In this paper I will discuss the integration experiences of African immigrant students in public and private Brazilian universities. By analyzing those individuals’ situation in university life experienced in Fortaleza, Ceará, I will examine their daily lives, their encounter with alterity, prejudice and racial discrimination, the difficulties in integration into colleges, as well as their social dramas at the end of their studies, related to the possibility of returning to their home country or staying in Brazil. It is true that Brazilian universities are many times unaware of those students’ and their countries’ reality, as they are simply regarded as knowledge consumers, whose experiences are underused or wasted. That student migration has been making student groups, movements and associations gather African students according to national distinction, making them quite sterile with no negotiation skills with Brazilian higher education institutions. As foreigners and as dark-skinned people, African students often experience a state of social anomie, where they have to “fend for themselves”, finally adopting a capitalist identity based on consumption.

1. 1
African Diaspora in Ceará: Integration experiences of African immigrant
students in university
Ercílio Langa 1
UFC, Brazil
Abstract: In this paper I will discuss the integration experiences of African immigrant students in public and
private Brazilian universities. By analyzing those individuals’ situation in university life experienced in Fortaleza,
Ceará, I will examine their daily lives, their encounter with alterity, prejudice and racial discrimination, the
difficulties in integration into colleges, as well as their social dramas at the end of their studies, related to the
possibility of returning to their home country or staying in Brazil. It is true that Brazilian universities are many
times unaware of those students’ and their countries’ reality, as they are simply regarded as knowledge
consumers, whose experiences are underused or wasted. That student migration has been making student groups,
movements and associations gather African students according to national distinction, making them quite sterile
with no negotiation skills with Brazilian higher education institutions. As foreigners and as dark-skinned people,
African students often experience a state of social anomie, where they have to “fend for themselves”, finally
adopting a capitalist identity based on consumption.
Keywords: African students; Brazil; universities; experiences; integration.

Translation: Soraia Redondo.
1 PhD student in Sociology and Master by the Federal University of Ceará (UFC, Brazil). Have Bachelors Degree in
Social Sciences and in Sociology from the University Eduardo Mondlane (UEM, Mozambique). Email:
ercilio.langa @ gmail.com

2. 2
Introduction: presenting the African diaspora in Ceará
To briefly summarize, the metropolitan citizen would accept
the immigrant if he were invisible and silent, but once a
certain demographic density has been reached, the ghost
assumes a terrifying consistency. To make matters worse,
reassured by his growing numbers, he dares, on the
contrary, to talk out loud in his native tongue and
sometimes appears in his native dress. Albert Memmi.
The presence of African students in the state of Ceará, as immigrants, began in the second
half of the 1990s, with the very first group coming from Angola. Over that period, only
students from Portuguese-speaking African countries came to be part of the Federal
University of Ceará (UFC, Portuguese: Universidade Federal do Ceará), through the
Undergraduate Student Partnership Program (PEC-G, Portuguese: Programa de Estudantes
Convênio - de Graduação).2 The immigration of Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean students
started in 1998 and, two years later, Santomean, Angolan and Mozambican students follow.
By the early 2000s there is a significant increase in the number of African students living in
Ceará, most of whom come to study at private colleges, with contracts signed in their
countries of origin, through ads and admission exams done in Guinea-Bissau. The increase in
immigration of African students to Brazil, at the start of the 21st century, was also fuelled by
president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva’s political stance and his policy of cooperation and
tightening of bonds with Africa3.
That ongoing policy of cooperation is particularly directed at higher education, by creating
different mechanisms, such as trainee programs, scholarships and agreements, in order to
facilitate the possibility of Africans studying in Brazil. Within the context of different
mobilizing strategies, students leave their respective countries with academic expectations
regarding Brazil, due to the country's greater level of economic, technological and academic
output development, bolstering their hopes of easy integration because of a common
language and culture – the Portuguese language, the cuisine, the religion and the African
culture brought by slaves permeating Brazilian life.
2 Undergraduate Student Partnership Program (PEC-G, Portuguese: Programa de Estudantes Convênio - de
Graduação), the result of cooperation in the area of education and higher education between Brazil and
developing countries, collectively administered by the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations and the Ministry of
Education, and comprising 45 countries, with 32 active countries which send students from Africa, Latin America
and East Timor. The African continent has the biggest student contingent, with 20 countries which send students
every year. In 2010, there were 383 African students, most of whom Bissau-Guineans, Cape Verdeans and
Angolans, enrolled at Brazilian federal and state universities. In the same year, under that program (and other
similar ones), there were about 18.917 students from Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOP) in Brazil.
3 Over the eight years of Lula’s government, spanning from 2003 to 2010, the student exchange between Brazil
and African countries intensified. During his two terms, President Lula visited 27 African countries, while his
predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, only visited three.

