INDIANS THINK AFRICANS ARE "frauds and prostitutes"

 On the morning of Feb. 06, a few hundred African students gathered on the steps of Bengaluru’s Town Hall, a striking, colonnaded building at the heart of the sprawling metropolis best known as India’s Silicon Valley. Holding posters, some printed and most handwritten, and shouting slogans, they were protesting the assault on a Tanzanian student who had alleged that she was stripped and beaten up by a mob on Jan. 31.

It was a heartfelt outcry over violence against Africans that is becoming all too commonplace in India. But there was also a strange air of amusement and bewilderment at the protest site. The policemen sniggered, speaking among themselves. Some passersby openly laughed, entertained by the sight of a group of agitating African students. Others simply walked by, unperturbed.

In many ways, those reactions reflect the reality that African students in India must contend with: A selectively racist nation that, at once, has the potential to fulfil their dreams, but which could also turn into their worst nightmare.

 
 “They think Africans are into fraud and prostitution” 

Janeth, who only gave her first name, decided to leave Tanzania and read for an undergraduate degree at Bangalore University in 2012 because of the solid reputation of Indian institutions in accounting and finance, her subjects of choice.

“My experience was not bad,” she told Quartz, “50-50.” Her experience with fellow students was problematic, and she did face racism, especially from the general public. “They think Africans are into fraud and prostitution,” she said.

Even landlords, who sometimes speak with potential tenants on phone, often deny apartments on realising that they were speaking to an African. “I don’t want Africans,” the typical landlord would say, Janeth recalled. “Africans are rude and have too many friends.”

There was a time when Africa’s best and brightest stayed at home for their higher education. The likes of Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, Tanzania’s post-independence leader Julius Nyerere, and Namibia’s first president Sam Nujoma, were all educated at African universities.

But underfunding and mismanagement, coupled with what the Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani called the “NGO-isation of the university”, has stripped Africa’s centres of higher learning of their reputations. In fact, a 2015 list by the Times Higher Education, a British publication, named only five African institutions among the top places for research.

SOURCE: QUARTZ INDIA