Racism is another war front for African students stuck in Ukraine
Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Zakari Ojonugwa was trying to pretend life was going on as normal in her university halls. She’d woken up early, showered, and was brushing her hair, when the first mortar shell exploded.
“I don’t think anything prepares you for war – it was like my heart stopped beating,” she says, speaking over a crackling line from Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, just 30 miles from the Russian border. “I was thinking, is this real?”
As panicked students fled to a bunker, where they hugged each other and tried to confirm what was happening, Ms. Ojonugwa, a medical student from Nigeria, had another grim realization. With Sumy State University located just a stone’s throw from the invading country, the closest ways to safety would be hundreds of miles west or south to the borders of Poland, Moldova, Hungary, or Romania.
As those huddled