3. 3
According to Mourão (2009), in the 2000s, the African students who were part of the
international agreements with Brazilian public universities called themselves the “African
community in Fortaleza,” including, particularly, young students of Cape Verdean and
Bissau-Guinean nationality, united and dealing with common issues at the time, such as
adjusting and solving everyday problems. The author argues that, even so, that union at the
diaspora did not dispel the historical differences of class, income, status and level of
education between citizens from both countries. Over the years, the number of African
students at Ceará has grown, establishing a contingent of immigrants becoming complex in
its diversity. In contrast, Baessa (2005) states that, given the increasing number of Guinean
and Cape Verdean students in the city, these individuals begin to establish greater
distinctions among themselves, highlighting their specific nationalities, contradicting the
previous designation of “African community.” Nowadays, there is a growing segment of
students from different countries, social classes and religious beliefs, not only from
Portuguese-speaking countries but also from English-speaking and French-speaking
countries, such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In 2011, the Federal Police of Ceará registered a 1260 African students in the state, of
whom 1000 attended several private colleges, a 130 attended the Federal University of Ceará
and 20 attended Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE), the majority being from African
Portuguese-speaking countries (PALOP) (BRÁS, 2011). In fact, the number of students seems
to be greater than what the Federal Police had previously registered, because many students
are in an irregular situation. A significant portion of students, the majority, studying at
private colleges, live in precarious conditions along with prejudice and racial discrimination.
I call the increasing presence of students – from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau,
Mozambique, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo and São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal –
in the State of Ceará, African diaspora4. Those individuals, who belong to several
ethnolinguistic groups, feature multicultural identities and several kinds of differences that
mark their lives in this state. This diaspora is comprised of both male and female students, of
whom the majority is young men between 18 and 35 years old, dark-skinned, of several
ethnicities, belonging to the big Bantu ethnolinguistic family. The African diaspora has
created groups and movements, gathering African students in a mobilization and
4 The notion of diaspora, which drives this research, is inspired in Hall’s ideas (2011) about the identities of
immigrants from the Caribbean region and Great Britain, their origin myths, the needs and dangers they face
under globalization.

4. 4
organization process in several student associations, the most important being: the
Associação de Estudantes Africanos no Estado do Ceará (AEAC), the Associação de
Estudantes da Guiné-Bissau no Estado do Ceará (AEGBECE), the Fundação de Estudantes
Cabo-verdianos nas Faculdades do Nordeste (FEAF), the Centro de Estudantes Estrangeiros
da UFC (CEEUFC) and the Movimento Pastoral de Estudantes Africanos (MPEA). Usually,
such African student associations are based on national distinctions, making them quite
sterile with no negotiation skills with Brazilian higher education institutions, these students
attend.
In light of this student migration situation, marked by the massive arrival and presence of
African students from several countries in Brazilian public and private higher education
institutions, and by the emerging of African student associations in those institutions, I feel
compelled to understand this phenomenon, discussing these students’ presence and
integration in Brazilian universities. My analysis is limited to the expectations of African
students in UFC, the largest public higher education institution of the State of Ceará, in
northeast Brazil. Therefore, I analyze the experiences of African students at the Fortaleza
campuses, where I have lived for about three years, being myself a student of UFC. For
questioning the problems of such phenomenon, here are some questions that guide this
paper: Who are these students? How do they life? How are they received by universities?
How is their integration carried out in Brazilian academic life?
The daily lives of African students in Fortaleza and their encounter with alterity
Once in Brazil, African students face daily challenges, especially financial difficulties, given
the high cost of living in this metropolis in comparison to what they can afford. A significant
portion of the contingent of students claims feeling discriminated against every day, due to
the color of their skin and their own African descent, in different degrees and forms of the
discriminations found in their home countries. Gusmão (2005) opens up ways for reflection,
by circumscribing Brazil’s own position, in receiving the African diaspora:
A multiracial country which is part of the so-called “developing countries,”
but that differs from the European countries, until very recently privileged in
the search for qualification of personnel by Palop. In question, the position
of a relatively peripheral country in the international division of labor, with a
Portuguese colonization past as well, and which, though structurally mestizo
and black, thinks of itself as white and European. In discussion, the existence
of internal processes of discrimination and racism in Brazilian reality and the
perception and experiences of the black and African individual in this
context. (GUSMÃO, 2006:16).

