Dirang Kotso puckers his brow as he recalls a typical day in his graduate studies journey. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning at a famous fast food restaurant in Perth, western Australia.
A student from Botswana, Kotso was slowly getting tired, having started┬áwork the previous evening at six o’clock. The restaurant was busy and showing no signs of slowing down as more Australians streamed in for their daily dose of burgers, fries and milk shakes.
“What would you like today, sir?” Kotso politely asked a young man several years his junior in front of him.
The young man gave his order and then as an afterthought asked Kotso, “How come there are so many blacks here…shouldn’t they be working at the farms shearing sheep or picking tomatoes or something?”
Kotso packed the young man’s food, ignoring the rude racist remark as he proceeded to serve the next clearly inebriated and scantily dressed teenage girl. He saw no reason to work himself up over a common racist remark that black international students had come to painfully accept.
After all, he had to work until six the following day - why bother about someone he may never again have to meet in this foreign country?
As Kotso tells the story, save for a white shift manager who handled the night’s cash, this “grave yard shift” is done solely by black international students and Asians. It is never popular among white Australians who normally go drinking on weekends┬áanyhow.
 Besides, all Kotso wanted to do was to earn an extra dollar to support himself through one of the universities in western Australia as a self-sponsored student. It was another day, another dollar.
In another part of Perth, Bonny Khumalo [not his real name], a South African student jumps onto a bus to start the half-hour ride back home after a ten hour shift gutting lobsters and fish. He has put aside the constant abuse from the racist owner of the fish joint and remained focused on the money he is going to earn and direct towards his university fees. He is oblivious of the smell of the fish on his body though nobody wants to sit next to him.
The two are not the only ones that are enduring a turbulent life in pursuit of a greener future after bidding farewell to relatively comfortable lives back home.
There are more than 10,000 African students in Australia doing slave jobs to fund their education in the absence of scholarships from their respective countries. Their stories for leaving home are varied but their hardships in their new economically and racial hostile home, Australia, are the same.
Kotso had responded to a glowing advert seeking skilled migrants to Australia for good dollar. Agents told him that life would be wonderful in the “lucky country” following an economic boom riding on mineral resources.
He, like others, was informed that he would easily pay tuition from part time work after school or earn money from his skills. But that was not to be. Kotso’s first job, earning him AU$16 per hour, involved changing soiled and wet nappies of old men and women in aged care homes.
He quit after a month due to abuse from the aged who constantly declared that they did not like to be touched by blacks.┬á Often times they said as he entered their rooms, “switch on the light… I can’t see you.”
He changed to earning $15 per hour gutting lobsters and was more grateful to do the job than face racial barrages, and the smell that so often accompanied the job at the aged care homes.
Attempts to get into the main stream job market in a country with less than 4 percent unemployment levels had been harder than attempts to get milk out of a stone. So much for multiculturalism and invitations for highly skilled migrants, muses Kotso as he relates his experience. This is despite adverts on national television and federal government’s own site inviting skilled foreigners to┬ámigrate to Australia.
Hundreds of African students have found themselves changing nappies all their education life and even after they qualify for Permanent Residency as highly skilled Australians [with masters degrees in various skills] because the mainstream job market cannot accept them, largely due to the pigmentation of their skin.
Some like Kotso have gone back home but others have remained, citing large unemployment levels in Africa, sluggish economies and political instability in cases such as Zimbabwe and the war torn Darfur region.
“I would rather clean shit than go back to walk the streets with my degrees in an envelope looking for a job that will never come,” is the common refrain from those that have stayed longer. The jobs left for highly educated Africans to do are highly humiliating, back breaking and low paying requiring long hours that have to be balanced with school work, a conditionality attached to student visas.
Some have failed to live up to the conditionalities either because they worked more than they needed to and failed in their school or simply stayed away from school in order to work.
┬áAfrican migrants and students ready to do an honest low paying hard days job also bred utmost resentment from mostly poor uneducated working white Australians who see these “foreigners” as a threat to the job market.
“They [blacks] are accepting to do jobs for less and accept long hours,” is a common sentiment from some working white Australians.
Pauline Hanson, a known racist politician famed for warning Australia of an “Asian population invasion” in the early eighties is not afraid to go record airing her “disgust” at the huge influx of Africans. She has categorically stated in local media that if she gets into parliament, she would ask Canberra to pass stiff laws that would bar Africans in general and South Africans in particular from entering Australia because they were diseased.
Even though her sentiments are not accepted as “politically correct” in Australia’s “multi-cultural” society, she clearly has following from sections of the lucky country’s society.
And while these complaints have been aired by African students during their few get together parties whenever they can afford some, none officially air them to immigration for fear of their student visas being terminated.
“I will slave for another year until I finish my degree after that am going home,” one student says, “but once am home, I shall give white foreigners the same treatment I have received here… I have never felt so black until I came and I wouldn’t want my children to grow up feeling the same way.”
┬áOthers though say, “I will stay here whether am accepted or not as long as I make my money… I didn’t come here for dignity, I came here for money.”
With these conflicting views and Australia’s official multiculturalism, African “slaves’ under the guise of seeking education shall continue to flock to the lucky country and the mistreatment shall continue.
After all, both parties are happy, the oppressor and the oppressed, at least in some cases.  But when all is said and done, the life of most African students in Australia is mostly miserable and hard. That is a life Kotso swears he would never dare to endure again.
