What is african in diaspora?

“When once were dispersions, there now is Diaspora”. As illustrated by this quote, the notion of Diaspora underlines the specificity of some migration phenomenon, thereby contributing to make sense out of certain transnational movements.

Etymologically, the word diaspora, meaning dispersal, stems from the Greek sporo (seed), and speira (to spree). Originally, it was used in the Antique tradition to refer to the “dispersion of Hellenic establishments around the Mediterranean Sea”.  Later on, in the biblical tradition, it was used to discuss the dispersal of the Jewish People.

Since the 1980s-90s, Diasporas have become the focus of numerous academic research and publications in the field of social sciences, gradually referring to more and more different communities around the world. Today, Diasporas can be defined as “national migrant communities living in interaction among themselves and with their country of origin”. The notion of diaspora must be distinguished with other phenomenon of migration, as the importance of the ties between members of the Diasporas and their country of origin is prevalent.

The nature of these ties is diverse: they can be political, economic, cultural as well as social and academic. Often, Diasporas are also linked to a “founding myth” related to their place of origin and to the conditions under which they were forced or urged to leave their motherland. As a matter of fact, according to Dominique Schnapper, many Diasporas are built on a major event, often dramatic, which ties a community together, despite its geographical dispersion. This is, for example, the case for the Jewish Diaspora, which appeared after the destruction of the Temple and the annexation of Judea by Romans.

As of today, the African Diaspora is one of the most important in the world in terms of numbers. According to the African Union, the African Diaspora is composed of “people of African origin living outside of 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”.

Three main periods can be identified, when it comes to giving an overview of the history of African Diasporas. Historically, the first wave of forced African migrations began during the Transatlantic Slave Trade (16th-19th century). Europeans captured or bought African slaves, mostly from West Africa, and brought them to Europe, and later on to South and North America. The number of Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic is estimated to be around 12 million.

This population movement can be considered as the migration that paved the way for the constitution of the first African community outside of Africa. In point of fact, slave trade can be considered as the “founding myth” of the African Diaspora in Europe and in America. Many Africans were deported out of Africa during this period, but the feeling of belonging to a community, the African community, did not disappear. In a way, this feeling became even stronger.

The transatlantic slave trade contributed mostly to creating a large community of African origins in the American continent, especially in the US and in Brazil. This diaspora belongs to the first wave of migration, and is often referred to as the historical diaspora. It is to be differentiated, from later movements of population of the 1960s, in the sense that these migrants blended more into local populations, partly losing the connection with their land of origin. The members of this diaspora tend to be more attached to Africa as a continent of origin, rather than linked to a specific country in Africa. They are still considered as part of the diaspora. In fact, if the concrete connection to their land of origin was often lost throughout generations, symbolic ties were kept, which will be assessed later on in this paper.

The colonial period, from the mid XIX° century up until the 1960s, contributed to creating strong, although very unequal, ties between Africa and Europe. The exchanges between the two continents were strengthened, and the colonization process contributed to the exploitation of the African Continent, thereby creating cultural and economic bonds which later on facilitated migrations and the creation of an African Diaspora in Europe. As a result, an important part of the African Diaspora can be found in European countries that had colonial history (France, United-Kingdom, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Spain).

The second African diaspora generation is the result of the difficult process of decolonization. During the late-colonial period, early post-independence, starting from the 1950s, there was a great increase of migrations coming from Africa to Europe in terms of numbers, creating the conditions for the settlement of a longstanding and active African Diaspora. Despite gains of independence, economic and cultural ties remained strong between the two regions, especially with the old colonist countries. Many people willingly left the African continent, in the search for better working or educational opportunities, mostly for Europe and North America. This period marked a rather important increase in emigration aimed at acquiring better quality of life and education. This diaspora is mainly the product of “voluntary migrations”. Among the members of this generation of migrants, the subsistence of ties with the country of origin and their nature is rather fluctuating. The reasons for why migrants left their homeland differed, the factors that contributed to migration were not only political persecution but also issues relating to their cultural and socio-economic background.

Starting from the 1980s, the most common grounds on which Africans left their countries changed in its nature. Fleeing from broken and breakable states, wars, hopeless poverty or political persecution became a major cause of emigration, up until today. This wave of African emigration influences all parts of societies, and the sociological profiles of the migrants are very diverse, as Africans of all hierarchies, occupations and age groups can be found. If the cultural ties are, for the most part, very vivid, there is in general no plan of returning to the motherland, mostly because of the existing deplorable conditions.

The two ladder waves of migration are often referred to as contemporary diaspora. The members of this diaspora tend in general to keep more connections to their country of origin, with various ways of relating.

As of today, the African Diaspora is one of the most active communities of citizens outside of their countries. Different institutions and African nations are calling them on more and more, particularly in the attempt of gathering forces in order to foster human development in Africa.

This part will focus on the percentage of European inhabitants born in Africa or from African descent. Diaspora has been defined as “people of African origin living outside of 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”. We will discuss the case of Italy, the UK, France, Australia, the United Sates of America, Asia and South America as a whole.

The figure represents the part of African migrants in different regions of the world. This could help us localize the recent African Diaspora. However, we have to distinguish diaspora from migrations. For the International Organization for Migration, migrations are “the movement of a person or a group of persons, either across an international border, or within a state. It is a population movement, encompassing any kind of movement of people, whatever its length, composition and causes; it includes migration of refugees, displaced persons, economic migrants, and persons moving for other purposes”. As a consequence, to form a diaspora migrants have to contribute to the development of the continent. It is not only for the reason that there is an important rate of African migrants in a certain region that there is an African diaspora, even if it is often the case. According to the figure, Europe is the second destination for African migrants (29.4% of the African migrants choose to go in Europe).

As we have seen in the introduction, the high presence of the African diaspora in Europe can be explained with the historical trends observed between the continents (Atlantic Slave, Trade and Colonization). Furthermore, the geographical proximity also plays a role. Only 5% of the African migrations are directed to North America and 0.2% to Latin America. However, there is a strong African Diaspora in this part of the globe (see table 2) related to the historical past, especially to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Last but not least, it is important to note that 1.3% of the African migrations are directed to Asia. In fact, since recent years, a lot of studies have underlined the growing African Diaspora in Asia, especially in China.

Table 2: Africa Diaspora by Countries

95% of the Haitian population comes from Africa. This is related to the history of the country. Between 1492 and 1804 the Spanish and the French occupied Haiti and imported with them a big number of slaves from Africa. As a consequence, the population of Haiti, count as an important rate of African descendants, which belongs to the first wave of the African Diaspora. Furthermore, since 2012 Haiti has been a member of the African Union. The adhesion reinforces Haiti belonging to the African Diaspora. Therefore, according to the definition of the African Diaspora we have referred to in our introduction, people who are contributing to the building of the African Union belong to the African Diaspora.

Apart from being a member of the African Union, a lot of examples illustrate the proximity between Africa and Haiti. In 1936, the country exposed the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy. During the decolonization process, Haiti supported African countries, which were claiming their independence.

The African diaspora community first emerged in Britain in the Roman period but comparatively little is known until the sixteenth century, when African arrived in greater numbers, most of them being victims of the slave trade. This period, ending in the nineteenth century, has been called the “old” diaspora; a “new” diaspora commenced with the end of the slave trade and most Africans thereafter came voluntarily as students and workers.

Africans created community organizations in the diaspora, reflecting new “self-identifications and solidarities”. Members of the host society supported the African migrant community, particularly those who had connections with the missionary societies. For many Africans, like, G.Daniels Ekarte, mission networks provided another means of support in the diaspora. Africans relied upon these networks for financial assistance, guidance and help in times of trouble. Those who have studied diaspora communities understand the importance of “networks” in sustaining Africans abroad. The term “mission networks” refers here to the often extensive organizations brought together by the work of missionary societies, connecting a range of religious, medical and educational facilities in communities outside of Europe with religious, educational and political groups inside of Europe.

Ekarte was part of the “new” diaspora, arriving in Britain in the interwar period; it can be asserted with more confidence that by the end of the century there were more than a million of African migrants living in Britain.

The African diaspora in France is one of the largest in the world. Their members are from its former colonies in Africa and from its overseas territories in the Caribbean. The largest African community in Africa is the Algerians (730.000). Until it gained independence in 1962, Algeria was a part of the French territory. France also had strong ties with Morocco and today Moroccans are the second largest group of immigrants in France (670.000). African immigrants came to France in consequence of the colonization process and, from the 60s onwards, to seek employment.

The African community is well assimilated in France. Christiane Taubira, who is from Caribbean descent, is the current Minister of Justice. Other African descendants or mixed race political leaders are, for instance, Harlem Desir and Senegalese born Rama Yade. The African diaspora is also involved in culture, sport and business. However, they are still a lot of issues that need to be addressed especially in the French suburbs. Inhabitants from these suburbs have to cope with high levels of unemployment and cultural clashes with the rest of society and as a result are often isolated. The African diaspora not only contributes to the French society, it also supports the economies of their countries of origin through capital flows.

Italy has become an important destination for African migrants. According to the last population census in Italy by the National Institute for Statistics (Istat) in 2011, Italy hosted 871,126 immigrants from Africa, 22% of the total amount of immigrants in Italy. The majority of them 403,592 (46%) are from Morocco, which proves to be the most populous African community in Italy. This is due to the geographical proximity of the North African country with Italy.

Morocco is one of the great protagonists of the intense migration that, in particular from the Second World War, marked the Mediterranean basin as a result of differential demographic, economic and employment between the two shores. Even if France has a higher number of immigrants from Morocco, Italy has seen an increase in their presence after the first oil crisis (1973) when the majority of European countries reacted by using restrictive immigration policies.

More in general, Italy receives migrants from all the Northern part of Africa, being 69% of the total amount of people coming from Africa. This could be explained by the fact that Italy is an entering point to the European Union due to its proximity with the North part of Africa. However, in recent years, there has been an increase in the percentage of those immigrants coming from the Occidental part of Africa (204,757), such as states like Senegal (about 67,000), Nigeria and Ghana (about 40,000 each).

A quarter of the African-American population in Boston, Miami and New York were born abroad and 8 percent of the total of African Americans in the US were born outside the country. Ever since the Immigration and Nationality act in 1965 and the opening of new legal channels, African immigrants have started to come to the US.

Today, Americans with African descent make up 13.5% of the total US-population. Throughout the last decades, they have been becoming increasingly more present in the middle classes. In 2002, 50.8% of all African Americans occupied so-called "white-collar-jobs" (academic professions and positions in management or administration). In 2003, 58.3% of all African American High School graduates were enrolled at a college within one year (compared to only 35.8% in 1982). The percentage of Caucasians students who attended college or university totaled 66.1%, less than 8% higher. However, the income of black people is still lower than that of white workers and unemployment rates, especially those of black young men, are higher.

