Thick white curtains with a colorful zigzag pattern only partially block the scorching sun from the living room of Sandra Adaora Okoyeegbe’s rented apartment on the outskirts of New Delhi. An episode of BKChat LDN streaming on YouTube flashes on a modest flat-screen TV mounted on a wall. The 21-year-old African student calls the recently launched British web series a “chat show,” each episode featuring a group of mostly black, young participants who exchange their views on issues including the racism they contend with in the U.K. Okoyeegbe has faced it in India, too.

ABOVE: Photojournalist Mahesh Shantaram began his project on Africans and racism in 2016 following an attack on a Tanzanian woman in the Indian city of Bangalore. The incident moved many people, both Indians and foreigners, to respond. One of them was Amina Abubakar (right), from Ghana, a mass communications student in Hyderabad. In February 2016, she posted a video on Facebook in which she called out Indians for their racism. “Africans are not beggars, we are human beings,” she said under the social media alias “Wumbey Mina.” The video went viral. Hokar Ahmed, from Kurdistan, is her fellow mass communications student. He and Abubakar have become so close that they’re nearly inseparable.

A Nigerian from the southern state of Anambra, she left her home to pursue an undergraduate degree in pharmacy at one of the private universities that have mushroomed in recent years in Greater Noida, a suburb about 25 miles south of New Delhi’s center. “Indians have racism in them, even the educated ones,” she says, with a trace of sarcasm. “They think because of the color of our skin, we are lesser than them. We face racism here every day.”

In March, not far from her neighborhood, a roving mob beat up a number of African students in multiple attacks. Some of the violence was captured on a widely circulated video of Indian men storming into a local shopping mall, kicking and punching a black man, and thrashing him with metal trashcans and stools. The severely injured victim, a young Nigerian, survived, but Okoyeegbe and many other Africans in the area feared enough for their safety to remain indoors for several days, in some cases weeks. Even now, Okoyeegbe says, “I cry seeing that video.”

The rampage followed the death of an Indian teenager. A few days earlier, when the young man was reported missing, rumors buzzed that Nigerian men had kidnapped him, and lurid tales of cannibalism ensued — until he came back home in a dazed state. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died. Soon unsubstantiated reports surfaced that he’d overdosed on drugs provided by some Nigerian men living in the area. After the teenager’s parents filed a complaint, the police detained the alleged culprits, but there wasn’t sufficient evidence to hold them, and the men were released. The African link to the episode refused to die, and anger toward the community boiled over.

That tension is connected, in part, to a widespread belief about Nigerians in Indian society — that they all sell drugs or are a social menace. Respected Indian publications have indeed reported on Nigerians’ disproportionate involvement in drug trafficking in some Indian cities, and many Africans, irrespective of their nationalities, have been subjected to a presumption of criminality. And there is minimal social exchange between the Indian and African communities to help dispel these stereotypes.

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The past few years have seen several clashes between the locals and an expatriate African population of about 40,000 by some estimates, many of them students. In 2013, a minister in the state government of Goa was criticized for referring to Nigerians as a “cancer.” The following year, a mob assaulted a group of young men from Gabon and Burkina Faso in New Delhi — an attack posted on YouTube. In January 2016, Indians and Africans alike were appalled again when a Tanzanian student was pulled out of a car, beaten, and partially stripped in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. She was allegedly targeted by an irate mob after an intoxicated Sudanese student ran his car over a couple, killing the woman and injuring the man. The Tanzanian student didn’t even know the Sudanese driver. She and her friends had only driven through the accident site and inquired about the earlier incident. The police confirmed that she was presumed to have been involved with the crime, simply because she was African. (Five men were arrested for their assault on her.) The recent violence in Greater Noida has only driven a deeper wedge between Africans and their host country.

Whether there has been an actual escalation in attacks on Africans or simply more news coverage of such events is debatable. But the conflict suggests that street-level Indo-African relations are dangerously unmoored from diplomatic policy and the historic camaraderie that has long existed between India and Africa.

Many Indians may be unaware that Africans have long lived among them — their descendants, known as the Siddis, inhabit India’s west coast and parts of its south. Their ancestors are believed to have been cavalrymen and slaves who came with Muslim invaders in the medieval era. Some of them ascended to powerful military positions and even became provincial rulers in western India. The Siddis have retained elements of their musical and artistic heritage even as they have assimilated into Indian society. A smaller wave of Africans also came to India as slaves with the European colonizers, and some 60,000 people of African origin live in India today, scholars estimate.

ABOVE: Mika’ilu Yahaya “Hudu” (left), an undergraduate business major, and Abubakar Garba, working toward a degree as a medical technician, are both Nigerians studying at NIMS University, in Jaipur. Like many other African students, they live in Achrol, a village an hour and a half from the city center by public transit. Hudu and Garba were involved in two separate violent incidents in March 2017 and have been lying low ever since. They heard of each other’s experiences through the grapevine and met for the first time only when this portrait was taken. Hudu was mugged and beaten with a cricket bat, and Garba was harassed by a gang of boys in a market. In both cases, the police acted swiftly in rounding up the suspects.

In modern times, a natural affinity has existed among the once colonized lands of the global south. India took to international forums to champion Africa’s liberation from imperialism and sought an end to apartheid in South Africa. Mohandas K. Gandhi once said, “India’s freedom will remain incomplete so long as Africa remains in bondage.” That moral solidarity underpinned India’s decision to extend diplomatic, financial, and material assistance to African nations from the time it formed its first independent government under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru.

It was in South Africa that a young Gandhi developed satyagraha, the philosophy of nonviolent resistance that served as an important tool in India’s fight against the British. That ideology deeply influenced the anti-colonial struggles of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, among others. The intercontinental ties, strengthened during the Cold War, brought scholars from Africa: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has noted that many African heads of state, past and present, have received some form of education or training in India.

In 1971, the foundation of the prestigious Symbiosis International University was laid in the western city of Pune with the aim to accommodate international students — which it did with not a fraction of the violence that has become all too common. Today, the school enrolls 3,000 foreign students, primarily from Africa. “The tears of a foreign student was the turning point in my life,” says S.B. Mujumdar, the university’s octogenarian founder. The plight of a homesick Mauritian with jaundice led to Mujumdar’s zealous efforts to promote dialogue between the local and foreign students. Even today, reports of assaults on Africans living there are rare, perhaps due to early, deliberate efforts to sensitize Indians.

Indian government agencies provide little useful data on the African student population currently in the country as a whole. But the Association of African Students in India estimates that some 25,000 Africans are currently studying in India, a substantial portion of them in Greater Noida. The area is one of the newest developments on the outskirts of the Indian capital, representing a slice of the new, aspirational India on the cusp of urbanization. Most of the original inhabitants are rural Indians; even those newly enriched by the real estate boom have had limited exposure to foreign cultures. They jostle against a young, upwardly mobile population, including African students of engineering, nursing, and finance, among other specializations.

Private universities have proliferated in India over the past decade. While catering to local demand, their promoters hard sell their instruction and facilities to international markets. “The world is here @ Sharda University,” promises a television ad for a privately funded school in Greater Noida. Many of these campuses are located in areas where rural insularity lingers. As foreigners, African students have become a source of revenue, often paying more in tuition than their Indian counterparts. Others are drawn by scholarships to Indian government-funded educational institutions — part of a diplomatic platform to promote regional trade and cooperation. Yet this show of amity has failed to bridge the cultural chasm.