A Soviet life in the Sahel

Irina arrived in Africa in 1994. Like thousands of other young Russian women, she chose to follow her African husband she had met in the USSR, where he had come to be trained as an engineer.

Irina's husband was from Burkina Faso, and he benefited from the technological cooperation between the Soviet Union and what was then called the Third World. He had first arrived in Uzbekistan, before coming to Belarus, then a constituent republic of the Soviet Union.

She met him while he was a student at the University of Novopolotsk, a small, closed military city, where she lived with her mother, an engineer. Her father, a career military man, had died shortly after her birth, and her uncle was to follow him a few years later — probably because of the position he held in Chernobyl, she told us.

If Irina said little about the circumstances of her departure, she spoke at greater length about her arrival in Burkina Faso at the early age of 17, newly married and not speaking a word of French.

Her account is sometimes a little blurred, but clear enough to convey the loneliness (and perhaps even the suffering) that she had to endure during the first years of her new African life. The Ouagadougou of the 1990s was indeed light years away from the closed military city where she had grown up in the USSR. Despite the deteriorating economic situation of the 1980s, the closed Soviet cities remained relatively protective cocoons for children who, like Irina, grew up there. The store shelves were probably almost as empty as elsewhere, but the social infrastructure maintained by the Soviet Red Army and the research laboratories present in these strategic enclaves made life sweeter.

In Ouaga, the short form of Ouagadougou everybody uses to refer to Burkina’s capital city, Irina discovered another universe. It was a world, she told us, that she did not even know about back in the USSR. We can guess from what she says that Irina's marriage must have been difficult. Her husband, often absent, let her to take care of the home and their young daughter in a country whose language and culture were alien to her.

In spite of the difficulties and extreme loneliness, she gradually got adjusted. She told us that she has had many jobs in the four corners of the Western Sahel: she was a waitress in the Malian capital of Bamako, a cook in Ouagadougou, and finally settled here in Bouaké, the city where her second husband came from, but she did not elaborate about that either.

In her restaurant, which she opened in 2019, Irina prepares Russian dishes to order: pirogi and pelmeni (dumplings), stroganoff, borsch. “The hardest part,” she says, “is finding the right ingredients in this city located six hours’ drive from Abidjan and its international port.”

Sometimes she cooks for the Ukrainian engineers who come from time to time to service the machines in the nearby tobacco factory. Her restaurant also attracts some of the Bouakois locals who are curious to taste this cuisine from far away.

For even if they are reluctant to try the low-cost geopolitical adventure offered by Russian entrepreneurs, the inhabitants of Bouaké seem to have a special bond with Russia. This is evidenced by several mysterious signs we came across in the streets of the city: Karaoke “chez Nikita,” which unfortunately we were not able to try, and a small cafe "Chez Vladimir" (which is Russian in name only, since it serves local dishes). “People here like Russians,” says Irina by way of explanation. It is likely that the Ukrainian cooperants who have been coming to the tobacco factory periodically for a long time have something to do with it. Ironically, Russians and Ukrainians represent the same ethnocultural group in the minds of many people here.

Soviet brides in West Africa, a socio-historical phenomenon

Irina is neither an isolated case, nor a curiosity. Her trajectory is actually part of the commercial, political, and social exchange networks that have long linked West Africa to the former Soviet Union. Numerous ties were indeed established between the countries of the region and the USSR in the aftermath of their independence, in order to train the future elites of the former French colonies in Africa — particularly, though not exclusively, in countries that had opted for a “socialist path.”

Very far from the present-day problems of Wagner and the human rights exactions attributed to it, there was a time when Soviet and local engineers cooperated on large infrastructure, industrial, and agricultural projects. Thus, like Irina's first husband, thousands of Burkinabes, Senegalese, Malians, and Ivorians went to study in the USSR in order to return to their respective home countries with a degree of technical training. And like Irina, many Soviet citizens married these cooperants and followed them to their distant homelands. The phenomenon is extremely gendered, if only because of the essentially male nature of the contingents sent by African countries to train in the USSR.

No one really knows how many of them have settled permanently in the region — hundreds surely, thousands probably. During a brief career as a journalist in West Africa nearly 15 years ago, I had the chance to meet some of these Russian wives and I even wrote a paper on them. At the time, in 2007, the Russian Consulate in Dakar, Senegal, confirmed that there was a community of more than a hundred Russian citizens who had been living in the country since the 1970s and 1980s. Those whom I met were organized into associations, corresponded with each other, and formed a network of solidarity whose ramifications extended throughout French-speaking West Africa.

By its very existence, this community testifies to the intensity of the links that united West Africa and the Soviet Union. While many studies have been conducted on other aspects of this relationship (economic relations, student exchanges, etc.), the phenomenon of Soviet brides in the region has not been the subject of an in-depth study. This is a pity, because it is still a very vivid manifestation of the historical depth of Russo-African relations.

Moreover, a better knowledge of this phenomenon would allow us to put Moscow's recent African adventures in their historical context, while adding a healthy dose of ethnography. This would certainly help to enrich our analysis on Russia's return to the region, which today is mainly analyzed from above, through the prism of strategic and security studies. In short, it would be new fieldwork that would undoubtedly allow people to draw together the threads of other unknown aspects of the Russian presence in Africa, and perhaps even to anticipate certain developments, rather than perpetuating the magnifying-glass effects created by the excessive media exposure of Prigozhin’s geopolitical enterprises.