I listened to a few of these stories and they were excellent and beautifully narrated. I will order her other audiobook, Foreign Soil. ( )

>Growing Up African in Australia (2019) is part of a series: Black Inc also publish Growing Up Queer in Australia (Aug 2019, which you can pre-order here); Growing up Aboriginal in Australia (2018, see here, and read my review); and Growing Up Asian in Australia (2008, see here). These books are revelatory: they share a diversity of experiences from multi-voiced; multi-cultural; multi-origin; and multi-gendered Australians. The stories can be heart-warming, poignant, challenging, confronting and even nakedly hostile, but all of them will change the reader's perceptions and misconceptions about what it's like to be part of a minority.

The minority in this book is the Afro-diaspora. The anthology includes writers with origins in Ghana, Zimbabwe, South Africa, South Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Zambia, Uganda, the Central African Republic and Kenya but also (because of the ongoing impact of slavery) those of Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Guyanese and Afro-Brazilian descent. Some contibutors came to Australia as middle-class skilled professionals, others as refugees, and many were born and educated here, some with African-Australian origins that go back many decades.

I was intrigued by the composition of the 35 writers featured in Growing Up African. Although there was a diversity of contributors, so many of them worked in the arts: in dance, theatre, spoken word performance, visual arts, and music. I liked this, because we don't often hear directly from people working in the arts... after all, if they wanted to express their ideas in words, they wouldn't be doing it in other art forms, eh? But there were also other contributors in other fields and some CVs are impressive in any context: activists, a journalist, a litigant, a gay Imam who runs a support group for young Muslims questioning their sexuality, and a doctor. Some were writers by profession or ambition, while others were busy doing other things but contributed an essay anyway.

I'm going to focus on two essays because they stood out to me. Other readers will have their own favourites.

'Both' by Vulindlela Mkwananzi writes movingly about the parents he hardly knew. His Australian mother was travelling in Zimbabwe when she met his father, a printer. Both were activists: he was fighting apartheid from Zimbabwe while she was a campaigner for women's liberation. But they were both killed in a car accident when he and his twin brother were three, and they were raised by his birth mother's Australian best friend.

It wasn't until I grew older that I started to ponder how controversial it was for both my parents' families to have mixed-race grandchildren, for different reasons. [...]

For my family in Zimbabwe, it meant that my brother and I might grow up not knowing our culture — we might not be raised the 'African' way. For my mother's family in New South wales, it was a shock to have 'coloured' children, a point of shame and a source of exclusion from a conservative white community that prided itself on its self of 'Australianness'. (p.101-2)

Mkwananzi goes on to say that he can't express in words how thankful [he] is that [the best friend's] family took us in, as they truly are very special people to my brother and me.

Yet, he also says, recounting an example of everyday casual racism, that his stepmother had no idea of the experience of growing up as African-Australian.

I realise her pain in her powerlessness to protect us from what our physical appearance means in Australia. It also makes me realise that she can have all the compassion in the world, but will still never quite understand what it means, and what it really feels like, to be in our skin here. (p.103)

And he discovers that he was naïve to think that he would fit in, in Zimbabwe. There, it's his light skin that's pointed out and remarked on, with people asking us why we had African names but were so white.

I began to comprehend the strange position of being from two distinctly different cultures — there is literally nowhere on the planet where the majority of people look like you. (p.103).

The title of his essay is explained in a plea that comes from the heart:

I always find strange that people with parents from two different cultural backgrounds are called: half-caste, mixed race, coloured. Why do I have to be half? Why caste? Why mixed? I am both: it is what makes me who I am, and in my romanticised moments, I see my birth as proof that love conquers all. (p.102-3)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/06/08/growing-up-african-in-australia-edited-by-ma... ( )