Just because we’re black

By Jessica Minshall

Brother and sister Omot and Akolla Cham fled political and racial persecution in Ethiopia for a life in Australia not without challenges.

Akolla, 19, just completed year 12 at Pendle Hill High school where she was Vice-Captain. She is one of the first African students to have been there since grade seven.

“Vice-captain, but it’s still good. You get to do speeches, go to conferences. We went to Parliament House to the Women’s Leadership Conference with different schools from all around Sydney.”

She is hoping to study either nursing or do hospitality management at TAFE next year.
Akolla wants to become a manager of a hotel, having enjoyed her work placements while at school. This hotel just might serve African food, quite a change from the menu at Hungry Jacks where she works (and runs children’s birthday parties).

Her older brother Omot, 22, is a nursing student at the University of Western Sydney (UWS). Being African at an Australian university means that you stand out:

“Last year I did! Last year I was the only African guy there. Actually that’s the same thing everywhere that I go. I’m the one that cops it all first.”

At TAFE, where he completed an Assistant in Nursing qualification, and at St Joseph’s hospital in Auburn where he works Omot has been the only African there. He and Akolla were also two of the first few African students to attend the Intensive English Centre at Evans High, and again when they changed schools.

“We didn’t even start together. He started a day later, I started first. There were no black people there, it was just me. Just sitting there in front of the canteen like a retard. It was pretty harsh,” says Akolla.

Good teachers and nice students made it easier, but English was an extra difficulty even coming from the English centre and having language tutoring.

“You can communicate. They talk to you and you can talk back, but then there’s always some assignment or exam and they’re using the big words and you look at that and you’re like ‘what’s this’? Tough luck then,” says Omot.

Omot’s seemingly American accent made it easier for people to ask where he’s from.

“Through that accent I made so many friends. Everyone just thought it’s so cool to talk like that.”

Omot thinks that perhaps the fear of sounding racist stops a lot of young people from asking Africans about their backgrounds.

“They should ask. I rather people ask actually, rather than just making assumptions. I’ve got friends that just call me ‘Black’. I go to uni and they’re like ‘Oh, Black is here.’ I don’t mind!

“You want people to understand what it’s like growing up like us. But I guess people don’t really see it and a lot of people don’t really give us chance to let them know.”

Omot explains that Ethiopia is so divided because there are so many different tribes. His family are part of the Anuak tribe, who have much darker skin than the Abash.

“The original Ethiopians they call us half Ethiopians- half Sudanese because we live on that border, because apparently back centuries ago we might have migrated into Ethiopia. Now the Abash, they moved into this region of Gambella and that’s what the war is all about.”

Omot and Akolla’s father got involved in politics in Ethiopia through his work in providing food aid. When he and others started getting arrested and he needed to leave, five children were left without money for food or rent.

“My mum literally built a house by herself. A hut, not a house. Literally went out, cut down some trees and built it. If it rains at night then you wake up, the whole place is just leaking and you sit in whichever spot that it’s not leaking at, and that’s how you’re going to spend the rest of your night,” says Omot.

Support from the Anglican Church in Randwick allowed them to migrate to Australia in 2000, following their father’s path through Kenya.

“We probably had it easier than the rest of the other people,” says Omot.

Akolla explains the current situation in Ethiopia as race based conflict:

“It started in 2004 and it was just like genocide, massacre, killing all the men and boys and so everybody fled out of the country. And the ones who stayed they’re still in terror you know. Because the war didn’t start with the military people coming in. It was the neighbours that came out and started butchering people. Because the Abash they’re not black they’re lighter.”

She does not understand why Africans trying to escape poverty and violence would not be allowed to come to Australia. Omot also wants to see more Africans in Australia:

“I want to see Africans running shops. I want to some Africans in big industry, some company boss, some kind of CEO.”

Omot dreams of finishing university, and doing an extra course to become a scrub nurse. He wants to get a job and buy a house in Kellyville.

“It’s really nice, all the houses are really new and if you live there you’ve got class. That’s my goal and to get married and settle down. And live a happy life.

“If I were to have enough money I’d like to go back to Ethiopia and open up a hospital. A little private hospital. The hospital system there is really not great. Somewhere where people can just go in and be given the right medication. Because right now, at public ones the doctors are the Abash, we don’t have any Anuak doctors.”

That is if his mother, as well as the ongoing conflict, will let him.

