Negotiating the challenges of everyday life: the African immigrant experience in Queensland, Australia

ABSTRACT

Africans have become firmly part of Australian society. They account for an increasing proportion of its total population. This article draws from empirical data generated via in-depth semi-structured interviews with 30 participants in South East Queensland. The findings suggest that the discursive constructions of Africans in everyday language and social relations in Australia work to construct their lived reality of being; becoming and being positioned as a racialized subject, leading to objectification, marginalization, exclusion and disadvantage. The article advocates for systemic changes that will end the problems of everyday racism at both state and national levels, and for the introduction of programs that will encourage the inclusion, belonging and full participation of visible and ethnically marked immigrants to Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Africans
• everyday racism
• immigrants and refugees
• Queensland Australia
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The derogatory term Kanakas was used to describe South Sea Islanders. ‘Sugar slaves’ was another term used to refer to South Sea Islanders from various Pacific Islands employed in the sugar cane fields of Queensland. To meet the needs of colonial Queensland, the South Sea Islanders’ labor was used – Queensland’s sugar industry literally depended and thrived on their labor. More than 62,000 South Sea Islanders, mostly from Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, including the Loyalty Islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, Gilbert Islands, New Ireland, and Milne Bay Provinces of Papua New Guinea, were brought to Queensland and New South Wales between 1863 and 1904. Though some of them signed a contract to work for 3 years, their recruitment was a form of slavery. At times, it involved the practice of outright kidnapping or blackbirding (Banivanua-Mar, 2012). Indentured to the plantations, they remained legally and spatially contained and separated from settler society. Many whites objected to their presence and saw it as a threat to their own standard of living and employment conditions. The objection had been in part one of the principles, but the main characteristic of the legislation against colored labor in 1868 had been a desire to protect the Polynesians from whites (Morrison, 1966; 50 km). After 1877, the South Sea Islanders were legally restricted to within kilometers of the coast (Banivanua-Mar, 2012).

2. The problem with these statistics however is that white Africans, especially white South Africans and Zimbabweans, are included in this number. In the 2016 census, there were over 23,436 White South Africans and 5,295 White Zimbabweans in Queensland (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012).

3. In the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Sudan and South Sudan are included in the description of North Africa. At the 2016 Australian census, in Queensland, there were 2,370 people who had been born in Sudan while 1,426 people had been born in South Sudan.

4. South East Queensland stretches from the Gold Coast in the south to Noosa in the north and extending inland to include the Toowoomba urban area in the west (Queensland Treasury, 2015). Of course, there are various definitions used for SEQ, some of which include Toowoomba and some that do not include it. The Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning (2013) includes parts of Toowoomba regional council in their definition of SEQ. However, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2012) does not include Toowoomba regional council in its definition of SEQ. Ultimately there is no right or wrong definition for SEQ, as long as one clearly defines what has been used for SEQ. In this study, Toowoomba is included in the definition. SEQ accounts for around two-thirds of Queensland’s total population. SEQ was chosen for this study for at least three reasons. First, it is culturally and ethnically diverse and home to people from different parts of the world. Second, it has a significant presence of black African immigrants. Third, it is where the social interactions occur and where both skilled and unskilled job prospects are very high.

5. Participants came from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Liberia in West Africa; Uganda and Tanzania in East Africa; Rwanda, Congo in Central Africa; Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan in Northeast Africa; and Zimbabwe and Botswana in Southern Africa.

6. The term ‘white Australian’ is more satisfactory than oft-used concept of ‘Anglo’ Australians because the category ‘Anglo’ and ‘Anglo-Celtic’ are far from being a dominant mode of self-categorization by the dominant white Australians or by people who share the racial category ‘white’ whether at a conscious or unconscious level. In addition, it may not account for the many non-Anglos and Anglo-Celtics who can be defined as white persons on the grounds of sharing a common set of phenotypes (skin color, hair texture, facial features) and trace their genealogical roots to Europe (Gallagher, 2007).

7. Australia has moved from being an Anglo-Saxon preserve to a multicultural society. Almost one in four Australians residents were born overseas and a similar proportion with at least one parent who was born overseas. The 2016 census results, published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, indicated that 49% (nearly half) of the Australian population had either been born overseas (first generation Australian) or one or both parents had been born overseas (second generation Australian): – a very high proportion compared to most other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries with populations more than ten million.

Additional information

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Hyacinth Udah

Hyacinth Udah is a Lecturer in Social Work and Human Services at the James Cook University. He holds Doctorate and Master’s Degrees in Social Work from Griffith University, and the Australian Catholic University respectively. He also has a First-Class Honours Degree in Theology and Philosophy. He is a leading scholar in the field of African immigrant settlement and discourses of Otherness in Australia. His doctoral study explored the African immigrant experiences, and his recent research publications are extending his interests in immigrant and international student experiences, mental health, community and well-being promotion, decoloniality, critical race and social work education, research and practice. They seek to inform policy, and improve practice.