Poverty continues to force many African Americans to live in city districts with high crime rates and drug abuse. In terms of government policy, affirmative action and quotas have been used to ensure that a certain percentage of jobs are allocated to workers with African descendants and that members of minorities constitute a specified amount of students in schools. The public discussion about the necessity, effectiveness and fairness of these programs intensified during the 1990s.

African immigrants came to South America and the Caribbean as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. In the 1780s, slavery started to be criticized by the Christian Church, philosophers and economists and, as countries gained independence, slavery was abolished.

Over time, African descendants influenced most aspects of everyday life. Carnival, which used to be only celebrated by Afro-Latinos, has now become a public holiday in Brazil. Unlike African Diasporas in the rest of Latin America who combine their African past with the culture of their host country, African descendants in the Caribbean who account for more than 90% of the population, are in search of a new national identity. They do not define themselves in terms of Africans but rather as Jamaican or Haitian nationals, for instance. They came to terms with their past and no longer need to think of themselves as Africans.

Like other African communities in the world, the African diaspora in Latin America has to face adversity on a daily basis. In Brazil Afro-Latinos accounted for more than 50% of the population, 64% of them being poor and 69% of them being extremely poor. In Columbia, only 10% of the blacks are covered by the healthcare system against a 40% of white people.

According to the Government website, in 2006, population census 248,605 residents in Australia declared to come from Africa, living mostly in Sydney and in Melbourne. As a result, African migrants are 1% of the total Australian population. Almost half of the African migrants to Australia come from South Africa (104,000). Moreover, in the last years, the government has also given humanitarian visas to almost 3,500 Africans, most of them due to a refugee status. According to the Government’s report, African migrants in Australia suffer from a high level of unemployment due to some problems including skill level, age, English language proficiency, and recent and relevant work experience.

Other problems that commonly affect African humanitarian migrants are the presence of a range of barriers to inclusion and integration, particularly in the areas of employment, education and training, social participation and political, civic and community participation. More specifically, the Australian government noted a necessity to create and implement targeted programs to increase access to higher education, issues associated with the high costs and complexity of recognition of overseas qualifications and the significant adjustment difficulties faced by African humanitarian migrants.

We could observe how the Australian government is trying to fix these problems by working very closely with the African Diasporas communities and organizations to encourage them to provide the necessary support to strength their integration. It was in fact, created a new subcommittee within the Australian government, and intended to address African communities in particular.

Finally, in its report, the Australian government highlighted how important it could be for Australia to improve the relationship with African countries.  Many African-born Australian residents could help making a real contribution to relations between Australia and countries in Africa due to their attachment to both continents. Furthermore, the diverse range of countries and cultures from which they come widens the scope for the development of relations.

Pan-Africanism unifies the cultural and political world of African diasporas and the self-determination of people from Africa, or at least of African origin, as well as the people of African descent resident outside Africa. Initially, there was an anti-slavery and anti-colonial movement amongst black people of Africa and the Diaspora in the late nineteenth century. Since then, the aims of Pan-Africanism have evolved through the ensuing decades.

This movement had its origin in the United States in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the work of the advocate M.M. Garvey. He stated the idea of creating a common state in Africa to welcome back all the African Americans.  Later on, Du Bois claimed the need to gain full rights, both in Africa and in the countries in which African communities resided, created by the forced migration represented by the slave trade in the previous centuries. Pan-Africanism gained legitimacy with the founding of the African Association in London in 1897, and the first Pan-African conference was held, again in London, in 1900 when Henry Sylvester Williams, the power behind the African Association, and his colleagues were interested in uniting the African Diaspora, and gaining political rights for those of African descent.

Between 1919 and 1945, Du Bois organized several conferences, which increased and expanded the influence on the development of the African descendants’ emancipation movement in the Americas and Europe, as a way of nationalism in colonial Africa. Moreover, between the world wars, Pan-Africanism became more related and influenced by communism and trade unionism, especially through the writings of George Padmore, Isaac Wallace-Johnson, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Paul Robeson, CLR James, WEB Du Bois, and Walter Rodney. Significantly, Pan-Africanism had expanded beyond the continent into Europe, the Caribbean and America. WEB Du Bois organized a series of Pan-African Congresses in London, Paris, and New York in the first half of the twentieth century. International awareness of Africa was also heightened by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935.

As a result, many leaders struggling for the independence from European colonial dominations were formed in this cultural and political context of Pan-Africanism. Among these, N. Nkrumah, J. Nyerere, A. Toure, M. Keita. The Pan-African ideal also inspired the emergence of regional groupings, some of which were short-lived, due to the immediate emergence of nationalistic feelings or tribal differences. There were also manifested divisions about the approach to be followed in respect of the Western countries and the former colonial powers: the countries 'reformists', the group gathered in Brazzaville, were contrasted those 'revolutionaries' of the group of Casablanca.

Despite the process of decolonization leading to further fragmentation of the African continent there was still an opportunity to observe some policy initiatives in the key of Pan-Africanism. For example, the Organization of African Unity and then African Union, which was established in 1963.

Both in its mission and structure, the African Union was meant to represent a different and a new stage in the research for a contemporary pan-African unity. Despite this, soon after the creation of the Union, it became obvious that a commonly shared understanding of its place in the project and processes of unification and integration was still not in place. In fact, African people and especially African revolutionaries are facing today a curious phenomenon, a duality, which divides the Black African people into so-called Francophone and English speaking countries and ethnic groups.

According to many authors such as Elenga M’buyinga, the O.A.U. does not have a clear perception on Africa’s important contemporary problematic, such as the problem of neo-colonialism. According to the author it is no coincidence that the unification of Africa is hardly on the agenda at the African Union due to these problematic that are impeding a proper unification. As a consequence, “the African Union has resulted in being is a Pan-Africanism without Pan-Africanists, the Pan-Africanism of the anti-Pan-Africanists”.

Nowadays, Pan-Africanism has been relegated to a mere cultural and social philosophy rather than the strong political movement that used to be in the past. Authors such as Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, are trying to make African people, both in the continent and outside, more aware of the ancient glorious past and about the African heritage, for instance the ancient Egyptian and Nubian cultures. This aims to seek a re-evaluation of Africa's place, and the Diaspora, in the world.

Pan-African movement was raised by world events such as, the Football World Cup in 2010, held in South Africa. South Africa’s post-apartheid foreign policy was premised on the vision of “a better South Africa, a better Africa and a better world”. In fact, the promotion of the ideology of Pan-Africanism has been a central aspect of South African government foreign policy since 1999 as a way to promote peace, stability and integration within the nation and, more broadly, in the whole continent.

President Mbeki was able to convince the FIFA’s authorities to host the World Cup, and was therefore permeated with the spirit of pan-Africanism and South Africanism and stressed the necessity to synergize the two. As he wrote, by organizing such event his intent was to “send waves” of confidence all over the African continent and about the necessity of recreating “Africa’s revival” and South Africa’s desire to promote the African Renaissance. As a result, deliberate efforts were made to merge pan-Africanism with South African nationalism in order to produce a consolidated hallmark of the African World Cup.

Early studies on immigration policy assumed that migrants leave their countries, settle in a new country, start integrating in their new society, and abandon their ties with their country of origin. Today, however, it is possible for immigrants to remain connected with and give back to their native countries while residing abroad, thus diminishing their loss of identity and separation from their countries of origin.

African governments are reaching out to diasporas. Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have launched several plans to incorporate their diaspora communities as partners in development projects. Several African countries (among them Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda) have established institutions (at the agency or ministerial level) to interact with the Diaspora.

“Reinforcing the Contributions of African Diasporas to Development” by Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie, offers some guidance to African governments seeking to make productive use of the resources of “their” diasporas for developmental gain. The guidance is drawn from the first 10 years of operation of the African Foundation for Development.

There has been a shift in the discussion from seeing the emigration of skilled people as a loss, to seeing skilled migration as an opportunity to get remittances, trade, investment projects and new knowledge. China; India; Israel; Japan; the Republic of Korea: and Taiwan, China are examples of economies that have tapped into their diasporas as a source of knowledge.

In addition, there has been a new emphasis on including both skilled and unskilled migrants as contributors to host and develop their home country. Some African countries are pursuing policies to develop links with Africans abroad, either to encourage them to return or to use their skills, knowledge or financial capital to foster African development. There is also a benefit for the country of origin when they allow dual citizenship. They can benefit because their migrants are then more willing to adopt the host country’s citizenship, which can improve their earnings and thus their ability to send remittances and invest in the origin country. Chiswick (1978) was the first to show a positive impact of naturalization on earnings.

The Economic Community of West African states has proposed establishing a dedicated financial instrument at a regional level to facilitate business contributions of the diaspora to the region. Even though these proposals are focused on the diaspora outside of Africa, there are also some initiatives for establishing an integrate approach to cross-border payment systems, including the transfer of remittances in the Economic Community of West African states and in the Economic Monetary Community of Central Africa. In some countries, encouraging growth of private sector networks may be more effective than direct government involvement in establishing links to the diasporas.

Some African governments are providing incentives to attract investment from the diasporas. For example, as mentioned, Ethiopia grants a yellow card to diaspora members, profiting from the same benefits and rights as domestic investors. Additional investment incentives for both foreign investors and the diaspora include income tax exemptions for two to seven years, 100 percent duty exemption on the import of machinery and equipment for investment projects, and 100 percent customs exemption on spare parts whose values does not exceed 15 percent of the total value of capital goods imported.

Such policies have encouraged many in the Ethiopian diaspora to invest in small businesses in Ethiopia. Investments at this level include those in cafes, restaurants, retail shops, and transport services in big cities and small towns that were otherwise restricted to Ethiopian nationals living in the country. Some countries are considering having one window at a government institution for the Diaspora in which all the paperwork in the different administrative levels can be handled. This could facilitate the Diaspora access to investment opportunities at home.

To date, the interest of African governments in their diasporas has focused largely on those residing in countries outside Africa, such as the OECD countries. Conferences and investment seminars, either at home or in the major capitals in OECD countries, are targeted to the Diaspora outside Africa.

Some developing countries are using dual citizenship to deepen ties with the Diaspora. Citizenship and residency rights are important determinants of a diaspora’s participation in trade, investment, and technology transfer with its origin country. Interest has also increased in providing dual citizenship to the children or grandchildren of migrants, in order to encourage their ties to the communities of their origins. But the potential gains for origin countries are limited because dual citizenship is not permitted in many destination countries.

