Nigerians On the Move: Educational Mobility to the Soviet Union during the Cold War (1960-1991)

Abstract

Between 1960 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, more than 43,500 students from Sub-Saharan Africa were awarded scholarships to study at Soviet universities. This educational “charm offensive,” involving all-inclusive scholarships, played a vital role in Soviet internationalism and cultural diplomacy. The USSR aimed to establish a socialist and Soviet-friendly intelligentsia in postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the allocation of Soviet-paid scholarships was primarily determined by African states, focusing on fields such as medicine and engineering. Despite this, little attention has been given to the perspectives, biographical trajectories, and agency of students themselves. The experiences of women, constituting one-fifth of scholarship recipients, particularly need more focus. Additionally, there is a noticeable research gap concerning gender, mobility, everyday experiences like love and friendship, cultural encounters, and racism. Little is known about how these experiences shaped the students' subsequent lives. For the Summer University of the German Historical Institute Paris, I will analyze the biographical trajectories of educational mobility to the Soviet Union, using Nigeria as an example. In total, 3,606 Nigerians graduated from Soviet universities, constituting around 12 percent of all Sub-Saharan African students. All these students had to apply for a scholarship, undergo a selection process, and travel to the Soviet Union, involving a multitude of experiences and logistical preparations over three decades. Surprisingly, even the selection process itself has not been adequately studied. Additionally, there is limited knowledge about the socioeconomic background of scholarship holders, gender, and the specifics of mobility, including air travel, flight routes, and airlines used. To capture the personal experiences of men and women from Nigeria, oral history interviews will shed light on their intentions and memories of the journey to the Soviet Union. Complementing these perspectives, documents from Nigerian state archives will provide insight into the scholarship selection process that facilitated mobility to the East. The synthesis of these sources will offer new insights into the selected students' socioeconomic backgrounds, travel routes, and important airlines. Through this research, I aim to contribute novel perspectives on mobility from Africa to Europe and Asia, specifically by analyzing postcolonial Nigerian educational mobility during the last three decades of the Cold War.