Laboratory of Pan-Africanism: The Soviet Union and African Student Protest

Almost as soon as they began arriving on Soviet campuses in the late 1950s, African students began organizing. Their political activism coalesced around a variety of issues. Activism was connected to events in their home countries, to international events such as the French nuclear tests, and events closer to home, particularly Soviet racism. Cities such as Moscow and Kyiv provided unique sites for experimenting in a grassroots pan-Africanism. Unlike Paris and London, where students from the Global South were largely drawn from the former empires, cities in the Soviet bloc drew students from across the African continent.

Drawing on student petitions and surveillance reports of student rallies, this paper examines the multiple ways in which students framed their identities as Africans. It argues that pan-Africanism existed alongside and intermingled with other identities, including other (in some cases more obviously Soviet) forms of internationalism and nationalism. As this paper argues, the fate of this grassroots pan-Africanism as students failed to arrive at a stable definition of who belonged and who were beyond the bounds of ‘Africanness’. Individual personalities, linguistic differences, nationalism, and geography all played a role in disrupting the success of these pan-African visions. This offers insight not just into the Second-Third World encounter during the Cold War; it also points to the importance of the ‘Black East’ for grasping the diversity of pan-Africanist thought and practice in the twentieth century.