Rwandan TOKEN program in 2005-07 is an example of a contribution made to human development. It involved visits by 47 volunteers to teach and provide technical assistance. The average stay was of less than two months and the variety of responsibilities constrained the transfer of knowledge to counterparts in host institutions.

Furthermore, there have been some proposals to take a more harmonized and integrated approach to the Diaspora within each regional economic community. For example, there is a proposal for the creation of a regional diaspora office within East African community.

It may be better to provide efficient procedures for all investors, without requiring proof of the investor’s origin and nationality. However, origin countries could still benefit from focusing their scarce resources on providing services to members of the Diaspora and on moving beyond consular services to a broader range of support for investors. Governments can also mobilize resources from Diasporas by encouraging their participation in social security, housing, and microfinance programs.

Peace Building can be a difficult topic for Diasporas due to the high level of political concern. In some cases the Diasporas do not wish to engage in this open combat because of its sensitivity, both in the country of origin and the country where it is located. Diasporas have to be seen as a part of an ongoing reconfiguration of power and authority at all levels and each state has to be studied separately because of their differences with their formation, thus, having a different process of adaption. Due to the differences between Nations, Diasporas, regardless of operating at a local, national or global level, should engage in different manners taking into account the historical relationship of these Diasporas with the African states.  These organizations and its activity have been rising thanks to the crisis of states and the progress of neoliberalism.

According to the OECD (2009), diaspora knowledge flows could increase if barriers to short-term and circular mobility were removed. There has been an increase in mobility partnership pacts between European Union countries and Diasporas’ origin countries. For example, an agreement with Cape Verde focuses on visa and border-control policies, while India has initiated discussions with the European Union focusing on the export of high-skilled professionals. But more data and research are required to develop effective policies to encourage circular migration. These initiatives have taken various forms, ranging from the creation of dedicated ministries to deal with migrant communities to adding specific functions to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Trade, Ministry of Social Affairs, Ministry of Youth, and so on.

Government institutions abroad, especially embassies and consulates, can play a key role in reaching out to the diaspora. They can help facilitate diaspora networks through the Internet, professional associations, embassies abroad, and cultural events. Some origin countries are supporting long-term and long-distance linkages between emigrants and their countries of origin.

Holding dual or multiple citizenship provides an important link between Diasporas and their home countries. This can improve both a Diaspora’s connection with its origin country and its integration into the destination country. Citizenship and residency rights also make it easier to travel and own land. About half of the African countries with available information allow dual citizenship.

Origin countries can strengthen Diaspora ties by allowing their citizens who reside abroad to vote without returning. African countries have different modalities for voting. Some countries allow their citizens to vote abroad for presidential and legislative elections. Some countries give nationals abroad voting rights, and some reserve specific number of seats in parliament for Diaspora representatives. African countries have different modalities for voting.

In addition, some African countries that confer voting rights on their Diasporas, require advanced registration or allow voting in person only. In other countries, voting by postal ballot is also possible. Those who permanently live abroad can register with an embassy or consulate in the country of their permanent residence and can vote there. But the costs involved in registration may be high. For example, South Africa approved voting rights for Global South Africans in 2009, but was unable to register voters in most foreign countries for the 2009 elections. Only some 16,000 voters (out of the estimated 1.2 million South African citizens living abroad) who had been registered well in advance were able to participate in the 2009 elections.

Similarly, members of the Nigerian Diaspora requested the Independent National Electoral Commission to register Nigerians abroad so they could participate in the 2011 elections. Rwanda provides a useful example of an effort to engage the Diaspora through reaching out and encouraging voting by foreign citizens. Some governments have established institutions such as councils or decentralized entities that handle migrant community issues. However, several of these initiatives have not maintained their momentum or have been discontinued with a change of government.

As members of the Diaspora today in the world come from very differentiated backgrounds, and emigrated for various reasons, their relations and contributions to host societies are as well very diverse. The interaction between both also depends on the country of destination, as some nations are more creole than others. In the Caribbean nations for instance, such as in Jamaica, Haiti or Cuba, the community of African descent had a huge impact on the culture of the country, as migrations were very important in terms of numbers but also very influential in the cultural sphere.

In any case, the presence of an important African Diaspora in a given place creates opportunities for cultural exchanges between members of the different nations. National policies aimed at strengthening Diasporas are more and more put into place, notably through the action of embassies abroad. In fact, they are often the place where different nationals from a community gather, for instance during special events organized by the embassies themselves, in the perspective of enhancing the feeling of belonging to a national community. The integration of Diasporas within the framework of foreign policies, encompassed in the scope of the action of embassies, indicates the growing interest of public authorities for this group of citizens living abroad. It also contributes to promoting African cultures and nations, which are not always understood in the western world.

Originally, members of the Diaspora started organizing themselves and constituting associations in order to facilitate the integration of new migrants in the societies of destination. They are still of great help as of today on this matter, but they are also very much oriented towards keeping the connection alive between members of the Diaspora and their homeland, and towards contributing to the development of their country of origin, which they often leave because of deplorable living conditions.

Due to the different nature of the migrations, the idea of returning to their homeland, which used to be very present for members of older generations of diaspora, is not as strong any more. Installed, and often well integrated in host societies, members of the diaspora often do not want to go back to their motherland to live once they retire, as the situation in their countries would not allow them to enjoy a decent life. In many cases, throughout the year, the choice is made to settle definitively in the North.

The impact of Diasporas as a phenomenon is also to be seen on the second generation of migrants. Generally speaking, children of African migrants, born in Europe, tend to emphasis the European part of their identity over their African origin, while still feeling attached to Africa and claiming to be of part of the African people. In terms of reshaping of identities, the Diasporas phenomenon tends to give birth to individuals who feel sort of uprooted, not genuinely anchored in one specific culture, but rather feeling “from everywhere and anywhere”, relating in different ways, both to their motherland and to their country of origin.

As stated in the introduction, there is an academic and an institutional debate as to who exactly is encompassed within the term of Diaspora, particularly when it comes to who should be targeted by the policies aiming at fostering “Diaspora Engagement”. One of the questions remaining is whether or not to include migrants within the African continent. The African Union chooses not to, as it states in its definition of the diaspora that it must necessarily be located outside of the continent. One of the grounds for this is that Africans who emigrate outside of Africa, mostly in the Northern hemisphere, are often wealthier, better-educated and more organized as Africans migrating within the continent, and have therefore more means of contributing to their home country development, thereby better fitting the second part of the definition of the African Union.

This idea also stems from the fact that, for a very long time, migration movements have been analysed mostly as being a stream from the South to the North, while other geographically located migrations did not seem as relevant to social scientists.

However, South-South migrations are more important numerically, and continue to grow in importance and in volume, therefore drawing more and more academic and research attention. This is true as well for Intra-African migrations. In fact, Africa is the most important destination for African migrants, as it accounts for about 53% of the total volume of migrations. If this phenomenon is to be differentiated from Diasporas living outside of the continent, it nevertheless plays a rather important role in the development of their country of origin.

Intra-African migrations are not a new phenomenon. Long-lasting forms of mobility have existed in the continent, such as nomadism, or travels along commercial routes. Those movements were permitted notably by the “porosity and artificiality of African international borders”. As of today, the total number of is African migrants is estimated to be around 16.3 million.

Intra-African migrations tend to be more developmental in nature, almost always related to the search of better opportunities in neighbouring countries. It is notably the case of many migrants from southern African countries, such as Zimbabweans, migrating to South Africa, where 71,5% of the migrants come from the continent. This type of migration, being closer geographically speaking, allows for the subsistence of stronger ties between the migrant and his home country, in terms of cultural bonds as well as in terms of economic contribution to development. As a matter of fact, the proximity of the host and origin country provides for more opportunities to go back and forth, thereby “avoiding making a definitive choice between origin and destination countries (…), but rather maintaining significant ties in both”. The diaspora within the African continent also tends to maintain rather close relations with the diaspora outside of the continent.

In conclusion, the African Diaspora within Africa is not to be ignored, as over half of the African migrants circulate within the continent. If there are differences in nature between the diaspora outside of the continent, mostly in the northern hemisphere, and the diaspora within Africa, both contribute greatly to the development of their countries of origin and destination. As of today however, the African Diaspora within Africa has not been targeted specifically by policy initiatives of the African Union that focused only on diaspora that comes from outside the continent.

The African Diaspora, which can be found all over the world, comes from three major waves of migration: historic, related to de-colonization process, and the current diaspora motivated by socio-economic and political situation of African countries. The African Union is a regional organization that aims to “achieve greater unity and solidarity between the African countries and the people of Africa”. Therefore, African people leaving outside the continent are encouraged to take an active role in their homeland’s politics or culture as long as they feel they belong to the African community, respective of their nationality and citizenship. The African Union considers the Diaspora at the “sixth economic region”, of Africa and an important inside actor to the AU’s politics.

The African Union Summit in 2012 was dedicated to the discussion on the impact and the role of the African diaspora. The AU decided to start a new chapter in its activity by involving the millions of Africans living outside the continent into the African integration and development process. Moreover, the AU decided to write and ratify an amendment to the “Constitutive Act of the African Union” enabling the effective inclusion of the African Diaspora-related-issues within the framework of the African Union throughout the creation of Article 3(q) that would provide legal framework to the extended Diaspora cooperation.

This political decision would facilitate and enforce African diaspora’s activity in the continent’s political, social, technological and economic development. The main areas of cooperation would be based on diaspora’s involvement in economic partnerships, incentives for innovation and entrepreneurship, research and development and knowledge transfer. However, it is important to mention that the AU’s definition of diaspora does not concern intra-African migration, which has been discussed above. Moreover, it refers to the concept of one, united and projected Africa that is not divided among nation-states. Therefore, the definition includes mainly the historic diaspora that is attached to the entity of Africa rather than referring to specific countries such as Rwanda, Sudan or Egypt.

In addition to that, the World Bank launched in 2007 the “African Diaspora Program” that focuses on formulation and implementation of policies that facilitate exchange between diaspora and homeland. The program is intended to promote, finance and facilitate a better exchange between diaspora organizations and local African associations. Finally, different strategies that would enhance diaspora’s involvement in development programs in Africa were established and promoted through the use of social media campaigns and through meetings of experts and officials of the organizations, NGOs and governmental institutions that collaborate with the African Union.

According to the Global Migrant Origin Database, around 340 million Africans (1.3% of the total population) are living on the Asiatic continent. Nevertheless, when talking about the presence of an African Diaspora in Asia, we have to distinguish two waves of migration: African slaves deported to the Indian Ocean World between the 15th and the 19th century and Africans who came to work and invest in Asia in more recent years.