5. 5
In Fortaleza’s daily routine, racial prejudice and discrimination toward African students
occur in several ways, often subtle ones, which range from looks of suspicion and discomfort
in waiting lines and rooms, when accessing services such as hospitals, banks, lottery retailers
and busses. Just like changing from one sidewalk or one street to another, people change
their wallet, purses and cellphones from one side or pocket to another as soon as an
individual of African descent approaches. These situations represent types of what Bourdieu
(2007) defines as symbolic violence.
Such violence involves gestures, signals, symbols and cultural practices shared by society,
often carried out subtly and inconspicuously by those who act, as a form of oppression, if not
constant repetition. The African students part of the federal and state universities, who are,
in fact, the minority, survive on the PEC-G scholarships and on other signed agreements
between Brazil and their home countries. As for the students studying at private colleges,
they receive money from their families to pay for tuition and to stay in college, adding to their
income from some undeclared work – at stores and markets, beauty salons, auto repair
garages, factories and construction, restaurants or parking lots of big shopping malls and
supermarkets, or even at people’s homes as babysitters – to thus ensure their survival and
their own means of transportation in the city.
Within this group of students studying at private colleges, there are a number of them who,
in their free time, trade clothes and footwear between Brazil and their home countries.
Finally, a select group of private college students, mainly Cape Verdeans, survives and studies
in a relaxed manner, thanks to the money sent by family members living in Africa and by
immigrant relatives in European and North American countries.
Private colleges – as a mechanism of attraction - claim to guarantee paid internships to
students once they finish their Management, Accounting, Marketing, Communication,
Science and Information Management degrees. In reality, African students are offered “paid
internships” that are forms of precarious work such as being pamphleteers, security guards at
shopping malls and parking lots or electronic surveillance operators, in a ploy used to bypass
the norm which forbids them from working.
In everyday life, African students realize how hard it is for Brazilians to call them by their
given names, replacing these by the Brazilian native category “negão” (lit. “big black”) and
easily forgetting their nationalities and the names of their home countries, blurring
everything into the African generic category. Mendes (2010:27) highlights that “[...] African
students are not fully aware of the social limits traditionally built by whites to segregate the

6. 6
blacks. They are not informed of those environments of exclusion, they go through the
delineated borders and walk in whites’ environments.” African students, in everyday
Fortaleza, notice the social distance of Brazilian blacks who, many times, believe that
Africans are playboys, rich individuals from African political elites, or that they are
individuals who come to Brazil to take up the seats which, by right, would be theirs.
There is also, among the Brazilians blacks, the idea that Africans are “cotistas” (lit, “quota
holders”), in other words, students beneficiary of racial quotas in higher education in Brazil.
To be exact, forms of African student integration with Ceará’s population, on a daily basis,
tend to express discrimination mechanisms, making them outsiders (BECKER, 2008);
(ELIAS & SCOTSON, 2000). One can notice, among the people of Ceará, the existence of
multiple ideas about the African presence, particularly, stigmatizing points of view of racial
prejudice because of being black. In a report, Guinean students, as an organizational strategy
within the scope of the Movimento Pastoral do Estudante Africano (lit. “pastoral movement
of the African student”) reported expressions of racism:
We have faced racial discrimination in the city and on campus as well, which
characterizes institutional racism, by college staff, teachers and academic
departments. The academic departments have even implemented rules for
us, such as: Take showers, wear perfume, skin cream, don’t arrive sweaty
[…]. These demands are only made of African students (2012: 7).
In fact, many of those students come to Brazil bearing expectations of easy academic
integration and personal and professional growth, however, they come across Brazilian
society’s social structure, organized in a hierarchical way by race, skin color and social
classes. Being black, African and poor places them in a subservient position, preventing
them from accessing several opportunities.
The difficulties and different forms of discrimination faced by African immigrants, their
racial interpellations and identity resignificance are similar to what Turner (2005) calls
“social dramas,”5 difficulties in recreating social and symbolic universes in the modern
world, where people feel isolated and abandoned faced with the responsibility of giving
meaning to their lives. In that context, several African students struggle to pay tuition and
others are caught working and threatened with deportation. Even so, student migration to
5 According to Turner (2005), social drama appears as a life experience which refers to the notion of danger,
allowing individuals to access the social and symbolic universe, contrasting the ordinary to the extraordinary. This
notion emerges as a model for reading reality in tribal societies, viewed in four moments: rupture, crisis and crisis
intensification, repairing action and outcome. Drama presents itself as an important moment in repairing crisis.

