African diaspora refers to the communities throughout the world that have resulted by descent from the movement in historic times of peoples from Africa, predominantly to the Americas and among other areas around the globe. The term has been historically applied[by whom?] in particular to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, with their largest populations in Brazil, the United States, and Haiti. Some scholars identify "four circulatory phases" of migration out of Africa.
The term has also less commonly been used[by whom?] to refer to recent emigration from Africa. The African Union defines the African diaspora as: "[consisting] of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union." Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union."
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| CD “Experience Africa” Program |
The phrase "African diaspora" was coined during the 1990s, and gradually entered common usage during the 2000s. Use of the term "diaspora" is modelled after the concept of the Jewish diaspora.
History
18th-century Peruvian painting showing a family of free Africans.
Dispersal through slave trade
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade and Arab Slave Trade
Much of the African diaspora was dispersed throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia during the Atlantic and Arab slave trades. Beginning in the 8th century, Arabs took African slaves from the central and eastern portions of the continent (where they were known as the Zanj) and sold them into markets in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and the Far East. Beginning in the 15th century, Europeans captured or bought African slaves from West Africa and brought them to the Americas and Europe. The Atlantic Slave Trade ended in the 19th century, and the Arab Slave Trade ended in the middle of the 20th century. The dispersal through slave trading represents the largest forced migrations in human history. The economic effect on the African continent was devastating, as generations of young people were taken from their communities and societies were disrupted. Some communities created by descendants of African slaves in the Americas, Europe, and Asia have survived to the modern day. In other cases, blacks intermarried with non-blacks, and their descendants are blended into the local population.
In the Americas, the confluence of multiple ethnic groups from around the world created multi-ethnic societies. In Central and South America, most people are descended from European, indigenous American, and African ancestry. In Brazil, where in 1888 nearly half the population was descended from African slaves, the variation of physical characteristics extends across a broad range. In the United States, there was historically a greater European colonial population in relation to African slaves, especially in the Northern Tier. There was considerable racial intermarriage in colonial Virginia, and other forms of racial mixing during the slavery and post-Civil War years. Racist Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws passed after the Reconstruction era in the South in the late nineteenth century, plus waves of vastly increased immigration from Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, maintained some distinction between racial groups. In the early 20th century, to institutionalize racial segregation, most southern states adopted the "one drop rule", which defined and recorded anyone with any discernible African ancestry as black, even of obvious majority white or Native American ancestry. One of the results of this implementation was the loss of records of Indian-identified groups, who were classified only as black because of being mixed race.
Dispersal through voluntary migration
See Emigration from Africa for a general treatment of voluntary population movements since the late 20th century.
From the very onset of Spanish exploration and colonial activities in the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africans participated both as voluntary expeditionaries and as involuntary laborers. Juan Garrido was such an African conquistador. He crossed the Atlantic as a freedman in the 1510s and participated in the siege of Tenochtitlan. Africans had been present in Asia and Europe long before Columbus's travels. Beginning in the late 20th century, Africans began to emigrate to Europe and the Americas in increasing numbers, constituting new African diaspora communities not directly connected with the slave trade.
Concepts and definitions
The African Union defined the African diaspora as "[consisting] of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union." Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union."
The AU considers the African diaspora as its sixth region.
Between 1500 and 1900, approximately four million enslaved Africans were transported to island plantations in the Indian Ocean, about eight million were shipped to Mediterranean-area countries, and about eleven million survived the Middle Passage to the New World. Their descendants are now found around the globe, but because of intermarriage they are not necessarily readily identifiable.
Social and political
A long line of scholars has challenged conventional views of the African diaspora as a mere dispersion of Black people. For them, it is a movement of liberation that opposes the implications of racialization. Their position assumes that Africans and their descendants abroad struggle to reclaim power over their lives through voluntary migration, cultural production and political conceptions and practices. It also implies the presence of cultures of resistance with similar objectives throughout the global diaspora. Thinkers like W.E.B. Dubois and more recently Robin Kelley, for example, have argued that Black politics of survival reveal more about the meaning of the African diaspora than labels of ethnicity and race, and degrees of skin hue. From this view, the daily struggle against what they call the "world-historical processes" of racial colonization, capitalism, and western domination defines Blacks links to Africa.
African diaspora and modernity
In the last decades, studies on the African diaspora have shown an interest in the roles that Blacks played in bringing about modernity. This trend also opposes the traditional eurocentric perspective that has dominated history books showing Africans and its diasporans as primitive victims of slavery, and without historical agency. According to historian Patrick Manning, Blacks toiled at the center of forces that created the modern world. Recognizing their contributions offers a comprehensive appreciation of global history.
Black diaspora
The late cultural and political theorist Richard Iton suggested that diaspora be understood as a "culture of dislocation." For Iton, the traditional approach to the African diaspora focuses on the ruptures associated with the Atlantic slave trade and Middle Passage, notions of dispersal, and "the cycle of retaining, redeeming, refusing, and retrieving 'Africa.'":199 This conventional framework for analyzing the diaspora is dangerous, according to Iton, because it presumes that diaspora exists outside of Africa, thus simultaneously disowning and desiring Africa. Further, Iton suggests a new starting principle for the use of diaspora: "the impossibility of settlement that correlates throughout the modern period with the cluster of disturbances that trouble not only the physically dispersed but those moved without traveling.":199–200 Iton adds that this impossibility of settlement—this "modern matrix of strange spaces—outside the state but within the empire,"—renders notions of black citizenship fanciful, and in fact, "undesirable." Iton argues that we citizenship, a state of statelessness thereby deconstructing colonial sites and narratives in an effort to "de-link geography and power," putting "all space into play" (emphasis added)[20]:199–200 For Iton, diaspora's potential is represented by a "rediscursive albeit agonistic field of play that might denaturalize the hegemonic representations of modernity as unencumbered and self-generating and bring into clear view its repressed, colonial subscript".
Populations and estimated distribution
African diaspora populations include:
African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Black Canadians – descendants of West African slaves brought to the United States, the Caribbean, and South America during the Atlantic slave trade, plus later voluntary immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants.
Zanj – descendants of Zanj slaves whose ancestors were brought to the Near East and other parts of Asia during the Arab slave trade.
Siddis – descendants of Zanj slaves whose ancestors were brought to the Indian subcontinent (Pakistan and India). Also referred to as the Makrani in Pakistan
Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora
3. https://afcdiaspora.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-african-diaspora-introduction-to.html
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