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Kasia Kovacs is a freelance journalist and writer based in London and Budapest.
BUDAPEST — For African students studying in Hungarian universities, the recent wave of protests that swept across Europe in response to the killing of George Floyd in the United States was a reminder of the uneasy position they occupy in their adopted country.
Many have come to Hungary on scholarships to study in prestigious higher-education programs that offer them a temporary entry-way into Europe. The program, which is not widely known locally though it is funded by tax-payer money, has brought thousands of African students to the country’s universities on scholarships for the past 50 years.
Still, the number of African residents in Hungary remains small — some 7,200 people, according to 2020 data — and a general lack of diversity coupled with anti-immigrant sentiment stoked by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government means racism is an everyday reality for many of them. Some report they have been spat on, called racial slurs and heard strangers make monkey noises as they walk by.
So when a group of African students, along with other expats and local Hungarians, gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Budapest in June in solidarity with anti-racism movements in other countries, few were surprised to see counter-protesters appear carrying signs that read “White lives also matter” and chanting “Hungária.” Although the small group of hecklers was peacefully dispersed, the incident is symptomatic of the lack of awareness of racial issues in the country and everyday taunts, they say.
"It happens every week, at least," Maveens Okwudiri Okwunwa, a Nigerian communications student at Budapest Metropolitan University, said in an interview in central Budapest, referring to the racism he experiences living in Hungary. As we spoke, a man shouted "Ape! Ape!" at him in the background.
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Hungary’s decades-old scholarship program for African students is seemingly at odds with its more recent hardline position on immigration.
In European debates on the relocation of asylum seekers, the Hungarian government has blocked efforts to relocate refugees across Europe. It was also one of the first countries to close its borders and adopt unapologetic anti-immigrant rhetoric centered on protecting Hungarian Christian values from outsiders.
Orbán’s government has also gone to battle with Central European University, which has a large number of international students, over alleged foreign influence — a conflict that led to the relocation of several CEU programs to Vienna.
The two policies — welcoming students from over 60 countries via scholarships and taking a staunchly anti-immigrant approach when it comes to refugees — “do not seem coherent,” said István Tarrósy, a professor of political science and African studies at the University of Pécs.
And yet, recently, Hungary has ramped up its outreach to Africa. Last year, the government announced it would offer scholarships to about 900 African students to study at Hungarian universities — in addition to the 1,710 Africans who already received scholarships that year — as part of its “Africa Program.”
The scholarship program has its roots in the Cold War. Like many countries in the Eastern bloc, Hungary admitted several African students starting in the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967, the number of African students in Hungary rose from 198 to 398.
The push was initially designed as a type of educational and ideological exchange that would help the socialist country open up to the world. Many of the students who were part of those first waves of scholarships put down roots in the country and still live there with their families.
"The thousands of African professionals who graduated from Hungarian universities in the '70s and '80s form an unbreakable link between our country and the continent," the state-sponsored Budapest Africa Forum said in a statement in 2013.
In more recent years, the Hungarian government has sought to create more ties to Africa, including through investments, which it frames as a way to stabilize volatile regions from which people would otherwise flee, seeking to better their fortunes in Europe. (It has also invested in Latin America and the Caribbean, following a similar logic.)
Pursuing a strategy of opening up to the south, including through trade ties, to ensure “fast growth” will “help dissuade potential migrants from leaving their homes,” Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in 2015.
Since the height of the refugee crisis — when some 67,000 asylum seekers passed through Hungary in the first six months of 2015 — the issue of immigration has dominated political discourse in the country.
The scholarships fit into the country’s goal of “controlling immigration,” said Dr. Elżbieta Goździak, a professor of migration studies at Georgetown University, who added that it was about choosing what type of person is allowed into the country and, crucially, how long they can stay.
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The word "migrant," or "migráns" in Hungarian, once had a neutral connotation. In fact, Hungarians rarely used the word before 2015, according to research by Idilkó Barna, a sociologist at Eötvös Loránd University who has tracked the government’s role in stoking prejudice against foreigners.
It was only in the wake of the refugee crisis, Barna's research found, that migrants were largely depicted as a threat to public security. It’s a shift that has created a surge in xenophobic rhetoric and “fear of the other,” said Tarrósy, the African Studies professor.
"There is a huge prejudice against Black individuals," Barna said, because many Hungarians may not necessarily differentiate between migrants and people who look like they could be migrants, including Africans who moved to Hungary by choice or received scholarships to study at local universities.
"Even for people who are half-Black and speak Hungarian as I do, they frequently meet prejudice."
Indeed, for many Black people living in Hungary, the government’s anti-immigrant rhetoric plays out on an intimate level in their daily lives. They speak of verbal taunts, being turned away from restaurants and bars, trouble with neighbors and flatmates and difficulties finding work.
Tobi Ojo was shocked when an older woman spat on him at a train station, days after he moved to Hungary from his native Nigeria in 2015. He was 16 at the time and about to begin a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Debrecen.
"I finally understood what it meant to be Black in a different place," Ojo said.
Things got worse when he started looking for a job. A permit gave him seven months to find employment in Hungary — but even with top grades, he had no luck. A friend at an engineering firm where Ojo had applied for a job eventually told him in confidence, "honestly they don't want any Black people in their company," Ojo recalled.
Okwunwa, the communications student, said he regularly notices that people treat him with suspicion. He stopped going to IKEA after consistently being followed around the store by security guards, and moved out of one apartment because an older neighbor frequently called the police on him “for no reason,” complaining that his footsteps “were too loud.”
Once, the neighbor reported a bomb threat when a friend temporarily left her luggage in the building’s lobby and Okwunwa returned home from class to find police searching his apartment.
Both men have resigned themselves to ignoring the noises directed at them on the street. "What can you possibly do?" Okwunwa said. Both men also plan on leaving Hungary to pursue graduate degrees in countries where they believe they have more opportunities.
Racism is not always overt, said Daniel Anyim, who came to CEU from Ghana in 2018. He occasionally notices Hungarians staring at him on the tram, but for the most part, he said, people approach African students with a "live and let live" attitude.
Some African students say they live in a bubble of fellow international students, with whom they speak English, and rarely interact with locals.
According to Tarrósy, attitudes are changing among younger generations, who are less likely to support anti-immigrant rhetoric and are also more aware of anti-racism movements in other countries thanks to social media.
In university towns especially, many Hungarians realize that foreigners stimulate the local economies and add to their communities, Tarrósy said.
For Ojo's part, the anti-racism protests in June have given him a sense of optimism for the future. "It was definitely a great thing to see, knowing that it wasn't even a minority that organized it definitely breeds hope for the future."
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