Wandoh Timothy is generous enough to term what happened to him in 2013 as a “one-of-a-kind” incident. The Chad national, who has been living in Bengaluru for eight years, was driving back through Hennur in the north of the city after dropping off his daughter when he cautioned a man doing wheelies to be careful, as he seemed drunk.“He began abusing me saying, ‘You’re a N****, you don’t have the right to say anything,” recalls Timothy at his home in the same neighbourhood. Other locals soon joined in and the group beat him till he was unconscious, leaving him on the road.Timothy was hospitalised and his assailants caught, but he decided not to pursue the case because one of his attackers had a small child. The 48-year-old widower, who was married to an Indian and even holds a Person-of-Indian-Origin card, says Indians have mostly received him very well. But he adds that they tend to stereotype people from Africa “They think all Africans are bad, that they steal,” says Timothy.This kind of stereotyping has victimised many an African in India over the years. Earlier this month, it was a young girl from Tanzania studying in Bengaluru who fell prey to a mob of locals, for no fault of hers.A car ahead of hers driven by another unrelated African, had fatally injured a local woman and the mob that gathered attacked her and her friends, in retaliation, even burning their car and tearing her clothes. She finally escaped with the help of her friends and a few people who formed a ring around her, according to reports.Almost two years ago, it was another mob, in another city: Three young African students at a metro station in New Delhi were chased and beaten up on the basis of a rumour that they had harassed a girl. Two years before that, it had been the turn of Yannick Nihangaza, a student at Lovely Professional University in Jalandhar who was beaten senseless by a group of drunk locals who had mistook him for another African student. He died after being in coma for two years.At a stretch, one could term all these incidents as one-of-a-kind. But conversations with African nationals living in India, whether for education or work, reveal that though such grievous racial assaults may be exceptions, they are subject to other indignities, and all because of the colour of their skin.When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the US in 1955, it became the spark that lit the antisegregation movement. But for an African or African-American in India, something as innocuous as getting on a bus can still come with its own challenges.“People feel uncomfortable when you enter a bus,” says Timothy. Just the other day, the seat next to him on a Volvo low-floor bus returning from the Bengaluru airport was left empty, though passengers kept entering, till he told the person standing nearby to take a seat.Faith John, studying for her degree at Symbiosis University in Pune, says she avoids taking buses for precisely this reason. “But I’ve noticed that when I take autorickshaws alone, they triple the fare. If I’m with an Indian friend, they will switch on the metre,” she says.The reluctance to sit next to someone based on the colour of their skin even extends to church, according to Victor Femi, a 23-year-old from Nigeria studying in Bengaluru. “The rest of the bench I’m on will be empty.The first time it happened I was angry, but then I got used to it,” he says. Chris, a Nigerian student at National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT) in Delhi who declines to reveal his surname, says he is unable to understand why people from Africa are singled out for ill-treatment by almost every section of society in India, including the police and the bureaucracy.“Look, there are many good things about living in Delhi. The transport is good, the accommodation is good. But what’s the use? The people are racist,” he says.Students like Chris, Femi and John come to India because of the lure of a foreign education without the price tag of a similar experience in the US or Europe.“Foreign certificates are highly valued in my country. You have an advantage when searching for jobs,” says Femi, who came to Bengaluru from Nigeria nearly a year ago, and describes the city as peaceful. Sensing this opportunity, the number of institutes wooing students from African, West Asian and Southeast Asian countries has also increased.Bengaluru-based Indo Asian Academy, located near the same Hennur area, says some 20% of its 4,500 students across three campuses are foreigners, including Africans. “We were one of the first to get foreign students in 2008 but, since then, many more such institutes have come up,” says Supriyo Guharoy, chief executive of the academy.Their fees would be 25% higher than what Indians pay, coming up to $1,500 a year on average. Guharoy says they try to help foreign students by ensuring they are picked up from the airport when they arrive from their home country, making them compulsorily reside in the hostel initially and appointing senior students as mentors. Ashok Mittal, director of Lovely Professional University, says on their campus, where some 6% of its 25,000 students are foreigners, they do their best to integrate foreign students, with a separate department and various cultural programmes. “Yannick’s was a very unfortunate case but it happened outside campus,” says Mittal, who refutes the student’s father’s charges that the university did nothing to aid them.The attempts at integration may not always work. Femi, a student of aviation programming at another institute, says sometimes his fellow students did not like him to sit with them, till their teacher reprimanded them. The Indian boys in his class, he adds, did not like him talking to the Indian girls. “Some people rush to judge you before they know you,” he says. Outside campuses, though, it’s a different ballgame.