Word: okonkwo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Black Africans in Moscow encounter little pure racial prejudice, but they have had some disillusioning encounters with the Russian police state, which contrasts badly even with their memories of colonial regimes in Africa. In a recent series of articles in the Lagos Sunday Times, Nigerian Student Chukwuemeke Okonkwo told how he rushed to Moscow in 1957, to find that Russian students were awed by "our easy manner, our gaiety and our open debates." When the Russians started imitating Africans at Moscow University, down rattled the Iron Curtain. Africans were segregated, jazz records were banned, free debates were outlawed, dates with...
...Okonkwo was also dismayed to find himself exploited for propaganda. Last July he was boxing in a Moscow University gym when he was asked to pose for a photograph. In August he recognized himself in a full-page picture in a big-circulation magazine. On his wrists were broken chains, and near him cringed a white man with a whip...
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...
...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...