From Western Sudan to Western Sydney

By Gillian Cook

Fathia Adam sits on the living room floor of her Blacktown apartment thumbing through the pages of an Australia Citizenship workbook. Her feet, painted with henna to celebrate the end of Ramadan, rub against each other.

Her tongue falters over unfamiliar words like ‘democracy’ and ‘responsibility’. Not because the concepts are foreign to her. It is because her mouth, so used to forming Arabic sounds, struggles to make sense of the syllables.

She doesn’t mind the frequent distractions by her one-year-old daughter, Marlawa. Her frizzy hair, uneven steps, and tendency to try and eat objects of varying degrees of edibility keep Fathia busy.

It is 9:30am and Fathia serves garlicky beef stew with home-baked bread for breakfast. Marlawa eats the gooey food from her mother’s henna-tipped fingers.

Fathia has been in Australia for 10 months. She came from Sudan as a humanitarian refugee and spent two years in Egypt before being granted refugee status in Australia.

This morning Mahgoub, her husband, is at a job search agency. He will take almost any job offered to him.

“In Australia it’s too hard to get a job because English is not good,” says Fathia.

Fathia was born in a small village in Darfur, a region in the west of Sudan.

It is a place where mountains are the backdrop for cascading waterfalls and running rivers – a place where she says the orchards are full of mangos, guavas and oranges.

In 2003 Fathia and her family woke in the 4am darkness to screaming and the sound of horse hooves.

The Janjaweed had come.

Meaning ‘man with a gun on a horse,’ the Janjaweed are militia of nomadic, Arab-speaking African tribes.

Her Father ran out of their house to defend the village with the other men after urging his wife and children to run and hide.

The militia were firing guns indiscriminately into houses and at running families - women and children too, remembers Fathia. They set houses on fire and herded cattle away.

Fathia and her Mother, brothers and sisters ran to hide in the mountain. They stayed there for a day before her father found them. Although he was wounded, he led them by foot for hours to the next village.

Mahgoub also escaped to the next village, but his Father died of his wounds.

Fathia travelled on her own to Khartoum, before going to Egypt and reuniting with Mahgoub where they married.

Fathia’s cousin Sidig had already been granted refugee status in Australia and so he proposed that Fathia, Mahgoub and their daughter Marlawa come to Australia as refugees.

“My father had 300 cows. We lost them and our home."

“All gone,” remembers Fathia, speaking through another Darfur refugee, Haviz.
At other times she speaks for herself in broken English.

Her grandfather was killed by the Janjaweed in his house. Her aunty had children taken and killed in front of her before the soldiers told her to leave.

Thick grey smoke puffs and coils out of the small clay pot of burning sandalwood twigs placed on the dining room table.

Fathia did not know until she reached Egypt that her family was safe in Khartoum. Her first born daughter, who she lost in the confusion, is still in Sudan, living with Fathia’s mother.

Marlawa runs around the carpeted apartment pulling on fake flowers.

Sometimes, when Marlawa grabs one too many hand-fried, oily cardamom donuts, or picks up a fragile glass cup, she receives a sharp word from Fathia.

It is either in Arabic or her mother tongue, Fur.

But when Fathia says to her daughter “no no no no no” in English and Marlawa mimics her perfectly with a waving finger and creased eyebrows, she cannot help but smile and laugh with her baby.

Fathia puts on a Bollywood film and she and her daughter dance and sing along to the choreographed moves of the women and children who weave through the Indian tea plantations.
Fathia scoops Marlawa up and wraps her in a makeshift sling made out of a blanket that binds her daughter to her back.

In the kitchen she pours water into a pot of four cardamom pods, some cloves and two tea bags. She places it all on a silver tray with a little bowl of sugar.

Over a cup of tea she talks about Australia, frustrated by her own fractured English.

Fathia is happy in Australia. She misses her family but she says “Australia is good.”

She is part of a tight knit Darfur community in Sydney. On weekends the families invite the bachelors of their community to eat with them.

She is about to begin a TAFE course in English because she has finished the hours the government mandates and wants to learn more. She is studying for the Citizenship test and hopes to pass in December.

As Fathia goes to leave the apartment she darts into the bedroom and pulls out an azure-blue silk shawl that when wrapped around her body and over her head and arms becomes the traditional dress worn by Muslim women from Darfur.

When outside, she adjusts her veil which often slips off her plaited hair. She laughs and points at Marlawa, saying “look, we forgot her shoes.”

But Marlawa doesn’t seem to mind at all as she totters ever so lightly and always so closely alongside her mother.