The authorities denounced the activists "for separatism" and for trying to talk about racism in the Soviet Union. But that's not why the organization was banned in the end. In 1960, the students decided to organize a protest against French nuclear testing in the Sahara. It seemed like an approvable topic of protest. But in those same days Khrushchev was planning his visit to France and the university was told not to allow the amateurism. Meetings and actions of the union were banned, then the organization itself was banned, and activists were threatened with expulsion from the country. Okonko ends up in the West where he publishes numerous interviews about the situation in the USSR.
Forced to respond, the Soviets were outraged that Okonko was telling the press in South Africa, a country of legalized apartheid, about the shortcomings of the Soviet Union. As for racism in the USSR, it was claimed that it did not exist. Okonko was accused of slander. The newspaper Trud called him an alcoholic, a bigot, and just in case a spy.
On December 9, 1963 the Ministry of Higher Education received information that students from Ghana were coming for the weekend from Leningrad, Kalinin, and Kharkov to a certain embassy event in Moscow. The embassy, meanwhile, did not invite anyone. The universities were told not to let students go to Moscow.
Nevertheless, on December 13, about 300 young people from Ghana and other African countries gathered outside the Ghanaian embassy in the capital. Ambassador Eliot later reported that the students had been living outside for four days, drinking, making noise, disturbing their work, so that he and his family even had to barricade themselves in the embassy. According to Eliot's version, the rally was instigated by one of the Western embassies. The diplomat said the students demanded increased scholarships, better housing, an expanded menu to include Ghanaian dishes, including rice-based dishes, and travel to the West. Calling these demands impossible and fantastic, and emphasizing the hooligan behavior of the students near the embassy, Eliot clearly concealed the political nature of the gathering and generally accepted the official Soviet version of events.
According to another version, the President of Ghana, Nkrumah, was behind the strange initiative who, through his people, summoned the students to a meeting and then changed the decision. Nkrumah was obsessed with the idea of pan-African unity but under Ghanaian hegemony. He used Ambassador Eliot to promote this idea. Perhaps the scandalous meeting was part of his multi-track plan to change the balance of power.
There is a third version. According to it, the initiative belonged to the Ghanaian students themselves. The rule of Nkrumah in Ghana, the first African country to be freed from foreign dependence, looked more and more like a one-party dictatorship. Ghanaian youth in the USSR, the country's potential elite, were also feeling this pressure. The students may well have been intent on using their newly formed community to speak out independently about both the racist excesses in the USSR and the situation in their homeland.
But even if the original initiative for the Ghanaians to meet in Moscow came from outside, the assembled students were most likely acting in their own interests. During a gathering to discuss racism and publicity tactics news of Assare-Addo's death arrives. The students decide to boycott classes pending an official investigation.
On the morning of December 18, they gathered again at the embassy and prepared a memorandum to the Soviet authorities. Then the column with hand-drawn anti-racist posters moved toward the Kremlin. "House of Friendship - House of Discrimination," "No More Murders" - after marching through Red Square the demonstrators stopped at the Spasskaya Tower, where they gave interviews to Western correspondents.
Party and ministerial officials began to approach the demonstrators. The students refused to disperse demanding a meeting at the Supreme Soviet to present the memorandum. They were offered to choose ten delegates. The negotiations lasted for two hours. Then the protesters moved to the building of the Ministry of Higher Education and settled in the courtyard of the Architectural Institute next door. Officials, including Education Minister Yelutin, were not happy - the delegates refused to talk to them behind closed doors and offered to come out to the protesters and listen to the memorandum.
The meeting in the auditorium of the Institute of Architecture was, according to Yelutin, extremely tense and lasted two hours. All the students who spoke, with noisy support from the audience, rejected Yelutin's interpretation of racism in the USSR as an anomaly and read a memorandum demanding an investigation into the death of Assare-Addo and other incidents: "We are not convinced of our safety in this country. When we are beaten no one reacts. Perhaps the minister is just not aware of the case."
A soon-to-be-released investigation revealed that Assare-Addo's death was the result of frostbite in a state of alcoholic stupor. The answer to the question of how the student ended up on the outskirts of the city and where the scar on his neck came from has never been found or at least has not reached the general public.
As a result of the December demonstration, not only did the ideological training of students from Africa increase, but more attention was paid to the education of internationalism in the USSR.