Africans are no longer welcomed as they once were during the era of international socialist solidarity; in fact they now have to take extreme care whenever they travel around the city

With more than 12m people, Moscow is Europe’s biggest city and a melting pot of sorts for Russia’s 100 or so different ethnic groups. But Moscow is not Russia. In speed and style, it has been playing catch-up with Western capitals since it shed communism in the 1990s.


Moscow’s powerful mayor Yury Luzhkov, in office since 1992, has spent billions of dollars from the well-padded city budget to give the city a facelift. The drab concrete apartment blocks have given way to brightly-coloured residential towers and glass buildings for investment banks and oil companies. Luzhkov’s government has encircled the city with ring roads and created a business district called ‘The Moscow City’, his answer to La Défense in Paris and Lower Manhattan in New York. Under construction here is the Federation Tower, a 600m steel-and-glass symbol of new Russian wealth and power, designed by British architect Norman Foster to be Europe’s tallest building. 


Muscovites are the richest people in Russia, which explains the stark differences in lifestyle between Moscow and the faraway provinces. Grocery stores and supermarkets such as French discount retailer Auchan have been springing up everywhere. But Moscow was never a cheap option for expatriates and immigrants: for the third year running it has been designated as the world’s most expensive city.


African food is rare here but there are two Ethiopian restaurants downtown, in Krasnaya Vorota and Zemlyanoi Val. Lovers of North African food can visit one of three Moroccan restaurants.



Not-so-cosmopolitan


Moscow’s Metro is a showpiece. Built in the 1930s, the 230km-long underground network is known for the design of its marble stations, many of them decked with mosaics, chandeliers, sculptures and precious materials. Each of its lines is identified by a colour, the Red Line running from south-west to north-east. 


Unlike London, Paris or New York, Moscow never had a resident community of Africans and there is little racial harmony here. The Red Metro Line is a living metaphor for many dark-skinned residents who regard it as a danger zone to be avoided on certain days of the year and at certain times of the day because of frequent assaults and attacks from the city’s skinhead population.


“It is no secret that blacks get beaten up on Hitler’s Birthday or People’s Unity Day by skinheads and football fans on the Red Line,” says Msangi Nsangu, who heads the Association of African Students. “Every time we venture out, it’s like going to a war front, especially in the Metro, where escape is difficult.”


In private encounters and within the confines of their apartments or around the kitchen table, Muscovites are jocular, witty, superstitious and generous. But there is also a deep feeling of otherness rooted in years of relentless communist indoctrination that makes them unwilling to cosy-up to foreigners, especially those with non-Slavic looks.


Moscow’s largest concentration of Africans is in the south-west, at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, which attracted thousands of scholarship students from developing countries in the days of proletarian internationalism. Now there are fewer than 1,000 Africans there, down from 2,300 in the 1990s, as stipends have all but dried up and the welcome mat has disappeared. 


Doctor Lyubov Ivanova, a lecturer at the Moscow State University’s Institute of Asian and African Studies, attributes frequent attacks on African immigrants to the poor image of the continent projected in the Russian media. “The image of Africa as an extremely poor continent is stressed to raise the level of self-esteem of the Russians,” Ivanova said. “A mindset has been created in which Africans are used as scapegoats to redirect social aggression and as the only way for showing masculinity by declassified Russian youngsters.” lTai Adelaja