN to launch grain blocked in Ukrainian ports. In official authorities rhetoric, the settlement was offered as an indication that Moscow protects African pursuits.
Extractive insurance policies and racist views
However the Kremlin’s narrative on Africa belies a really totally different actuality. Though it claims to assist Africa’s struggles towards former colonial and present neocolonial powers, Russia itself has engaged in predatory practices on the continent that smack of neocolonialism.
It’s fairly ironic that Prigozhin alleges Nyirenda noticed the Wagner Group as a supply for good on condition that it has been on the forefront of Moscow’s extractive insurance policies in Africa. Wagner has grow to be notorious in Sudan and the Central African Republic for each its employed weapons and its involvement in illicit mining operations.
The group has additionally had a hand in navy conflicts plaguing the Central African Republic, Mali and Mozambique. The United Nations has accused the Russian mercenaries of committing a number of human rights abuses, together with harassment of civilians, wrongful detainment, torture and abstract executions.
Russia doesn’t deal with Africans that significantly better inside its personal borders both. As Nyirenda’s case illustrates, Africans who come to Russia to check or work don’t discover the post-colonial, anti-imperialist paradise Moscow claims to be.
Africans have confronted racism and anti-Black violence, which was significantly lethal within the 2000s and 2010s. In a 2006 report, Amnesty Worldwide mentioned African college students and asylum seekers they met in Russia “prevented going out after darkish and one coated his face with a shawl so his pores and skin color was much less conspicuous to passers-by”. Additionally they detailed a number of murders of African college students, together with the 2004 stabbing of Bissau-Guinean scholar Amaru Antoniu Lima and the 2006 capturing of Senegalese scholar Lamsar Samba Promote.
In media stories, African college students have shared tales of being denied service by taxi drivers, being barred from shops and golf equipment, seeing “Slavs solely” necessities in rental adverts, and being ignored when reporting violence towards them to the police.
When African college students attempting to flee the Russian invasion confronted racism in Ukraine, the Russian authorities took benefit, encouraging anti-Ukrainian sentiment amongst Africans by amplifying their tales. However the Russian authorities have remained largely silent on racism and discrimination inside Russian borders.
Anti-Black racism in Russia, in fact, is nothing new. Africans didn’t really feel that rather more welcome throughout Soviet instances both, with African college students usually encountering racism and violence due to their pores and skin color. In 1963, African college students staged a uncommon protest after the killing of a Ghanaian scholar allegedly as a result of his relationship with a white Soviet girl.
Just like the miscegenation fears within the American South in the course of the Jim Crow period, the Soviets needed Africans to maintain their distance from Slavic ladies. Combined-race kids usually confronted racist abuse and had been referred to as “Competition Youngsters” and “Olympics kids”, referring to worldwide occasions throughout which international guests supposedly fathered kids with Soviet ladies.
This sentiment continued after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Forward of the 2018 World Cup that Russia hosted, Tamara Pletneva, head of the State Duma Committee on Youngsters, Girls, and Household, reminded Russian ladies to not enter into relationships with guests who weren’t of the identical race.
Afro-Russians nonetheless routinely face racism in Russia. Russian-born footballer Bryan Idowu, who has performed for a number of Russian soccer golf equipment, has been vocal in regards to the racist abuse he confronted on and off the sphere. Regardless of being a well known participant, he says he has been racially profiled by the police, routinely getting stopped and searched.
In June 2020, amid the Black Lives Matter protests urgent for an finish to institutional racism in america and Western Europe, a viral video of a Russian taxi driver refusing service to an African scholar highlighted simply how little the Russian public was prepared for such conversations. After the driving force was fired by the corporate he labored for, a web-based marketing campaign in his assist was launched underneath the hashtag #RussianLivesMatter.
In the meantime, Maria Magdalena Tunkara, an Afro-Russian blogger who tried to elucidate BLM to her Russian viewers, confronted a brand new wave of on-line harassment and dying threats.
On this context, Lemekhani Nyirenda’s life in Russia and his dying in Ukraine are consultant of Russia’s two-faced strategy to Africa and Africans. Whereas the Russian presence in Africa may be very a lot extractive and Russian views of it fairly racist, the continent continues to buoy Russia’s worldwide popularity, simply because it did in the course of the Chilly Conflict.
Moscow launders its popularity by means of African want. Many African states rely upon Russian agricultural exports or on Russian navy coaching and provides and have few causes to show towards it.
Till there’s a concerted and targeted Western effort to enhance relations with the continent that features reckoning with the long-lasting impacts of European and US imperialism, Russia will proceed to have an outsized affect in Africa and can proceed to downplay and ignore the anti-African racism and xenophobia in its midst.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.