7. 7
Brazil is a life experience6, an intensely lived, unique and significant experience which forms
and transforms these student’s lives and paths. The migration experience is almost always
given a positive resignificance, and it is perceived as an education, learning and career
development opportunity. However, it is also perceived as a change in their worldview and
stance, acquired because of the financial difficulties they go through and challenges finding
work and paying their bills.
African students' experiences in Brazilian universities
African students in Brazilian universities seam to live in a state of social anomie (Merton,
1970). Social anomie in African students in Fortaleza manifests itself through disorientation
in their personal and academic lives. It shows in the constant skipping between programs and
colleges, where many can't adapt to the programs their enrolled in, when they would rather
take others befitting their “heart’s desire” of their “calling.” Others still, become aware of
other programs and colleges that offer better segues into the job market and, with time,
“find” their calling in a different profession. These intentions of constantly switching
programs cause problems for the students, as well as for the college’s academic departments
and heads of the students’ programs. They are seen as “a problem,” as “problem” students.
Most Africans are in undergraduate programs in private colleges. Few can manage to break
through into graduate programs.
Education in Brazilian higher learning institutions offers new disfigures and new identity
synthesis through different cultural practices observed in the Brazilian university experience,
however these institutions - students, teaching body and staff - ignore the students reality in
their home countries (FONSECA, 2009). The author also points to conflicts originating in the
sigma of being temporary immigrants and the war refugee stereotype. In reality, these
subjects adaptation is slow. In a colonialist attitude, Brazilian universities and colleges create
gaps where the experience and knowledge African students bring are not applied and are not
considered valid. There's a notion that African students are not producers of knowledge,
merely consumers who come to Brazil only to learn and not bring or produce knowledge. The
universities' hegemonic scientific order isn't concerned by those students' reality, nor that of
6 Turner (2005) literally defines experience as “trying, going on an adventure, taking risks”, where experience and
danger have the same origin. Turner differentiates three types of experiences: the daily experience which refers to
the simple, passive experience of accepting daily events; the life experience which refers to the unique experience
that happens in regards to perception of pain or pleasure, which can be felt more intensively and; learning
experiences which differ from external events and internal reactions, such as the beginning of new ways of living,
romantic adventures, which can be personal or shared.

8. 8
the countries they come from which results in what Sousa Santos (2011) calls a waste of
experience.
[...] the worldview is wider than the western one. The South African, Indian,
Mozambican colleagues perceive sociology, society and the world differently
from those in the north. So, I thought that, probably, what is most worrying
in today’s world is the amount of social experience that is wasted, because it
occurs in remote places. The media is adverse to very local experiences, the
ones not well known nor legitimized by hegemonic social sciences, and that
is why they have stayed invisible, discredited (SOUSA SANTOS, 2011:23-24).
In fact, most African students cannot join extracurricular or research activities in and
outside universities and are underused by the precarious work job market. Usually
experience and knowledge not originating in the West are ignited by the “dominant
paradigm” in scientific work doesn't dialog with other world views (SOUSA SANTOS, 2010).
In this context authors, facts, stories, narratives and experiences from the African and not
western world are ignored and considered nonscientific, local and, in consequence minor.
The migration experience of African students in Brazilian territory influences and changes
their worldview and stance. Many start building a “capitalist identity” (Fonseca, 2009) and
sometimes an “entrepreneurial identity.” These identities are based in the consumption of
goods in a capitalist market, with various products at accessible prices, as has been the case
in Brazil in the last few years. Consumption of clothes, footwear, famous brand cellphones,
as well as trading clothes and footwear between Brazil and their countries of origin - clothes,
tunics, colorful cloth from African countries and Havaianas flip-flops, blouses, bikinis,
footwear, jewelry from Brazil - is predominant in these identities. In this scenario, part of the
students are attracted to remain in Brazil or settle in permanently, by a set of “conveniences”
and a greater “quality of life,” as well as because of the social and certainty returning to their
countries of origin, because of their feelings of lack of place, change of identity references,
social and emotional ties, etc. Gusmão (2008) appropriately describes the position of an
African student in Brazil:
What they learn and what they forget when staying “out of place” for too long
is now the challenge for the home countries’ authorities. It is also a challenge
for family, relatives and friends, who often sacrificed themselves to support
their quest for education, when they finish their degrees and return to their
families and home countries. Because of their new ways, how they dress,
how they behave, the students no longer fully recognize themselves in their
original group, feeling weird at the same time in that world. Those who
stayed in that world also feel uncomfortable around those who returned.
They see themselves as modern, globalized individuals, who have
perspectives and different values which contrast with the more traditional
context values and habits. What they understand is that they are no longer
from there, but they also know they are not from the land where they seek
new paths through education and professional qualification. In these are,

9. 9
mostly, foreigners and then “Africans and blacks.” In Africa those who are:
Angolan, Mozambican, Cape Verdeans Guinean, Santomean. They are
Balanta, Fula, Pepel, Kimbundu, Ovimbundu, Creole, Mestizos and with no
reference to ethnic origin, and so on and so forth. (GUSMÃO, 2008:8-9).
A majority of students who remain in Brazilian territory marry Brazilian women or start a
family, but few manage to continue their academic life and take graduate degrees. Others are
observed by the job market in larger metropolis like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This
scenario, based on the experiences of African students in Brazilian territory, raises several
questions: What historic power relationships have formed between African countries and
Brazil? What educational reality do African countries and Brazil feel, when accepting these
students?
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