For G. Campbell, this first wave of African migrations constituted by slaves deported by the Portuguese (15th-17th centuries) and then by the British (17th-19th century) cannot be called a Diaspora because there was not a diasporic consciousness among this group. Two main reasons can explain this statement. First, African-Asian slaves wanted to forget the role of fellow Africans, especially kings, who sold and enslaved their own kind. Secondly, there was an absence of the three bases for the rise of a diasporic consciousness: geographical concentration, common living and working conditions different from those of the locally dominant group and a leadership to articulate the diaspora’s interests. In point of fact, “despite being generally impoverished and socially stigmatized, African-Asians overwhelmingly claim to be a local Asian, and deny an African identity”. Consequently, only the second African migration wave lead to the constitution of an African Diaspora in Asia.

As a matter, even if there is less awareness of an African presence in Asian countries than for example in European countries, there is an African Diaspora living in Asia. This Diaspora is mostly constituted by the African migration wave, which started in the 1950s and which still continues, and is mostly located in China.

A quarter of the African Diaspora living in Asian is settled in China, more precisely in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau Shanghai and Beijing. According to S. Van Sant, the African Diaspora in China would is of about 500.000 members (0.038% of the total population). Most African migrants and Asian of African origin living in China are from either West Africa or the Maghreb region. A. Bodomo has divided Africans in China into several categories: “diplomats and other official representation from Africa in China; African students; African professional from continental Africa and from the African diaspora living and working in China; and finally, African traders”.

This last group of African is the largest one. As a proof, trade between China and Africa increased by 700% during the 1990s. Since 2009, China is Africa’s largest economic partner. The implementation of the African Diaspora in Asia is not only economic but also academic. For example, the University of Hong Kong has introduced a new Program in African Studies at the School of Humanities. This program is the first of this kind in Hong Kong and Southern China.

To sum up, the African Diaspora in Asia is not the most important of the world in terms of number, but it is for sure one of the most dynamic, and because of the increase of African migrations to Asia, this diaspora would gain more relevance. In reality, for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs "Asia and Africa would joint efforts to maintain the lawful rights of developing countries and push forward the creation of a new, fair political and economic order in the world”.

In the 1990s-2000s, new technologies of information and communication (NTIC) emerged, and their use is today widely spread all over the world, at various degrees. New media, such as Internet, have been adopted by many migrants, and have greatly contributed to the formation and consolidation of diasporas all over the world, enhancing opportunities for citizens to take an active part in public space. Websites are particularly numerous, and can be related to different themes, or linked to specific countries, or even tribes. There are however, many websites dedicated to Africa as a whole, aiming at providing with information and platform regarding the entire continent.

For members of the diasporas, Internet and new media fulfill some essential functions. First of all, they are major channels of information, to stay connected with what is happening in the countries of origin. The development of Cyber press in the past decade allows for a much easier access to information regarding news and trends in Africa, and is now the first channel of information for most of diaspora members. Abderrahmane Ngaidé even refers to it as a “portion of national territory”, in the global virtual space.

Internet therefore, allows for greater connections between the diaspora and its country or land of origin. However, it also goes the other way around, and Internet, notably through discussion platforms and forum, provides for a true space of free exchanges between citizens, thereby contributing to the formation and consolidation of a virtual transnational civil society. This aspect is not to be neglected, as it favors democratic speaking in countries in which freedom of press and of expression is not necessarily granted. In Mauritania for instance, Internet backs the emergence of a virtual democracy that goes beyond the state monopoly in media, and the press censorship, which is mostly the doing of members of diaspora, who can provide with alternative sources of information. Through participation in Internet forum or discussion platforms, members of diasporas can take part in the political debate, and be involved in African public life. As part of contribution to fueling democratic debate about African issues, new media also gives a voice to those who do not necessarily have the means of being heard within their own country, for instance in the case of exile related to political persecutions.

The Internet thereby, allows for a reshaping of the way nationals perceive and exercise their role as citizens. In fact, they can take a more proactive part in the debates, events and trends that are discussed within their homeland. In this sense, the use of Internet participates in the maintenance of the link with the motherland, and with the citizens of the country who stayed.

Internet, as a global tool, is also a way of bringing closer members of a diaspora which are situated in different parts of the world, thereby contributing to the emergence of a transnational community, dispersed but linked, at the same time, to the place of origin. Movements and exchanges within the members of diasporas situated in different places of the world are thereby enhanced, contributing to the consolidation of the feeling of belonging to a common culture and history, pursuing similar interests. Internet greatly participates in the construction of the group identity, shaping the ways that individuals articulate their experiences of uprooting with the necessity of local integration within the host country, while upholding features of their identities.

Through these various functions and mechanisms, the increased use of Internet has greatly contributed to the mobilization of diasporic communities, towards their home countries as well as amongst their own members. Through greatly facilitating the conservation of strong links and ties, both from the diaspora to Africa and within diaspora members, Internet has largely contributed to the formation of a coherent African diaspora, with all of the characteristics that are contained in the definition. It also contributed to expand the diaspora on a global level, as before the rise of internet, African communities gathered on a more local scale, with the creation of social link within locally based associations.

The movement of populations from Africa was always a response to political, social, religious, and economical or other related factors. After the colonial era, the motivations for these movements changed. The effects of colonization and decolonization always had an impact, directly or indirectly, on the economy, thus having a strong influence in migration. According to a survey by the United Nations, African governments have considered migration as the most important population phenomenon, setting aside fertility and morality.

Nowadays there is a strong response to migration by students. Students are looking for an improvement in their education. Therefore, they migrate to where they know they will have support. All over the Globe, there are African student unions, which provide social activities as well as representation and academic support for students. In other words, they act as representatives of the student when dealing with the administration process. In some cases, they even fund their studies by granting scholarships.

A. Gueye distinguishes two generations of African students who went to France to study. The first one occurred in 1950s-1970s and was constituted by students who stayed only a short time in France (between four and eight years) and then went back to Africa in order to contribute to the development of their country. The second generation, the 1980s-1990s generation, is different because these African students went to France to study and they choose to stay in France after the end of their studies and to work there.

Nowadays, there is still a strong African Diaspora in France and African students associations are very active. For example, in 2000 the Association of the African Interns and Students in France was created. This association obviously belongs to the African Diaspora because, according to the website of the association, it is “aiming to participate to the development of the African continent and to promote a common African culture and identity”.

France is the first destination choice by African students. According to Campus France the country counted 100.000 new African students what represents a third of African student migrations. According to a study realized by Campus France, African Student would choose France for the quality of its’ academic system. It is also a question of language, because more than a half of African students in France are French native speakers. However only 64% of these African students assert that studying in France helped their professional development. In fact, because the lack of structure and the very complicated administrative process for international students, going back on a few years, more and more African students choose to study in the United Stated rather than in France.

The United States are the third destination for African students who want to study abroad, just after France and the United Kingdom. In the United States of America, 34 thousand students per year, enroll in universities. However, since September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks enrollments of students from Africa dropped because it became more difficult to obtain a visa to study in the US. Most of these African students come from the Sub-Saharan region of Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon and South Africa). The majority of African students choose the US because the country offers a wide range of school programs, good student support services and abundant scholarship opportunities. The majority of the African students in the US stay in the country after graduation due to having more job opportunities and higher wages.

In the past decades, the concept of Diaspora has grown in importance in academic milieus in order to provide for a relevant theoretical framework to analyze a certain type of circular migrations, which could not be encompassed in the study of migration flows as they were traditionally considered. The concept of a diaspora cannot be confined to the peoples of African descent. Historians are familiar with the migration of Asians that resulted in the peopling of the Americas. Sometime between ten and twenty thousand years ago, these Asian people crossed the Bering Strait and settled in North and South America and the Caribbean Islands. The Jewish Diaspora, perhaps the most widely studied, also has very ancient roots, beginning about 5000 years ago.

However, the concept fits rather well the developments of the African Diaspora, which does meet, at various degrees, the criterions usually used to define a diaspora.  In this paper, we have chosen to give an overview as African Diaspora as a whole, without differentiating according to countries of origin within Africa, as the African Union does in its definition. The African Union has designated it as a sixth development “zone”, the others being West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa and North Africa. As such, it is a subject that is the focus of a growing attention on the part of researchers and scholars, but also on the part of African Governments, institutions, as well as Development Institutions, as it becomes growingly organized and institutionalized.

In this paper, we have provided for an overview of the African Diaspora in different regions of the world in terms of numbers, thereby presenting an idea of the phenomenon in quantitative and geographical terms.

In a more analytic approach, we have emphasized on different major aspects of African Diaspora and the mechanisms according to which it functions and exists. Indeed, the presence of an organized and active global diaspora is influential on the land of origin as well as on the members of the diaspora themselves and the societies in which they live. Its importance in terms of contribution to the development of the different parts of Africa is outstanding, to the point that it can exceed international public aid in certain cases. Indeed, the remittances paid by Africans living abroad seem to rival official aid to the continent, at least in terms of figures quotes for some years. Total diaspora contributions to Africa in 2010 stood at $51.8 billion compared to the roughly $43 billion in Oversea Development Assistance (ODA), according to the World Bank figures for that year. The latest World Bank figures about Diaspora African remittance show that in 2012, despite paying far more remittance fees than most other areas in the world, Africans still sent back home to Africa a whooping US$60 billion. Depending on the region, those figures can account for from 1 to 5% of Gross Domestic Products (GDP).

The greatest advantage that foreign remittance funding has over foreign aid funding is that these remittance funds go directly to the remittance targets, the recipients most of the time. These funds help pay school fees, build houses, and support growing businesses. Moreover Overseas development assistance (ODA) and other types of Diaspora African remittances could thus be used as a neo-colonial tool to influence the socio-economic and socio-political decision-making processes of the recipient countries by the donor countries and agencies. However, the contribution of Diaspora is not only economic, as they participate in many other areas of life in the home country, such as politics or culture. The African Diasporas also have an impact on their host societies, as they interact with the communities in which they settle. Mention has also been made of intra-African Diasporas and of how they, too, contribute to the development of their own countries, and thereby of the continent as a whole, despite the fact that they are widely ignored by many academic research or studies on the subject of migrations.

After providing or an outline of the main influences, challenges and contributions of the African Diaspora, this paper focuses on some specific current trends that are to be observed in the evolution of the functioning of diasporas. The trends researched were the growing tendency to call on diasporas to contribute to African development through institutional channels, such as the African Union for example, but also the recent rise of an African Diaspora in Asia, as well as the phenomenon of African Student diasporas, which is to say the fact that many young Africans leave the continent to complete their education, and in the mean time play a rather important role in forming African communities in the host countries. The importance of New Technologies of Information and Communication in the process of forming a diaspora has also been tackled, as the presence of a global virtual platform of exchanges such as the Internet has largely contributed to providing the conditions of emergence of a diaspora as such.

