Author and journalist Santilla Chingaipe’s latest project has cast a spotlight on an overlooked part of Australia’s colonial history.
The Yarraville resident’s latest project is a ‘Our African Roots’, a documentary tracing the role people of African descent played in the early history of Australia’s colonial settlement.
The documentary is now streaming on SBS as part of its ‘Australia Uncovered’ series.
Chingaipe, who migrated to Australia with her family from Zambia when she was nine, said SBS approached her while she was researching the topic and asked if she would turn it into a feature documentary.
“I first encountered the stories of African convicts when I did a story for SBS in 2015, working as a journalist there at the time,” she said.
“That made me aware that people of African descent were here longer than I had been led to believe, which was after the abolition of the White Australia Policy.”
Chingaipe said part of the motivation for taking a closer look at this aspect of history was the politicised panic in the lead-up to the 2018 state election.
“The conversation about so-called ‘African crime’ had been ramping up in Victoria, I would hear the reason they are copping this is they are recently arrived and I thought ‘I don’t think that is true because Africans have been here for a long time’,” she said.
“I thought I am going to find them, I then started to discover all of the others.”
The documentary traces the stories of Africans arriving on the First Fleet, the first bushranger John Ceasar, and convict turned boatman Billy Blue.
Chingaipe said all of these people were being recorded by white colonisers, but settler history continues to be whitewashed.
“We’re not the people that traditionally tell history,” she said.
“A lot of how we tell stories is that we still look through a monocultural lens of an Australia that never existed, and we are not really questioning that and we take a lot of that as fact when it’s not – history shows us all over again that our communities are built from all walks of life.”
‘Our African Roots’ is streaming now via SBS On Demand.
