[1] Her father was a Zanzibari politician who served as prime minister of Zanzibar in 1964, and was later executed without trial in 1969 for an alleged plot to overthrow the regime of Abeid Karume.

[4] Golden was an African-American from Mississippi and graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, while Bialek was a white woman from New York City of Polish-Jewish descent.

[4][5] They immigrated together to the Soviet Union in 1931, as interracial marriage was outlawed in much of the United States at the time and socially unaccepted, settling in Tashkent where they became specialists in the Uzbek cotton industry.

[7] After graduating with her degree in 1984, Khanga began her career as a journalist with The Moscow News, the English language newspaper of the Soviet Union.

[8] In 1987, Khanga became the first Russian journalist to participate in a foreign-exchange program with the American news organization The Christian Science Monitor in Boston.

[27][28] She initially hosted the weekly show CrossTalk, and later cohosted the program Reference Point with Aleksandr Gurnov from 2013 to 2015.