Russia Elects First Black Politician

Jean Gregoire Sagbo  gives new meaning to the term, Black Russian.  Because henceforth when that term is uttered, the reference might be as much to him, the first black to be elected to political office in Russia, as to the eponymous drink.

Granted, his election is more akin to the first black being admitted to serve on a town council in the Jim Crow South than Obama being elected president of the United States.  In fact, Sagbo has only been elected as one of ten councilors of Novozavidovo, a small town 100 kilometers (65 miles) north of Moscow. But his election still signifies a change in Russian politics that is worth heralding.

His skin is black but he is Russian inside. The way he cares about this place, only a Russian can care.

(Vyacheslav Arakelov,  mayor of Novozavidovo, Kyiv Post, June 25, 2010)

One can be forgiven for thinking, though, that Sagbo’s election is nothing more than a quaint or token gesture. During the Cold War, a significant number of Africans became indoctrinated with communist ideology and did all they could to immigrate to Russia, the motherland.  And, of course, Russia was all too happy to use them as pawns in a chess game with the West for superpower dominion over the Dark Continent.

[Putin was] the first Russian leader to visit Africa’s most influential country, South Africa. And there Putin vowed to end “the decades-long interruption in ties between South Africa and Russia”. More importantly, however, Putin used this vantage point to assure all African leaders – many of whom (including South African President Thabo Mbeki) studied communist ideology and received military training as communist revolutionaries in Russia during the Cold War – that he intends to seal their bond this time around with sustainable financial partnerships instead of mere rhetorical comradeship.

(Cold War II- from the Russian Front, The iPINIONS Journal, July 17, 2007)

At any rate, it is hardly surprising that a few of the estimated 40,000 Africans now living in Russia have become so “settled” that they consider themselves more Russian than African these days. 

Nevertheless, as my reference above to Jim Crow indicates, Sagbo’s election is only one very small step for racial equality in Russia. For one thing, blacks are so few in number there that they exist, collectively, as the Wrightian “invisible man”. Yet those who live in big cities are often the targets of the kind of hate crimes that blacks who lived in the South during segregation experienced.

Nearly 60% of black and African people living in Russia’s capital Moscow have been physically assaulted in racially motivated attacks.

(BBC, Africans ‘under siege’, August 31, 2009)

So congratulations to Mr. Sagbo. But I suspect that he and all of the other Africans who went to Russia seeking a socialist utopia must now wish that they had bought into the American dream instead….

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Cold War II- from the Russian Front