Diasporas are evidently not a new phenomenon, as the notion has mostly been construed to discuss the dispersal of the Greek and Jewish peoples a few millenniums ago. Neither is the African Diaspora, as it finds its early roots in slave trade, starting from the XVI° Century onwards. However, this societal phenomenon is growing in importance in terms of policy initiatives, as more and more realize its influence and the contributions it can make to enhance African human and economic development. Given the importance of Diasporas in the many aspects that have been covered in this paper, the “sixth zone” of Africa must not be forgotten when dealing with topics or issues related to the African continent.

Description The global African diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities descended from native Africans or people from Africa, predominantly in the Americas. Wikipedia

African Diaspora may be a new term for many people. We don’t hear it used very often in conversation or writing. African Diaspora is the term commonly used to describe the mass dispersion of peoples from Africa during the Transatlantic Slave Trades, from the 1500s to the 1800s. This Diaspora took millions of people from Western and Central Africa to different regions throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.

These African ancestors landed in regions that featured different local foods and cuisines, as well as other cultural influences, that shaped their unique cooking styles. The overall pattern of a plant-based, colorful diet based on vegetables, fruits, tubers and grains, nuts, healthy oils and seafood (where available) was shared throughout these four regions, but their cultural distinctions have reason to be celebrated. Their tastes can be shared and tried by people everywhere.

Here is a brief description of the four healthy regional diets of African Heritage. See the differences and similarities throughout:

African

Africa is home to leafy greens, root vegetables, mashed tubers and beans, and many different plant crops across its lands. In Central and Western Africa, traditional meals were often based on hearty vegetable soups and stews, full of spices and aromas, poured over boiled and mashed tubers or grains. In Eastern Africa, whole grains and vegetables are the main features of traditional meals, especially cabbage, kale and maize (cornmeal). In the Horn of Africa, where Ethiopia and Somalia are found, traditional meals are based on flat breads like injera (made out of teff, sorghum or whole wheat) and beans blended with spices, like lentils, fava beans and chickpeas. Today, many meals in the Horn are still prepared in halal style meaning that they include no pork, no alcohol, and meat only from animals who have died on their own. Across Africa, couscous, sorghum, millet and rice were enjoyed as the bases of meals, or as porridges and sides. Watermelon and okra are both native to Africa, and many believe that cucumbers are too. Beans were eaten in abundance everywhere, especially black-eyed peas, which were often pounded into a powder for tasty bean pastes seared as fritters.

African American

African American cuisine has been called “food to fall in love with.” Much of early African American cooking was influenced by both French and Spanish cuisines, and intertwined with Southern cooking to co-brand some of its major staples. The majority of traditional African American foods came straight from the garden. Cabbage, okra, tomatoes, peppers, and greens were abundant, including dandelion, mustard, collards, and turnip greens. Pickling vegetables was a popular way to preserve food; pickled beets, radish, cabbage, carrots, and cucumbers were enjoyed—and the list goes on! Louisiana’s Creole cooking has its roots in French, Spanish and Haitian cuisines, with a common base called “The Holy Trinity”: celery, onions and red bell peppers all equally chopped—which is at the heart of Louisiana’s popular Gumbo soup. Traditional Low Country cooking, from South Carolina and Georgia’s coast, features oysters, crabs, shrimp, sweet potatoes, Hoppin’ John, and rice.

Afro-Caribbean

The West Indies and Caribbean Islands bring tropical accents and various seafoods to the African Heritage Diet Pyramid. Approximately 23 million people of African descent live in the Caribbean. Here, we find French, African, and Spanish culinary influences. Surrounded by ocean, traditional African-Caribbean fare included a variety of seafood, like salt fish and conch; tropical fruits, like papaya and guava; rice and peas dishes, typically featuring pigeon peas or red beans. Coconut milk, breadfruit, callaloo, yams, plantains, annatto and pumpkins are all found in the Caribbean islands. In the southern parts of the Caribbean, roti is a popular flatbread, primarily made from whole wheat flour, that can be filled with curried vegetables and shrimp, or bean dishes, as a warm, soft roll-up.

Afro-South American

The African diaspora, together with the Jewish diaspora—the etymological and epistemological source of the term diaspora —enjoys pride of place in the increasingly crowded pantheon of diaspora studies. Studies of African diasporas can be divided into two broad categories. First, there are those that discuss the patterns of dispersal of African peoples around the world and the kinds of diasporic identities these populations developed in their new locations. Distinctions are increasingly drawn between the "historic" and "contemporary" or "new" African diasporas, referring respectively to diasporas formed before and during the twentieth century. Second, some studies are concerned with analyzing the various linkages that the diasporas have maintained with Africa. Here emphasis is on the demographic, cultural, economic, political, ideological, and iconographic flows.

The term African diaspora gained currency from the 1950s and 1960s in the English-speaking world, especially the United States. As pointed out by George Shepperson, none of the major intellectual forerunners of African diaspora studies, from Edward Blyden (1832–1912), the influential nineteenth-century Caribbean-born Liberian thinker, to W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the renowned African-American scholar-activist, used the term African diaspora. The Negritude writers from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean also did not use it. Instead, the term used to define and mobilize African populations globally was Pan-Africanism. One of the challenges in African diaspora studies, then, has been to overcome an American and English language-centered model of identity for African diasporas globally.

There are several conceptual difficulties in defining the African diaspora—indeed, in defining the term diaspora. Contemporary theorizations of the term diaspora tend to be preoccupied with problematizing the relationship between diaspora and nation and the dualities or multiplicities of diasporic identity or subjectivity; they are inclined to be condemnatory or celebratory of transnational mobility and hybridity. In many cases, the term diaspora is used in a fuzzy, ahistorical, and uncritical manner in which all manner of movements and migrations between countries and even within countries are included and no adequate attention is paid to the historical conditions and experiences that produce diasporic communities and consciousness—how dispersed populations become self-conscious diaspora communities.

Various analytical schemas have been suggested for diaspora studies in general and African diaspora studies in particular. Based on what he regards as the nine common features of a diaspora, Robin Cohen distinguishes between the "victim diasporas" (Africans and Armenians), "labor diasporas" (Indians), "imperial diasporas" (British), "trade diasporas" (Chinese and Lebanese), and "cultural diasporas" (the Caribbean). Kim Butler, a historian of the African diaspora in Brazil, suggests another schema for diasporan study divided into five dimensions: first, reasons for and conditions of the dispersal; second, relationship with homeland; third, relationship with host lands; fourth, interrelationships within diasporan groups; and finally, comparative study of different diasporas.

Diaspora refers simultaneously to a process, a condition, a space, and a discourse: the continuous processes by which a diaspora is made, unmade, and remade; the changing conditions in which it lives and expresses itself; the places where it is molded and imagined; and the contentious ways in which it is studied and discussed. In short, diaspora is a state of being and a process of becoming, a condition and consciousness located in the shifting interstices of "here" and "there," a voyage of negotiation between multiple spatial and social identities. Created out of movement—dispersal from a homeland—the diaspora is sometimes affirmed through another movement—engagement with the homeland. Movement, it could be argued, then, in its literal and metaphorical senses is at the heart the diasporic condition, beginning with the dispersal itself and culminating with reunification. The spaces in between are marked by multiple forms of engagement between the diaspora and the homeland—of movement, of travel between a "here" and a "there" both in terms of time and space.

It is quite common in academic and popular discourses to homogenize and racialize the African diaspora and see it in terms of the Atlantic experience of forced migration and in terms of "black" identity. The first ignores African dispersals and diasporas in Asia and Europe, some of which predated the formation of the Atlantic diasporas and which emerged out of both forced and free migrations. The second is largely a legacy of Eurocentric constructions of the continent whereby sub-Saharan Africa, from which North Africa is excised, is seen as "Africa proper," in the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Early-twenty-first-century research has tried to go beyond these limitations.

There are numerous dispersals associated with African peoples over time. Colin Palmer has identified at least six: three in prehistoric and ancient times (beginning with the great exodus that began about 100,000 years ago from the continent to other continents) and three in modern times, including those associated with the Indian Ocean trade to Asia, the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas, and the contemporary movement of Africans and peoples of African descent to various parts of the globe. While such a broad historical conception of diaspora might be a useful reminder of common origins and humanity, it stretches the notion of diaspora too far beyond analytical recognition to be terribly useful. So most scholars tend to focus on the "modern" historical streams of the global African diasporas. Studies of African diasporas focus disproportionately on the Atlantic world, but literature is growing on the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean diasporas.

The historic African diasporas can be divided into four categories in terms of their places of dispersal: the intra-Africa, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Atlantic diasporas. The challenges of studying intra-Africa diasporas meaningfully are quite daunting, given the extraordinary movements of people across the continent over time. Clearly it will not do to see every migration across the continent as a prelude to the formation of some diaspora. More fruitful is to focus on communities that have constituted themselves or are constituted by their host societies as diasporas within historical memory. And here may be distinguished five types based on the primary reason of dispersal: the trading diasporas (the Hausa and Doula in western Africa); the slave diasporas (West Africans in North Africa and East Africans on the Indian Ocean islands); the conquest diasporas (the Nguni in southern Africa); the refugee diasporas (e.g., from the Yoruba wars of the early nineteenth century); and the pastoral diasporas (the Fulani and Somali in the Sahelian zones of western and eastern Africa).

These intra-Africa diasporas have been studied in their own right, often without using the term diaspora except for the trading diasporas and the slave diasporas. But it should not be forgotten that the other diasporas, insofar as they existed, filtered into the historic diasporas or served as historical switching stations for the emergence of the new African diasporas in the twentieth century. At the same time, the formation of colonial borders and new national identities reinforced their diasporic identities and sometimes pushed them into the circuits of international migration.

Recent studies clearly demonstrate that the African diaspora has very old roots in Asia, to which Africans traveled as traders, sailors, soldiers, bureaucrats, clerics, bodyguards, concubines, servants, and slaves. Hence unlike the historic Atlantic diasporas, the Indian Ocean diasporas were composed of both forced and free migrants. In India, for example, according to Richard Pankhurst, there were numerous African diasporan rulers and dynasties established between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries by the Habshi (corruption of Habash, the Arabic name for Abyssinia), Sidi (corruption of the Arabic Saiyid, or "master"), and Kaffir (from the Arabic Kafir, or "unbeliever"), as the Africans were known, throughout India from the north and west (Delhi, Gujarat, the Gulf of Khambhat, Malabar, Alapur, and Jaunpur) to the northeast (Bengal), the south (Deccan), and the west coast. Besides the Indian sub-continent, significant African communities also existed in the Persian Gulf from present-day Iran and Iraq to Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Exploration of the African diasporas in the Mediterranean worlds of western Asia and southern Europe has been fraught with considerable difficulties, not least the fact that until modern times this was the most intensive zone of cultural traffic and communication, in which communities straddled multiple spaces in complex networks of affiliation. The case of the Arabs from the Arabian peninsula, who swept through northern Africa following the rise of Islam in the seventh century, is a case in point. They traversed northern Africa and western Asia, the so-called Middle East, although with the rise of the modern nation-state and national identities, notwithstanding the enduring dreams of the Arab nation, it is possible to talk of, say, the Egyptian diaspora in the Gulf.

