Waiting for Moses: Africa’s sons in Russia’s war

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Cargo ships come and go. Trucks rumble past carrying timber, cocoa and oil towards the Atlantic. Inside her home, time barely moves. On the wall hangs a portrait of her son, Moses. “So handsome,” she whispers, almost to herself. His smile belongs to another life. Grief arrives in waves. Like the Atlantic beyond Douala’s port, it retreats just long enough to let her breathe before returning with the same relentless force. Whether beneath a grey sky swollen with rain that never comes or beneath the scorching Cameroonian sun, there is no shelter from it. Against the elements, and against time itself, she is powerless. For more than a year, she has waited. “He left this world the same way he entered it,” she says. “Suffering, without saying a word.” There is no anger in her voice any more. Only exhaustion. She recounts the phone call almost mechanically, as though repetition has stripped the words of everything except their weight. The call came from thousands of kilometres away, not from Cameroon, not even from Africa, but from Europe’s war. Her son was fighting alongside Russian forces when he came under Ukrainian fire. He was shot as he ran towards the trenches. As she speaks, silence fills the spaces between her sentences. I find myself imagining the unimaginable violence of his final moments. The violence of a battlefield thousands of kilometres from home. She presses a hand against her chest. “He left for me,” she says quietly. “For us.” “To fight another man’s war,” she adds. Listening to her describe the trenches, my mind drifts to another generation of Africans sent to Europe’s battlefields. I think of the Senegalese Tirailleurs who crossed the Mediterranean to fight and die for France, in wars that were not theirs. According to Ukrainian officials, nearly 3,000 Africans from 35 countries are fighting alongside Russian forces, which Kyiv says is the result of active recruitment across the continent. Former Russian army officer Sergey Elidonov dismisses the allegation. “It’s all false,” he says. “These stories about Russian Houses or recruitment networks across African countries – they don’t exist. Russia offers the pay and the conditions. If people want to come, they find their own way.” He is affable and articulate, with the easy confidence of someone who has spent a lifetime around soldiers. When he is not talking about war, he talks about philosophy. He has worked in Europe, Africa and Asia, though he remains deliberately elusive about the nature of his roles. Elidonov argues that Cameroon’s prominence among African recruits owes more to history than clandestine recruitment. “The relationship goes back to the Soviet Union,” he says. “Large numbers of Cameroonian students studied there. There has been a Cameroonian diaspora in Russia for decades.” For him, economics explains the rest. “People are desperate. They want to support their families.” For Professor Aicha Pemboura, who has been researching the phenomenon, the story extends well beyond military recruitment. Many of those heading to Russia are experienced Cameroonian soldiers, battle-hardened by years of fighting Boko Haram, separatist groups and piracy. But they are not alone. Students, unemployed graduates and young men are also making the journey, often believing they are travelling for work or education, before finding themselves signing military contracts. “What we’re seeing is a new type of migration,” she says. “People leave with the hope of a better future. It doesn’t replace the other migration routes. It is simply one more route.” For Pemboura, the war in Ukraine is quietly draining African countries of soldiers, students and skilled workers. “All of that represents a loss for Africa,” she says. For many of us, war exists only through television news bulletins and the endless scroll of social media. We know the sound of artillery and the sight of trenches without ever having stood inside one. During the second world war, hundreds of thousands of African soldiers crossed continents to fight for Europe’s freedom. The Senegalese Tirailleurs landed on the beaches of Provence, marched through France and into Germany, helping to liberate a continent that would later struggle to remember them. When I picture the liberation of Paris, I still instinctively see white American, British and French soldiers. It took me years to realise that my own great-uncle was there too – a brown-skinned man from colonial Bengal, fighting in a European war that would become someone else’s story. History has a habit of bleaching its heroes. I wonder whose faces will be missing from the photographs when this war is remembered. Today, another European war is drawing young Africans north. Not to liberate a continent, but to fight in its bloodiest conflict since 1945. Some will return transformed. Some will return in silence. Some will never return at all. Mama Regina is waiting for a body. Without one, there can be no funeral. No grave. No final prayer. A body is proof that a son existed. Proof that he fought. Proof that he was loved. Proof that this distant war has entered African lives. 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