The bottom line is that Africans are viewed as people we do things for - and now that we want to do things for ourselves, sorry comrades, you ll just have to go elsewhere. And they do. There were 22,000 Africans studying in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe up to 1988. At the beginning of this year there were only 7.200. The main reason for this has been the rise in racist and fascist groups in the East.
Students now try to go to India or Cuba instead.
Eastern Europeans are going elsewhere too. Another worrying trend in African-European relations is the opening up of the East to South Africa. It seems that they are judging the degree of their democracy by their ability to condone undemocratic repressive and inhuman regimes. Thus Pik Botha, South Africa s foreign minister, was one of the first visitors to post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There are even reports of Hungarians emigrating to South Africa.