Before the Atlantic slave trade, the most significant African presence in southern Europe was the Moors from northwestern Africa, who occupied and ruled much of Spain between the early eighth century and the late fifteenth century. As is well known, the Moors made enormous contributions to Spanish culture and society and to the modernization of Europe more generally during those seven centuries, but they are rarely discussed in diasporic terms—as an African diaspora. Discussions of African diasporas in the Mediterranean world, which are still relatively scanty, tend to focus on "blacks," that is, Negroid peoples, in ancient Rome or in the Mediterranean lands of Islam, where African diasporas were absorbed into the host communities thanks to the integrative principles and capacities of Islam.

Beyond the Mediterranean littoral in Europe, there are ancient African communities from Russia to Britain. The origins of the scattered African communities on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus mountains are in dispute. Some argue that they were brought there between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries as slaves for the Turkish and Abkhazian rulers, while others trace their origins many centuries earlier as remnants of an Egyptian army that invaded the region in antiquity. Allison Blakely believes the two explanations may not necessarily be contradictory, in that there were probably different waves of Africans. Modern Russia did not develop a significant practice of African slavery, but some Africans did come as slaves; others came as servants for the wealthy nobility or as immigrants, usually seamen, including some who came from the Americas. One of these Africans was Abram Hannibal from Ethiopia, who arrived as a boy around 1700 and was raised as a favorite of Peter the Great, became a general and an engineer, and was the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), the great Russian poet.

The history of Africans in Britain can be traced back two thousand years, but the African presence became more evident following the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Many of the Africans worked as domestic servants, tradesmen, soldiers, and sailors. A growing stream of Africans coming for education—a tradition that began in the eighteenth century and accelerated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—later joined them. In the nineteenth century they included some of West Africa's most illustrious intellectuals and nationalists. Out of these waves emerged a "black" British culture with its own associational life, expressive cultural practices, literature, and political idioms, all forged in the crucible of unrelenting racial violence and oppression.

The Atlantic diasporas are the most recent of the global diasporas and are far better known and researched than the others. The diaspora in the United States often stands at the pedestal, the one against which to judge the identities of the other diasporas. The fact that Brazil has the largest African diaspora in the Americas, indeed in the world, is often forgotten, and so is the fact that in the Caribbean the African diaspora is the majority, rather than a minority population as in the United States. Debates about African diasporan identities have tended to be framed in terms of African cultural retentions or erasure on the one hand and diasporan adaptations and inventions on the other. Paul Gilroy's influential text, The Black Atlantic, is essentially a celebration of the supposedly new and distinctive Anglophone diaspora culture in which Africa is an irrelevant reality.

In effect, the two were not mutually exclusive, insofar as diasporic communities and consciousness were forged out of complex and sometimes contradictory encounters and negotiations between what Sheila Walker, in African Roots/American Cultures (2001), calls the three puzzles and Stuart Hall calls the presences in the Americas—the African, European, and Native American puzzles or presences. It is also important to note that there were continuous movements of people from Africa and the diaspora and back that kept connections alive.

On the whole, studies of African diasporas in the Americas continue to be heavily focused on national histories. In situations where the African puzzle or presence is marginalized, as is often the case in the United States, excavating the dynamic import of the African cultural, religious, artistic, social, economic, and political imprint on mainstream American society has produced some exciting scholarship. In societies that have tried to "whiten" themselves, such as Argentina, the object has been to demonstrate the African demographic presence. Similar attempts have been made to demystify Africa's "absence" in the histories of other countries in America's Southern cone: Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and in the histories of the United States' immediate neighbors, Mexico and Canada, and to chronicle the contributions of African diasporas beyond picturesque folklore.

For Brazil, great store has been placed on explaining the remarkable survival and transformation of the Africans and their cultures as well as exposing the brutal realities behind the mystifications of race mixture and cultural syncretism. With their large African populations, the Caribbean islands reflect Brazil in terms of the evident demographic and cultural visibility of the African presence. Also as in Brazil, this presence, ubiquitous though it may be, has not always been valorized—at least not until the black consciousness movement of the 1970s. Perched in the Atlantic in the middle of the Middle Passage, as it were, the African diaspora in the Caribbean in fact embodies all the complex connections, crisscrossings, and cultural compositions of the African diasporas of the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, Caribbean activists and intellectuals played a crucial role in all the transatlantic Pan-African ideologies and movements, from Garveyism to Negritude to socialism.

In the twentieth century there were several new dispersals from Africa, a continent divided into colonial territories and later into independent nation-states. Unlike their predecessors, whose communities of identity, either as imagined by themselves or as imposed by others, were either ethnic or racial (not to mention sometimes religious), the new African diasporas had to contend with the added imperative of the modern nation-state, which often frames the political and cultural itineraries of their travel and transnational networks. The "new" or "contemporary" African diasporas, as they are sometimes called, can be divided into three main waves: the diasporas of colonization, of decolonization, and of structural adjustment that emerged out of, respectively, the disruptions of colonial conquest, the struggles for independence, and structural adjustment programs imposed on African countries by the international financial institutions from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

As with the historic diasporas, the challenge has been to map out the development of these diasporas and their identities and relations with the host societies. Needless to say, and also in common with the historic diasporas, the contemporary diasporas are differentiated and their internal and external relations are mediated by the inscriptions of gender, generation, class, political ideology, and sometimes religion. Where they differ from the historic diaspora, complicating analysis, is that they have to negotiate relations with the historic diasporas themselves and also not just with "Africa" but with their particular countries of origin and the countries of transmigration. The revolution in telecommunications and travel, which has compressed the spatial and temporal distances between home and abroad, offers the contemporary diasporas, unlike the historic diasporas from the earlier dispersals, unprecedented opportunities to be transnational and transcultural, to be people of multiple worlds and focalities. They are able to retain ties to Africa in ways that were not possible for earlier generations of the African diasporas. The diasporas of the late twentieth century were even more globalized than those earlier in the century in terms of the multiplicity of their destinations and networks.

Particularly rapid in the closing decades of the twentieth century was African migration to Europe, which was characterized by increasing diversification in the number of countries both sending and receiving the immigrants. The African diaspora from the continent and the diaspora itself grew in Britain and France, the old colonial superpowers. Quite remarkable was the emergence as immigration countries of southern European countries such as Italy, Portugal, and Spain, which were themselves emigration countries. This development was as much a product of the improving economic fortunes in these countries and their integration into the prosperity and political sphere of western Europe as it was of mounting immigration pressures on their borders to the east and the south. New African immigrant communities also formed in central and eastern Europe, especially following the end of the Cold War.

Equally rapid was the growth of African migration to North America, especially the United States. By 2000 there were 700,000 African-born residents in the United States, up from 363,819 in 1990. This new African diaspora constituted only 2.5 percent of the total U.S. foreign-born population, up from 1.9 percent in 1990. The African migrants in the United States tended to be exceedingly well educated, in fact they enjoyed the highest levels of education of any group in the United States, foreign-born or native-born. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, among the African-born residents aged twenty-five and above, 49.3 percent had a bachelor's degree or more, as compared to 25.6 percent for the native-born population and 25.8 percent for the foreign-born population as a whole (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001).

The continuous formation of African diasporas through migration is one way in which the diaspora and Africa have maintained linkages. There have also been numerous movements among the diasporas themselves, for example, of Caribbean communities to Central, South, and North America and Europe, so that the entire Atlantic world, including the United States, is constituted by Earl Lewis's "overlapping diasporas."

One critical measure of the diaspora condition as a self-conscious identity lies in remembering, imagining, and engaging the original homeland, whose own identity is in part constituted by and in turn helps constitute the diaspora. This dialectic in the inscriptions and representations of the home-land in the diaspora and of the diaspora in the homeland is the thread that weaves the histories of the diaspora and the homeland together. Two critical questions can be raised. First, how do the different African diasporas remember, imagine, and engage Africa, and which Africa—in temporal and spatial terms? Second, how does Africa, or rather the different Africas—in their temporal and spatial framings—remember, imagine, and engage their diasporas? Given the complex ebbs and flows of history for Africa itself and for the various regional host lands of the African diasporas, it stands to reason that the engagements between Africa and its diasporas have been built with and shaped by continuities, changes, and ruptures.

The fluidity of these engagements is best captured by the notion of flow: that flows of several kinds and levels of intensity characterize the linkages between the homeland and the diaspora. The diaspora-homeland flows are often simultaneously covert and overt, abstract and concrete, symbolic and real, and their effects may be sometimes disjunctive or conjunctive. The diaspora or the homeland can also serve as a signifier for the other, subject to strategic manipulation. The flows include people, cultural practices, productive resources, organizations and movements, ideologies and ideas, and images and representations. In short, six major flows can be isolated: demographic flows, cultural flows, economic flows, political flows, ideological flows, and iconographic flows.

Clearly, engagements between Africa and its diasporas have been produced by many flows that have been carried on by a variety of agents; but not all flows and agents are equal, nor have they been treated equally. Much scholarly attention has gone toward the political and ideological flows across the Atlantic, as manifested, for example, in the role that the transatlantic Pan-Africanist movement played in engendering territorial nationalisms across Africa and how continental nationalism and the civil rights movement in the United States reinforced each other. Only recently has the discussion of cultural flows begun to transcend the question of African cultural retentions and survivals in the Americas to examine not only the traffic of cultural practices from the Atlantic diasporas to various parts of Africa but also the complex patterns and processes of current cultural exchanges through the media of contemporary globalization, from television and cinema to video and the Internet.

The historiography of these other forms of engagement is still relatively underdeveloped. Indeed, as with the history of the dispersals analyzed above, far less is known about the engagements between Africa and its diasporas in Asia and Europe than is the case with the Atlantic diasporas. The challenge in African diaspora studies, then, is twofold: to map out more accurately the dispersals of African peoples globally, and to map out the various engagements between Africa and its diasporas for each of the major world regions.

See also Black Atlantic ; Black Consciousness ; Creolization, Caribbean ; Pan-Africanism ; Religion: African Diaspora ; Slavery .

