Thousands of young people from Africa, many of them Catholics, migrate each year to major Indian cities, mainly to study, creating a new challenge for the Indian church. “The challenges are pastoral,” said Fr Martin Puthussery, secretary of the Commission of Migrants in Bangalore Archdiocese. He said Indian society is prejudiced against Africans, seeing them as wanton drug peddlers.
“It is difficult for them to rent accommodation because of the negative attitudes towards them and those who do find accommo-dation are almost always over-charged,” the Jesuit priest said.
Bangalore, where Father Puthussery is based, has at least 3,000 African students and a third of them are Catholic, he said.
Even though there are no official statistics on the number of Africans in the country, a rough estimate suggests that there are 50,000 Nigerians in India mostly in New Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai.
The prejudice against Africans in Indian society cannot be helped but Africans are encouraged to join in with parish activities, Father Puthussery said. “We deliberately try to integrate them and help remove social preju-dice,” he said.
