 - Andrew Sankoh
This site is intended to share my views on "African Refugee integration in Australia". The aim of this research is requirement for the fulfillment of a PhD at the University of New South Wales and to help us understand problems associated with carrying 'the burden of integration' and what this might mean for both Africans and Australians alike.
Immigration statistics have shown to us that Africans migration to Australia is a recent phenomenon. This means that whatever result this study might get would be based on this limited time of migration experience. However, as an African refugee myself doing this research, I have done a a vivid reflection on my experience which is not typical in anyway, but generally gives me the framework-experience if you like to investigate or test some of the assumptions I had made in the past and see how they resonate with others.
One thing is certain though that 'it takes two' to make settlement experiences of any cohort of migrants to Australia to successfully integrate into the Australian community.
I welcome suggestions and comments here on people's subjective and objective opinion. I will be posting excerpts of my research so far as I consider them relevant for the public.
One last word: This is my personal site and all that I post here will be based on my individual opinion. Please check back often as I will try to update it when I can spear the time.
Thank you for visiting my site.
Andrew Sankoh
PhD Student
UNSW
THE AFRICANS IN AUSTRALIA-BY LAWRENCE T. UDO-EKPO (1999); Seaview Press South Australia
"The Africans in Australia" is the first book to be published by an African since the migration of Africans into Australia. Udo-Ekpo's initiative to document the complex migration experiences of Africans to a far land such as Australia is one that needs commendation.
Obviously, it was an enormous task for Udo-Ekpo given the fact that many reports and surveys have been conducted, published on refugees from Africa by community of practice organisations in most states in Australia. This meant that most of the issues discussed would have had some critical analysis elsewhere.
Therefore in my view, I think an important contribution made by the book is firstly, the retelling of the issues by an African author and in the process validating other sources. Secondly, I think that the book makes an important contribution in chapter nine which looked at how Africans have been portrayed to a very large extent negatively in the Australian media. However, a more objective contribution would have been one that looks at why some of the images portrayed by the media are not representative of the population of Africans.
As an African academic, my unfair expectation is that he would have engaged more with the negative stereotypes with an aim of exposing the untruths of some of these dominant images of Africans.
Chapter six "Africa Imagined" documents some of the past experiences of Africans interviewed for the book. This is an attempt to examine how the African culture whatever it is disintegrates as more and more exposure to the'Australian' way of life or 'Western' hegemonic culture takes precedence. This chapter explains how some migrants become marginalised in both cultures. He relays the quotes of some African migrants who went back for a visit to Africa only to realise that they had forgotten some of the cultural practices due to a long absence from home. In Australia, these same people consider themselves Australians only as a legal status and do not feel as much. This bears relevance to how migrants and people all around the world live 'documented lives' separating the 'legal person' from the 'real person'.
Conclusively, the book is worth reading as the language used is extremely reader friendly for most Africans who Udo-Ekpo would have had in mind in his crafty writing of the first history of African migration by an 'African of both the blood and soil' to use Ali Mazrui's concepts.
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