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2African Diaspora theory provides a framework for understanding the socio-historical experiences of peoples who have been categorized by phenotype or skin-color. However, what are the problems associated with categorizing people of African descent into some kind of transnational, historical continuum and then describing the communities using diaspora concepts? First, individuals in diaspora do not necessarily accept or engage the concept when talking about their own communities. One does not need to self-identify as an African Diaspora individual for the concept or theory to be useful. Second, sorting peoples by racial categories and assuming everyone imagines their own histories similarly risks the worst kind of essentialist scholarship. This work critiques numerous trends in conceptualizing the African Diaspora, illuminating ideas from its earliest proponents to its more contemporary cultural studies adherents while also providing a few examples of African Diaspora life and culture.

3In simple terms, diaspora as a concept can be defined as the identity community formed when people move. However, this multivalent theory has rarely been so simply defined; rather it has been employed to characterize a complex set of circumstances, from individuals who are racialized into specific categories, to oppressed religious or cultural groups, to communities of consciousness, to a whole host of other dispersed groupings. The concept of diaspora originated in the Greek language with a certain ambiguity about the Greek imperial project of dispersal and migration. Subsequently, the concept was applied to the forced migration of Jews out of the Holy Land, and our understanding of diaspora became inextricably linked to this ‘classical’ Jewish model of oppression and victimization (Cohen 1997). Today, scholars who study black life and culture in the African Diaspora generally employ several characteristics in their analysis: 1) Dispersal/Migration; 2) Germination; and 3) Community of Consciousness.

4For people in a diaspora, the dispersion is the beginning of a split, with new communities formed or germinated in the new locale (Hesse 2000). Within these new dispersed communities of diaspora, there are identifications that are individually formed, making the germinated community a sort of ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983). These new germinated communities are at times made real with the active and creative memories of the individuals. This creative memory process or ‘re-memory,’ as Toni Morrison writes in Beloved, is especially descriptive of dispersed Africans who were displaced around the world during the hundreds of years of slavery’s existence (1987). Diaspora as a framework of explanation has been utilized and theorized differently over time, and it should be understood as mutable. Although scholars of the African Diaspora come from a multitude of disciplines—history, sociology, literature, and political science—what binds us all together is our study of black life. Scholars using African Diaspora theory employ different modes of inquiry, study different historical trajectories, and analyze a multitude of objects; yet, all are working to uncover the multitude of histories and realities of black people over time and in different geographic spaces.

5The five centuries of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Africans involved millions of people on all seven continents. There need be no further validation of the racialized, globalized, and victimized aspect of this African or Black Diaspora. The trade in African slaves impacted all continents and peoples of the Atlantic, hence diasporic communities were formed at every port of the triangular trade. The everyday consumption habits of Europeans changed because of the new staples provided by the plantation communities in the new world. Sugar and coffee, among other items, flowed back to Europe from the world system of globalization that the slave trade created. Europeans engaged in the slave trade—whether as slave traders, insurance investors, plantation owners, or periphery workers—were marked by their experiences of trading in the lives of people. New communities were formed in the locations where the slaves were dumped. These communities engaged in a continual regenerative process rather than a static carry-over of values and behaviors from their point of origin. Within Africa, many communities exhibited different behaviors because of the impact of the slave trade. Slavery’s global reach impacted people at the point of origin and the point of relocation.

6Colonial regimes engaged in this global trade of goods, moving soldiers, merchants, and families around the world, while also redistributing native peoples to other locations. This ‘Imperial Diaspora’ of dispersed Europeans germinated new communities in all corners of the world (Cohen 1997). New variants of slavery and indenture and hierarchy emerged in the communities the Europeans created. These Europeans of the Imperial Diaspora were not ‘pure,’ they crafted new behaviors and identities the longer they stayed on the islands, creating ‘creole’ communities among the peoples and places that they encountered (Naipaul 1981). The process of identity formation born out of slavery is necessarily ‘creole’ (Holt 1999).

7Generally, creolization is understood as a linguistic phenomenon; however, the concept can be used to investigate identity formation. Creolization is what emerges as the clash of languages; it is halfway between two basic structures (Glissant 1989). For example, in Caribbean so-called creole languages, you will find West African syntax and grammatical structure overlaid with European words. All languages are combinations of languages and can be thought of as creolized. Creole is the norm for language patterns and can be useful when applied to the process of identity formation. The descendants of the diasporic movements wrought out of slavery (both the Imperial Diaspora and the African Diaspora) have developed their own unique cultures that both retain and often elaborate on their original cultures. These new world diasporic communities may be imbued with some of the same cultural practices as the ‘originating community’ (the village communities within the continent of Africa, or the members of European nation-states), but the originating culture does not need to be seen as ‘pure.’ Do not look for a true original form—any sort of purity in either language or identity—in the originating culture, nor in the dispersed diaspora community. These creolized diasporic cultures are constantly in motion producing and reproducing new identities. Diaspora theory and concepts are useful when studying these groups.

8So how was this African Diaspora ‘creole’ identity forged under slavery? How can we interpret the primary sources using the framework of African Diaspora theory? Over 6,000 Africans in the Americas narrated their own stories of enslavement through books, memoirs, essays, poetry, and interviews (Gates 1987). The preponderance of primary source evidence never completely convinced whites of the humanity of blacks—that battle is still being waged—but reviewing the evidence today allows us to place this historical evidence among the many creative enterprises of people of African descent. Enslaved Africans were thought to be simply cargo; in fact, ‘enlightened’ Europeans and Americans were not convinced that the African was capable of writing literature. This was the special province of the white male. Within the hierarchical scale of being, the African was placed at the bottom of the well unable to scribble his way to the top. As many societies measure greatness by literary production, a brief investigation of the autobiographies of ex-slaves Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince is instructive in understanding some of the first formulations of an African Diaspora identity. These African Diaspora slaves were involved in creating literature in order to prove their humanity. The autobiographies of Equiano and Prince reveal what these African Diaspora individuals were saying about their place in the global world order that slavery wrought. These individuals moved around the world and in their writings reveal their interior thoughts about home, being in motion, and freedom. Their experiences while traveling through the ports of the slave trade, encountering European diaspora communities, and ultimately gaining their freedom, are key to the formulation of an African Diaspora identity.

9There are many similarities in the highly stylized and gender differentiated slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince. Equiano displays a diasporic consciousness in his 1789 Interesting Narrative and Prince overlays gender to her diasporic identity in her 1831 History of a West Indian Slave. They are transnational: African, American, Caribbean, and British, while at the same time rejected by all cultures. When Equiano and Prince write their narratives it is expected that only imminent (white) men should pen memoirs. Important and political people were expected to write their own stories, not slaves. Equiano the traveling slave wrote himself into existence and also proved his humanity, employing a distinctly European literary style. When he writes his interesting travel narrative, he is retelling an African story from a western perspective. He is free, and his African Diaspora identity is constantly reborn and re-crafted based on his life experiences—travel, slavery, business enterprises, and finally literary endeavors.

10What ties the Equiano and Prince narratives together is their personal reflection on the institution of slavery, the disruption of family values and personal life, their understanding of their own diaspora identity (although neither used the term), as well as their understanding of the liberating forces of literature. Like Equiano, Prince lived with the hope that God (and the British government) would give her freedom and let her return to her husband in Antigua. Prince like Equiano is a traveling slave; her testimony is another example of diaspora literature. She ponders her place in the world and she acculturates to the multitude of environments and peoples she encounters, ultimately forging her own creole or diaspora identity. Clearly, this bridging of worlds is central to an African Diaspora identity. These two historical accounts are primary source examples of the saliency of diaspora theory.

11Another subtle explication of the multi-impact of the slave trade, diaspora theory, and creolization can be found in Bruce Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah. Here a Brazilian born slave trader identifies himself as ‘pure Portuguese’—an anomalous category of identity—and succumbs to the peculiarities of trading in human lives. His move to the African slave-coast kingdom of Dahomey renders his identity as completely one of diasporic citizenship. He is neither Brazilian, nor Portuguese, and certainly not African. He is a member of the new global order that slavery created. Whoever travels into the heart of darkness to engage in the trade of human beings is forever victimized and stained with the blood of slavery. The two-way aspect of the slave trade needs to be expanded to encompass the marking or victimization of all participants; to address what happened to the Viceroy as well as what happened to his ‘cargo.’ The Viceroy seems to slip between the Imperial Diaspora while also displaying the victim characteristics of the African Diaspora (Cohen 1997). These formulations of diaspora—the imperial diasporas of empire, the creolized communities in the new world, and the victimized Jewish diaspora—reflect the ways the original Greek concept has been expanded to incorporate more imagined communities that germinated from the migration experience.

12Scholars must expand on the idea of the Jewish diaspora as a normative model, because it is simply too constraining. Today, there are more Jews around the world, dispersed and diasporic, than in the ‘homeland.’ As Thomas Holt explains: ‘Africans in the Americas and Jews embody the two archetypal narratives of diaspora, of holocaust, and of redemption’ (36). Holt links the Old Testament story of Jewish dispersal to a similar diasporic consciousness among the African American population. Both communities have identified with the same story of exile and enslavement. The story that is key to Jewish consciousness of community also serves as inspiration for many Christians in the African Diaspora. However, there does not need to be any sort of similarity of experience within either of the diasporic communities for the theory to be effective. We must look for the point of victimization and then uncover the multitude of ways that the diasporic communities forged new identities. Here we may see more variety and dissimilitude than consistency.

13Scholars should use the African Diaspora concept metaphorically, focusing on the history but also focusing on the contemporary or voluntary aspects of African migration and diaspora formation (Shepperson 1982/1993). In addition, when undertaking a study of Africans in the diaspora, scholars must carefully deploy a periodization scheme that clearly delineates the time and people under investigation. Colin Palmer (2000) noted how the African Diaspora concept had been around since the 1800s, but its current conceptualizations came about as a result of the independence movements in Africa. He warns that there is no single African Diasporic community, or consciousness, because there are five major streams of African Diaspora migration. These streams periodize different histories of peoples of African descent and provide a timeline for African Diaspora research. Besides the five major streams, Palmer also noted how the diasporic communities generally possessed: an emotional attachment to their ancestral land; recognition of their dispersal; a sense of alienation and oppression; a sense of racial pride, and a belief that all members of the diaspora should be committed to the maintenance or restoration of the original homeland (27). All of Palmer’s formulations utilize a checklist of behavior in order to be called a diaspora.

