Muffled wails seeped through the thin dormitory walls of the dorm at Bint-ul-Huda University in Qom, Iran, early on the morning of March 1, jolting Janet Pauros awake.
With sleep still clinging to her eyes, the Zimbabwean student of Islamic studies rushed down the stairs, where she found her classmates huddled around the TV. A breaking news banner flashed across the screen: Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei was dead.
“That’s when I knew it was going to be a big war,” Ms. Pauros says.
Why We Wrote This
For years, Iran’s government has doled out scholarships to African students to help build political goodwill on the continent. Now, those students find themselves in the crosshairs of a mushrooming conflict.
As U.S. and Israeli missiles fall on Iran, students from Africa have found themselves in the crosshairs of an escalating conflict. They come from across the continent – from Nigeria to Uganda to Zimbabwe – many on scholarships from the Iranian government. Precise figures are hard to come by, but about 1,000 students from Nigeria alone were studying in Iran this academic year, according to the Nigerian Embassy there.
For Tehran, sponsoring these students’ education is a way to build goodwill and deepen its political influence in Africa. For the students themselves, meanwhile, studying in Iran was supposed to be a ticket to a funded international education.
But now, they were just trying to make it out alive.
An abrupt ending
In the days that followed the supreme leader’s death, grief seemed to hang over Qom, thick as the air pollution, Ms. Pauros says. A hospital near her school was bombed. “I thought I would die,” she recalls.
Iran had not been part of Ms. Pauros’ plan. But a family emergency drained the funds for her university tuition back home. When her friend who was already in Iran told her about scholarship opportunities in the country, it felt like a lifeline.
Zimbabwe’s ties to Iran run deep. “When we went to war [for independence], Iran was our friend,” explained Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa as he welcomed his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, to Harare in July 2023. “When you see him, you see me. When you see me, you see him.”
The two countries also share another common experience. “It is critically important that we, the victims of Western sanctions … show them that we’re united,” Mr. Mnangagwa explained.
But that warm diplomacy couldn’t insulate Ms. Pauros from the prickly reception she received in April of last year when she arrived in Qom, an ancient city that is considered holy by Shiite Muslims.
Though she learned Farsi, it quickly became clear to her that she would never be accepted. “The people are incredibly racist,” she says bluntly, sadness falling over her brown eyes as she remembers how African students were passed over in class – their hands raised, ignored.
Leaving the campus to go out and explore was also difficult. She says the school even kept students’ passports, saying they needed them in order to renew their study permits.
A bright spot had been befriending a student from Burkina Faso, named Majdida. But when Ms. Pauros decided to leave Iran last week, Majdida stayed behind. Her embassy hadn’t organized a visa.
“I was so scared because she couldn’t evacuate,” Ms. Pauros says, recalling how the two women cried as they said goodbye.
Dragging a suitcase filled with everything she owned, Ms. Pauros got a taxi to Tehran’s bus station, which was teeming with people and barely-contained panic.
She boarded a bus to the border with Armenia, arriving late at night. A visa organized by the Zimbabwean government was waiting. “I was relieved,” she says, but her anxiety didn’t fully dissolve until six hours later, when she arrived in the Armenian capital Yerevan, just in time to see the sun come up.
“A very nice country”
For the last five years, Alhassan Lamrana Jalloh’s medical studies at the University of Tehran have been his whole world. Unlike Ms. Pauros, the student from Sierra Leone says Iran has been good to him.
“It’s a very nice country,” says Mr. Jalloh, who is studying on an Iranian government scholarship. “Peaceful. The people, accommodating.”
Courtesy of Alhassan Lamrana Jalloh
Mr. Jalloh says studying in Iran gave him access to an education better than what he could get back home. And outside the classroom, he was happy, meeting up with friends in cafés and restaurants, and exploring nearby cities on his holidays.
But that calm student life was shaken last June, during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. A blast tore through his dormitory, injuring a number of students.
Rattled, Mr. Jalloh moved into the Sierra Leonean Embassy. It was there he sheltered when missile strikes began again in recent days, waiting in shock as internet cuts kept him from reaching his mother to let her know he was safe.
Five days into the war, the embassy chartered a bus to take Mr. Jalloh and 13 other Sierra Leonean students – all of them studying on Iranian government scholarships – to the Armenian border.
But the journey hit a snag when the students reached the frontier and were told their Armenian visas weren’t ready. Stranded in the cold, between two countries, they settled in for a night of waiting.
A narrow escape
At the same time, Zimbabweans Cecil Magura, Ishmael Chikuwa, and Nathaniel Muringani were also trying to escape.
The three friends had been living in the northern city of Qazvin, where they studied Farsi at a language center.
When the bombing started, they, too, began searching for a way to get to the Armenian border.
Faced with extortionate prices from taxi drivers, the friends were forced to split up, and as the car Mr. Magura was riding in wound through mountains blanketed in ice and snow, it got stuck.
He got out and pushed; shoulders down, feet sliding, and harsh bitter wind cutting through his thinning resolve. All around him, people were doing the same, pushing cars with luggage piled high on their roofs over the slick roads.
The three friends eventually managed to bundle into the same car, and reached the border at 6 a.m. There, they found Mr. Jalloh and the other Sierra Leonean students still waiting.
When staff from the Sierra Leonean Embassy saw the Zimbabweans, they immediately offered to pay for their visas, and to get them to their final destination in Armenia. The two groups from opposite ends of the African continent left Iran together.
“They just accepted us as their own,” Mr Muringani says.
