Muffled wails filtered through the thin walls of the dormitory at Bint-ul-Huda University in Qom, Iran, early on the morning of March 1, waking Janet Pauros.
With sleep still clinging to her eyes, the Zimbabwean Islamic studies student ran downstairs, where she found her classmates huddled around the television. A banner with the latest news appeared on the screen: Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was dead.
“That’s when I knew it was going to be a big war,” Pauros says.
Why do we write this?
For years, Iran’s government has awarded scholarships to African students to help generate political goodwill on the continent. Now, those students find themselves in the crosshairs of a rapidly escalating conflict.
As US and Israeli missiles rain down on Iran, African students find themselves in the crosshairs of an escalating conflict. They come from across the continent, from Nigeria to Uganda to Zimbabwe, many on scholarships from the Iranian government. Exact figures are difficult to come by, but about 1,000 Nigerian students studied in Iran this academic year, according to the Nigerian embassy in that country.
For Tehran, sponsoring the education of these students is a way to generate goodwill and deepen its political influence in Africa. Meanwhile, for the students themselves, studying in Iran was supposed to be a ticket to a funded international education.
But now, they were just trying to get out alive.
An abrupt ending
In the days following the supreme leader’s death, grief seemed to hang over Qom, as thick as the air pollution, Pauros says. A hospital near his school was bombed. “I thought I was going to die,” he remembers.
Iran had not been part of Ms. Pauros’s plan. But a family emergency depleted the funds for university tuition in his country. When her friend, who was already in Iran, told her about scholarship opportunities in the country, it felt like a lifesaver.
Zimbabwe’s ties with Iran run deep. “When we went to war (for independence), Iran was our friend,” explained Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa while hosting his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, in Harare in July 2023. “When you see him, you see me. When you see me, you see him.”
The two countries also share another common experience. “It is vitally important that we, the victims of Western sanctions… show them that we are united,” Mnangagwa explained.
But such warm diplomacy could not insulate Pauros from the thorny reception he received in April last year when he arrived in Qom, an ancient city considered sacred by Shiite Muslims.
Although she learned Farsi, it quickly became clear to her that she would never be accepted. “People are incredibly racist,” he says bluntly, sadness falling in his brown eyes as he remembers how African students were ignored in class: hands raised, ignored.
Leaving campus to go out and explore was also difficult. She says the school even kept students’ passports, saying they needed them to renew their study permits.
A positive point was making friends with a student from Burkina Faso, called Majdida. But when Pauros decided to leave Iran last week, Majdida stayed behind. Their embassy had not arranged a visa.
“I was very scared because I couldn’t evacuate,” says Pauros, remembering how the two women cried when they said goodbye.
Dragging a suitcase filled with everything he owned, Pauros took a taxi to the Tehran bus station, which was packed with people and barely contained panic.
He boarded a bus bound for the Armenian border and arrived late at night. I was waiting for a visa arranged by the Zimbabwe government. “I felt relieved,” she says, but her anxiety didn’t completely dissolve until six hours later, when she arrived in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, just in time to see the sun rise.
“A very beautiful country”
For the past five years, Alhassan Lamrana Jalloh’s medical studies at the University of Tehran have been his entire world. Unlike Pauros, the Sierra Leone student says Iran has been good to him.
“It is a very beautiful country,” says Jalloh, who is studying on a scholarship from the Iranian government. “Calm down. The people are accommodating.”
Courtesy of Alhassan Lamrana Jalloh
Jalloh says studying in Iran gave him access to a better education than he could get in his country. And outside the classroom, she was happy, meeting friends in cafes and restaurants and exploring nearby cities on vacation.
But that quiet student life was shaken last June, during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. An explosion ripped through their dormitory and injured several students.
Restless, Mr Jalloh moved to the Sierra Leone embassy. It was there that he took refuge when missile attacks began again in recent days, waiting in shock as internet outages prevented him from contacting his mother to let her know he was safe.
Five days into the war, the embassy rented a bus to take Jalloh and 13 other Sierra Leonean students – all of them studying on scholarships from the Iranian government – to the border with Armenia.
But the trip hit a snag when the students arrived at the border and were told their Armenian visas were not ready. Stranded in the cold, between two countries, they prepared to spend a night of waiting.
A narrow escape
At the same time, Zimbabweans Cecil Magura, Ishmael Chikuwa and Nathaniel Muringani were also trying to escape.
The three friends had been living in the northern city of Qazvin, where they studied Farsi at a language center.
When the shelling began, they too began looking for a way to reach the Armenian border.
Faced with exorbitant prices from taxi drivers, the friends were forced to separate and, when the car in which Mr. Magura was traveling crossed mountains covered in ice and snow, it got stuck.
He went out and pushed; shoulders slumped, feet sliding, and a strong, bitter wind cutting into his weakened resolve. Around them, people were doing the same, pushing cars with luggage piled on their roofs across slippery roads.
The three friends finally managed to get into the same car and arrived at the border at 6 am. There they found Mr. Jalloh and the other Sierra Leonean students still waiting.
When Sierra Leone embassy staff saw the Zimbabweans, they immediately offered to pay for their visas and take them to their final destination in Armenia. The two groups from opposite ends of the African continent left Iran together.
“They just accepted us as theirs,” says Muringani.
