in the spirit of black history monthLet’s take a look at our African Diaspora family in South Korea. South Korea is one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world: more than 99% of south koreans identify ethnically as Korean. There are no concrete statistics on the size of the Afro-Korean population; Needless to say, it’s small, but it exists.
The African diaspora in South Korea is largely made up of Africans and African Americans who have moved to Korea to study, work, or because they have been deployed by the military. There is a small minority of native Afro-Koreans, generally the biracial children of Korean women and African-American servicemen.
This dates back to the 1950s, when the United States deployed forces to South Korea during the Korean War, where North Korea (with the support of Porcelain and the Soviet Union) fought for control against South Korea (with US and UN support).
South Korea saw an increase in the number of mixed-race and half-black children, many of whom were put up for adoption or abandoned.
As a result, in 1955 the US State Department petitioned American families to adopt marginalized Afro-Korean children, although many children continued to be turned away in favor of ethnically Korean orphans. The Korean government also partnered with international private adoption agencies to send mixed-race Korean children abroad.
Over time there have been larger waves of African immigrants coming to South Korea to study or work, and while the black presence in South Korea is still relatively small, television and social media have meant that some Afro-Koreans have enjoyed a great fame. and media attention.
An example is the teenager Jonathon Thona known as the ‘Prince of the Congo’. His family was originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and his father came to South Korea seeking asylum. Several years later, the rest of the family came to Korea to join him, when Jonathon was eight years old. Today, Jonathon attends high school but has become a media sensation in Korea, where he frequently appears on television and has almost half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel.
One of the most famous black people in South Korea is Sam Okyere, a Ghanaian-born television personality. He originally came to Korea after receiving a scholarship to study computer science in 2009. He transitioned into the entertainment industry and has since used his position in the media industry to bridge cultural gaps and illuminate attitudes towards blacks in korea
Han Hyun-min is a South Korean model who became the first Korean model of African descent to walk the runway in Korea. He is biracial; his father is nigerian and his mother is korean. Han himself was born and raised in the Korean capital of Seoul. He appears in the 2021 Netflix series ‘So Not Worth It’.
For more on the African Diaspora around the world, see ‘Freedom Is Mine’ Youtube channel, where I have made videos about black communities around the world. And you can follow Freedom Is Mine on instagram for daily global black history content.