“People keep laughing and pointing at me and I get called names I don’t want to mention. I don’t see what’s so amusing for them, even after a year,” says Symbiosis student John. Others complain of the challenge of finding rented accommodation with some landlords reluctant to let out their house to Africans, being charged higher rates than what locals pay and even difficulty in getting their security deposit back from the landlord.For this reason, they tend to stay in the same neighbourhoods. But that does not always make life easier, says John. “If we are walking in a group, things are okay. But it hurts when you are walking alone and are abused. It makes you wonder what is wrong with you.”“Treat Us with Dignity” The indignities extended even to the Foreigners Registration Office (FRO), as Union home minister Rajnath Singh was informed publicly at a Symbiosis event last September, by Simon Kuany, president of the Symbiosis International Students Council.“At the FRO, they were treating us like criminals, as if we were a big problem for them to solve. I told the minister this, and that the process should take just one or two days, and not a month,” says Kuany.The minister had been taken aback but promised to take action and, to his credit, Kuany got a call from him in two weeks. “I was impressed with the home minister. He said he was sending a circular to all the FROs and it is true, things have got better,” says the Masters student from South Sudan.Kuany, who came to India in 2011 and started off at a “local college” before joining Symbiosis, says he has chosen to try and understand why he was being laughed and stared at, and the recipient of racial epithets. “I came to figure out that a lot of locals are very ignorant and have not been exposed to different cultures.” He adds that there are also lots of misconceptions because some African nationals have been caught with drugs.“Of course, like in any society, there are some bad people but it doesn’t make sense to judge an entire continent on that basis.” Sam, a Nigerian in his 40s living in Delhi and associated with an evangelical group, agrees. “One person somewhere does something bad and the entire group gets a bad name,” he says.Kuany says that personally he can bear small slights. “But some are being broken by this. They come from thousands of miles away, very far from their homes and families. It becomes impossible for them to do well in academics because of this,” he says, explaining what prompted him to speak out to the home minister that day.What African expatriates cannot understand is why Indians do not accord them the same dignity and respect they are given when they are in Africa. “In any other country, you can see many people from other parts of the world living freely. Even Indian people who live in Africa live freely and no one bothers them. Then why do they behave like this with us?” asks Chris, the Nigerian studying in Delhi.Close to 3 million Persons of Indian Origin are estimated to be living in Africa and on social media forums, there were murmurs of reciprocation, after the assault on the Tanzanian girl in Bengaluru. “Maybe some Indians don’t know their brothers and sisters are in Africa,” muses Timothy. “It is possible that there will be retaliation back home.”Indeed, in 2013, after 21 students from Congo studying in Lovely Professional University had been arrested in Jalandhar for an altercation with locals, some shops of Asians in Kinshasa had been attacked. Kuany strikes a more honourable, though perhaps less realistic, note when he says, “If Indians choose to behave this way, they can. But I can assure you that we will never treat you this way. We are better than that.”In April 2012 Yannick Nihangaza, a Burundi national studying at Lovely Professional University in Jalandhar, was set upon by a group of locals and brutally beaten up, allegedly because of an altercation the gang had with another, unconnected African.Yannick slipped into a coma from which he never woke, passing away two years later in July 2014. His father, Nestor Ntibateganya, was by his side throughout, and ran from pillar to post to try and get justice for his son. Of Yannick’s nine assailants, seven were sentenced to 10 years in prison, while two are on the run, including Rommy Uppal, the son of a superintendent of police.After promising to foot the bill for Yannick’s medical expenses, the state government finally paid only Rs 5 lakh of the over Rs 1 crore bill. In a Skype conversation from Burundi, Ntibateganya says he and his family are still struggling to come to terms with their loss."My son liked to do computer science and some of his friends asked if he could come to India to study. Lovely Professional University had also come to Burundi and had done publicity here, so I said ‘yes’.""He left in July 2011 and liked it there, though he was staying outside campus because he had problems with the food. In April 2012, he was going out to meet his friends when he was beaten up; he didn’t know why.""Yannick had to have two surgeries, and I was told he would never recover — the head injuries were the cause of his death. He never woke up from his coma.""Lovely Professional University said the incident happened outside campus so it wasn’t their responsibility. At first the police arrested two guys and, after I approached the media, they arrested five more. One of them was the son of a policeman. I saw them in court, the criminals who killed my son. Their families tried to contact me through someone, asking if I would sign an affidavit saying their son was innocent, which made me very angry. They tried giving me money, but it was like acid for me.""The state government promised to help, but they did not. They gave me Rs 5 lakh in July 2012 and paid for the air ambulance but I had to put my own money to pay the rest of a crore and a half. I have had no communication with them since I left.""It is still very difficult for my family to come to terms with what happened, it is still a big loss. Of course, I regret sending my son to India. If he had stayed in my country, he would have been alive. It was my fault for sending him... My son was very polite, very quiet. I don’t understand why this happened to him."(Additional reporting by Raghav Ohri and KP Narayana Kumar)