African Australians

African Australians are Australians descended from the any peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa, including naturalised Australians who are immigrants from various regions in Sub-Saharan Africa and descendants of such immigrants. At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses categorised within Sub-Saharan African ancestral groups as a proportion of the total population amounted to 1.3%.

Large-scale immigration from Africa to Australia is only a recent phenomenon, with Europe and Asia traditionally being the largest sources of migration to Australia. African Australians come from diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, educational and employment backgrounds.

History

Large-scale immigration from Africa to Australia is only a recent phenomenon, with Europe and Asia traditionally being the largest sources of migration to Australia.

Coins minted by the Tanzanian medieval kingdom of Kilwa Sultanate have been found on the Wessel Islands. They are the oldest foreign artefacts ever discovered in Australia. Other people descended from African emigrants later arrived indirectly via the First Fleet and 19th century multicultural maritime industry. Notable examples are Billy Blue, John Caesar, and Black Jack Anderson.

Migrants from Mauritius have also been arriving in Australia since before federation in 1901. They came as convicts, prospectors who sought Victoria's goldfields, or skilled sugar workers who significantly helped to develop Queensland's sugar industry.

The Special Commonwealth African Assistance Plan enabled students from British Commonwealth African countries, including from Ghana, to travel to Australia during the mid-1960s. More than 70 percent of those from West African countries remained in Australia following military coup d'états in their countries of birth.

However, immigration from Africa to Australia generally remained limited until the 1990s, thus compared to other established European and American countries, African Australian community remains new in the country itself.

In 2005–06, permanent settler arrivals to Australia included 4,000 South Africans and 3,800 Sudanese, constituting the sixth and seventh largest sources of migrants, respectively.

Demographics

African Australians are Australians of direct Sub-Saharan African ancestry. They are from diverse racial, cultural, linguistic, religious, educational and employment backgrounds. The majority (72.6%) of African emigrants to Australia are from southern and eastern Africa. The Australian Bureau of Statistics classifies all residents into cultural and ethnic groups according to geographical origin.

Migration streams

Some of the most significant migration streams as of 2011-2012 were as follows:

• Other immigrants from Africa arrived via humanitarian programs, mostly from East Africa. In the 2011–2012 fiscal year, these individuals were mainly from Burundi (44/79), Congo (143/158), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (370/454), Eritrea (244/294), Malawi (57/71), Rwanda (44/62), and Tanzania (40/67).
• Additionally, other immigrants from Africa arrived through a family reunion migration stream. In the 2011–2012 fiscal year, these individuals were primarily from Ethiopia (412/802), Ghana (152/202), Guinea (33/62), Liberia (82/129), Sierra Leone (106/140), Somalia (164/420), and Uganda (37/67).
• A significant number of African migrants have come to Australia through a skilled migration stream. In the 2011–2012 fiscal year, these individuals were chiefly from Kenya (188/415), Mauritius (228/303), Nigeria (126/250), South Africa (4,239/6,307), Zambia (35/115), and Zimbabwe (467/848).
• Some African immigrants have also arrived via a secondary migration from New Zealand, where they are citizens.

Broadcasting services for African migrants

Multicultural broadcaster Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) broadcasts in five African languages on radio, including Dinka of South Sudan, Swahili of Tanzania and the African Great Lakes region, Tigrinya of Eritrea and Amharic of Ethiopia. Arabic broadcasting began with a 6am service by SBS in 1975, and from 2016, SBS began a year-long trial of SBS Arabic 24, a 24/7 digital radio station and website. It continues today and includes an Arabic24 podcast. An English language program, simply called SBS African (nicknamed the African Hour) was broadcast until 2017, when it was cut from schedule. 2ME Radio Arabic also broadcasts in Arabic throughout Australia.

Social status

As Africans only began to migrate to Australia in larger numbers much later than Africans were brought to the United States as slaves, and those who settled in parts of Europe, African Australian status is largely a new challenge for Australian authorities, and it is acknowledged that widespread racism against Africans is not uncommon in Australia. Research on the experience of African Australians began in the 2000s and more has been conducted since the 2010s as more and more Africans, mostly from East Africa, have arrived in the country.

Relationship to Indigenous Australians

The concept of how the American notion of "blackness" was adopted and adapted by Aboriginal civil rights activists has been little known or understood in the US. In 2011, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in New York mounted an exhibition of Indigenous Australian art, concerned with making connections between the current civil rights and spiritual movements of Indigenous Australians and that of black people in America and elsewhere.

A 2012 study looked at attitudes towards African immigrants in Western Australia, based on a survey of 184 Australians, examining the quantitative data for use in developing strategies to combat prejudice, and the media's role in the development of negative attitudes. It compared the results of the study with those previously found in looking at attitudes towards Indigenous and Muslim Australians.

Natasha Guantai, in response to Roxane Gay's initial implication that the only "black people" in Australia would be of African descent, wrote "In the dominant Australian narrative, blacks are regarded as Aboriginal. This is a narrative with little space for non-Indigenous black Australians". Guantai goes on to highlight some differences in the experience of the various groups - Indigenous Australians, immigrants from Africa, the black descendants of settlers, and black people who arrive from other white-majority countries such as the UK or the US.

In 2018 Kaiya Aboagye, a PhD student of Ghanaian, Aboriginal, South Sea and Torres Strait Islander heritage, underlined the African connection to Aboriginal Australians, citing "long histories of African/Indigenous relationships both inside and outside Australia", despite the many and varied origins and experiences of blackness among peoples in the Global South.

Relationship with the criminal justice system

In 2021, it was reported that African Australians, predominantly of South Sudanese descent, comprised 19 percent of young people in custody in Victoria, despite making up less than 0.5 percent of the overall population. Previously, in 2013 Victoria Police settled a racial profiling complaint lodged by members of the African community by agreeing to review its procedures. A 2020 study in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology found that South Sudanese-born individuals were significantly overrepresented in as perpetrators of "crimes against the person", such as robbery and assault, but that "rates for less serious crimes, such as public order and drug offences, have remained stable and relatively low for South Sudanese-born youth".

Organized crime

African Australian identity

African Australian identity is the objective or subjective state of perceiving oneself as an African Australian and as relating to being African Australian. As a group identity, "African Australian" can denote pan-African ethnic identity, as well as a diasporic identity in relation to the perception of Africa as a homeland.

Notable African Australians

This list includes only individuals who immigrated directly from Africa to Australia, plus those who had an immediate ancestor who made such a migration. Individuals of African origin who migrated from non-African countries, or those whose entire African ancestry stems from such migration, are not included.

In recent years, African Australian soccer players have been prominent in men's soccer in Australia, with 34 players making an appearance in the 2020-2021 A-League season, up on 26 the previous year. These include Kusini Yengi and his brother, Tete Yengi, from South Sudan, and their friends, brothers Mohamed and Al Hassan Toure.

See also

• African immigration to Europe
• American Australians, a category that includes Australians of African-American descent
• Arab Australians
• Black Australians (disambiguation)
• Congolese Australians
• Egyptian Australians
• Ethiopian Australians
• Ghanaian Australians
• Kenyan Australians
• Mauritian Australians
• Nigerian Australians
• Somali Australians
• South African Australians
• South Sudanese Australians
• Sudanese Australians
• Zimbabwean Australians