BISSAU - hen her country needed arms to fight its bitter liberation war against its colonizer, it was the Soviet Union that provided them. When her country needed medical workers to tend to the war’s wounded, it sent her to train as a nurse — in the Soviet Union.
So when Joana Gomes, now a lawmaker in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau, heard about the war between Russia and Ukraine, her allegiance was clear from the start: It would be with Russia, although she sometimes slips and still calls it the Soviet Union.
“It was with their arms that we won our independence,” Ms. Gomes, 72, said on a recent rainy afternoon, cooking lunch at home in the capital, Bissau. “If not for them, even today we would not have our independence.” When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, some voices were absent from the global concert of condemnation, many of them African.
Sixteen of the 35 countries that abstained from the United Nations vote to condemn Russia’s actions were in Africa, as was one of the five that voted no, Eritrea. For many African countries, ties with Moscow run deep.
The Soviet Union supported many African liberation wars, supplying training, education and weapons to freedom fighters like Ms. Gomes. Nearly six decades later, she hasn’t forgotten.
