Growing African in Australia: racism, resilience and the right.
To many African-Diaspora people in Australia, being included means masking yourself. The fitting is to correct one’s Africanness and one’s darkness. Australia is teaching you to show yourself in the divisive identity of who you need to be and who you really are. You just never are.
Africans recently came to Australia. They weren’t. The first recorded African-expatriate settlers were the defendants who landed with the first fleet in 1.6. They were 11 and were heavily involved in the colonial project of deporting the aborigines. This is where the conversation begins – as it should.
African-Diaspora people use the term deliberately instead of “African”, to include people of Afro descent who do not need to “come” from Africa. From Brazil, Guyana to Jamaica, Africa closes a geographical location and is a tangible experience.
People of Afro-descent live all over the world and carry different histories, beliefs and ideological convictions. The way the book often unites them in Australia is the oneness that is classified with them. “African”.
Growing up in Africa is divided into six categories, but with a very clear theme: instability, isolation, racism, resilience, survival and the right to call Australia home – or the fight for opportunity.
Relations with the new country are complicated not only by the shock of the novelty of an individual space, but also by the history of Australia. It is in this colonial context that the Afro-blackness of African-expatriate Australians becomes visible. Here they begin to feel or are told that their blackness is a sign of something – something less desirable.
The beginning of racism
The book’s most influential theme is racism – both covert and confidential – and how it punctuates the lives of black people living in Australia. .Historically, and still, skin color has been identified here as a gauge of differences and otherwise.
The heartbreaking stories detail how the African body is layered with suspicions of guilt, inferiority and inadequacy. In white Australian space, black Africans struggle to see the body as worthy or fit. It’s deviant.
In Australia, apartheid is not only seen and heard by African-Diaspora people, it is also felt. It is clear and obvious to those who experience it, but those who remain silent and those who do it deny it. With suspicion it is being monitored continuously.
More complex in relation to the process of nationalization – when an individual or group is forced into a particular ethnic identity without their consent. By acknowledging the super-visibility of their skin color, the authors reflect on the difficult and transient journey of embracing their blackness, expressing annoyance at it, or feeling detached from it.
The journey may be free, but knowing that you have to be fully human in Australia and live with dignity, it can have a profound idea of exclusion. So to be non-white, especially to be black, occupies the space of the margin. It is not included.
But still like the wind … they rise
Despite the structural barriers to healthcare, education, housing and employment, Africa’s Growing Up accounts contain stories of deep courage, hope, resilience and tolerance.
Despite having a perpetual knowledge of “their place” in Australia, African-expatriates in this place are now making huge contributions to academia, finance, social work, healthcare, engineering, business, digital media, law, and politics.
One thing is clear (but still unspoken) in this book. Alignment leads to deep feelings of frustration, mental illness, violence, and internal powerlessness. It takes away the humanity of man.
There is so much to contribute to a country where African-expatriate Australians have so generously opened their doors, but they can only do what they are “approved” of. Inclusion means rich. It means home.