14Joseph Harris’s theorizing on the African Diaspora framework also valorizes the African aspect of the dispersal, while adding a new subtlety. He focuses on the global dispersion of Africans, both voluntary and involuntary, and identifies:

15In this formulation, Harris is engaging in some of the necessary dynamics and specifics of African Diaspora theory. Harris adds more cogency to the concept, but he still points backward to revalorize the African origin in both individual identity formulations and group consciousness. Africa is an entire continent with a multitude of histories and experiences, which defies any single monolithic interpretation of its essence. The trajectory of Africans moving around the world has never been a singular experience, and establishing a checklist of migratory streams does not provide for the particularity necessary for defining a diaspora. Too many people and histories slip through these checklist formulations of African Diaspora theory.

16Michele Reis and Tina Campt periodize other African Diaspora formations as ‘modern’ and then ‘late modern or contemporary’. Reis specifically places slavery within the ‘modern’ phase of diaspora and moves away from establishing a checklist of victimization. Reis studies recent immigrant/migrant communities in the Caribbean and advocates for their inclusion in a widened understanding of the ‘contemporary’ diaspora. She writes that she is ‘critiquing the theories in the conventional literature, exposing the lacunae in terms of interpretation of diaspora’ (41–42). Campt places Afro-Germans in the twentieth century within the lacunae of contemporary diasporas, asking about the political stakes in the modern day uses of diaspora (94). She is specifically working within the field of postcolonial and feminist studies, informed by the cultural anthropology works of James Clifford (1994). Reis and Campt push away from checklists and ‘normative’ explanations and use specific time periods, peoples, and migratory flows in their explorations of African Diaspora identities.

17Many scholars approach diaspora from the view of migration. Dwayne Williams sees a symbiotic relationship between diaspora and migration. ‘Social processes such as migrations (forced, induced, or voluntary) do not simply divide people of African descent, but can and do serve as a reunifying force’ (108). Steven Vertovec joined Robin Cohen (1999) as both attempted to define the parameters of migrations, diasporas, and transnationalism, ultimately stating that at times each theme is subsumed into the other. They distinguish the new global migration flows as a recent phenomenon inextricably linked to economic push/pull influences from the entering and exiting locations. For Vertovec and Cohen the framework of diaspora explains the multi-locality of social and cultural identity formations. The concept of transnationalism provides a foundation for understanding how global identities are formed. They warn against applying the term diaspora to communities that have been deterritorialized or can be described as transnational. They understand diaspora formations as linked to migration flows. However, nowhere in their six-hundred-page tome can one find a clearly delimited definition of the three concepts. Theorizing each of these themes of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism is still under development: ‘That these three themes are intuitively linked is incontestable, but how they are linked is still a matter for further theoretical reflection and detailed empirical research’ (xiii). What both authors want to prevent is any sort of conflating of categories— migration and/or transnationalism—that describe the movement of workers or ‘racial minorities’ with the active identity formation that is central to the framework of diaspora. Cohen’s solution is to offer a qualifying descriptor (victim, labor, trade, imperial, or cultural) to denote the type of diaspora, but then he is forced to apply this descriptor to all of the peoples and processes he has identified (1997). This categorization or checklist approach is too general, and in many ways misses the vibrancy of the African Diaspora communities that germinated long after the victimization process of slavery.

18African Diaspora theory is organic; it is developed, applied, and altered as different scholars undertake studies of black people around the globe in different epochs. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza notes the difficulty in defining the African diaspora (mostly choosing to use the term in lowercase). He wrote: ‘there are several conceptual difficulties in defining the African diaspora; for it simultaneously refers to a process, a condition, a space, and a discourse’ (41). Avtar Brah succinctly represented the tensions in the use of diaspora as an explanatory paradigm. In her monograph Cartographies of Diaspora, she describes how the use of ‘diaspora’ can be too general: ‘Its explanatory power in dealing with the specific problematics associated with transnational movements of people, capital, commodities and cultural iconographies’ (196). Kim D. Butler understands these difficulties, yet proposes ‘how’ to use an African Diaspora framework when studying transnational and contemporary diasporic communities. Butler advocates that scholars employ a checklist crafted around earlier theorists’ models and then adapt the checklist to reflect the unique characteristics of the people in diaspora within the study group. Butler identifies some problems when scholars have attempted to define diaspora by observing the characteristics of single diasporas and using them as a checklist’ (126). Her solution is to acknowledge complexities within the group being studied, and then to clarify and illuminate the research questions within the written narrative. These scholars complicate the concept of the African Diaspora by setting out its inherent problems, and then crafting useful timelines while detailing the specific characteristics of the individuals that they study. They understand and employ the organic nature of African Diaspora theory.

19Earlier twentieth-century scholars, W.E.B. Du Bois, St. Clair Drake, and C.L.R. James, used African Diaspora theory to understand black life both in slavery and freedom. Du Bois deliberated from a diasporic framework, writing from both Ghana and the U.S. about the African Diaspora experience. St. Clair Drake cites Du Bois as the beginning point for his own explorations of black life in the diaspora. C.L.R. James always wrote from a diasporic perspective, moving both himself and his investigations of diaspora from the Caribbean, through the U.S., into Africa and Britain. Du Bois, Drake, and James lived and analyzed ‘Black People Here and There’ throughout the African Diaspora (Drake 1987). Most of these first scholars of the African Diaspora utilized the concept ‘as both a political term with which to emphasize unifying experiences of African peoples dispersed by the slave trade, and an analytical term that enabled scholars to talk about black communities across national boundaries’ (Kelley 1). These scholars were the first to give meaning to the idea of a worldwide black brotherhood—a diaspora community formulated out of the forced migration experiences of slavery.

20Du Bois, Drake, and James distinguished themselves by using different objects of study and modes of inquiry when studying the black experiences on a diasporic or global level. They were able to investigate the black experience by studying a wide spectrum of cultural objects, including history, literature and art. They contextualized black life in different geographical regions using an organic methodology of African Diaspora theory. Each advocated placing the study of slavery within a globalized framework, the key to forming any African diasporic community. Drake explained his own study of the enslaved as constituting ‘an analysis of values and symbols that have emerged within Black communities in the Diaspora,’ and he links those cultural products with the ‘coping processes at various periods in history and in diverse places where ecological and economic contexts present quite different options’ (xv). Drake also understood the linkage between blackness and the African diaspora. He wrote:

The global African diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities descended from native Africans or people from Africa, predominantly in the Americas. The term most commonly refers to the descendants of the black 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 (in that order). However, the term can also be used to refer to the descendants of non black North Africans who immigrated to other parts of the world. Some scholars identify "four circulatory phases" of this migration out of Africa. The phrase African diaspora gradually entered common usage at the turn of the 21st century. The term diaspora originates from the Greek διασπορά (diaspora, literally "scattering") which gained popularity in English in reference to the Jewish diaspora before being more broadly applied to other populations.

Less commonly, the term has been used in scholarship to refer to more recent emigration from Africa. The African Union (AU) defines the African diaspora as consisting: "of people of native 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".

Much of the African diaspora became dispersed throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia during the Atlantic, Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. Beginning in the 8th century, Arabs took African slaves from the central and eastern portions of the African 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 to Europe. The Atlantic slave trade ended in the 19th century. The dispersal through slave trading represents the largest forced migrations in human history. The economic effect on the African continent proved devastating, as generations of young people were taken from their communities and societies were disrupted. Some communities formed by descendants of African slaves in the Americas, Europe, and Asia have survived to the present day. In other cases, native Africans intermarried with non-native Africans, and their descendants blended into the local population.

In the Americas, the confluence of multiple ethnic groups from around the world contributed to multi-ethnic societies. In Central and South America, most people are descended from European, Amerindian, and African ancestry. In Brazil, where in 1888 nearly half the population 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. Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws passed after the 1863–1877 Reconstruction era in the South in the late-19th century, plus waves of vastly increased immigration from Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, maintained much 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 those of obvious majority native European or of majority-Native-American ancestry. One of the results of this implementation was the loss of records of Native-identified groups, who were classified only as black because of being mixed-race.

From the very onset of Spanish exploration and colonial activities in the Americas, Africans participated both as voluntary expeditionaries and as slave 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.

The African Union defined the African diaspora as " of people of native 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 as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade, roughly eight million were shipped northwards as part of the Trans-Saharan slave trade, and roughly eleven million were transported to the Americas as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Their descendants are now found around the globe, but because of intermarriage they are not necessarily readily identifiable.

Many scholars have challenged conventional views of the African diaspora as a mere dispersion of African 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.

In the last decades, studies on the African diaspora have shown an interest in the roles that Africans 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. Paul Gilroy describes the suppression of blackness due to imagined and created ideals of nations as "cultural insiderism." Cultural insiderism is used by nations to separate deserving and undeserving groups and requires a "sense of ethnic difference" as mentioned in his book The Black Atlantic. Recognizing their contributions offers a comprehensive appreciation of global history.

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): 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".: 201

African diaspora populations include but are not limited to:

The first Africans in the Americas arrived in the region during the initial period of European colonization. In 1492, Afro-Spanish sailor Pedro Alonso Niño served as a pilot on the voyages of Christopher Columbus; though he returned to the Americas in 1499, Niño did not settle in the region. By the early 16th century, more Africans began to arrive in Spanish colonies in the Americas, sometimes as free people of color, but the majority were enslaved. Demand of African labor increased as the indigenous population of the Americas experienced a massive population decline due to the introduction of Eurasian infectious diseases (such as smallpox) to which they had no natural immunity. The Spanish Crown granted asientos (monopoly contracts) to merchants granting them the right to supply enslaved Africans in to Spanish colonies in the Americas, regulating the trade. As other European nations began establishing colonies in the Americas, these new colonies began importing enslaved Africans as well.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, most European colonies in the Caribbean operated on plantation economies fueled by slave labor, and the resulting importation of enslaved Africans meant that Afro-Caribbeans soon far outnumbered their European enslavers in terms of population. Roughly eleven to twelve million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade.

Beginning in 1791, the Haitian Revolution, a slave rebellion by self-emancipated slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue eventually led to the creation of the Republic of Haiti. The new state, led by Jean Jacques Dessalines was the first nation in the Americas to be established from a successful slave revolt and represented a challenge to the existing slave systems in the region. Continuous waves of slave rebellions, such as the Baptist War led by Samuel Sharpe in British Jamaica, created the conditions for the incremental abolition of slavery in the region, with Great Britain abolishing it in the 1830s. The Spanish colony of Cuba was the last Caribbean island to emancipate its slaves.

During the 20th century, Afro-Caribbean people began to assert their cultural, economic and political rights on the world stage. The Jamaican Marcus Garvey formed the UNIA movement in the United States, continuing with Aimé Césaire's négritude movement, which was intended to create a pan-African movement across national lines. From the 1960s, the decolonization of the Americas led to various Caribbean countries gaining their independence from European colonial rule. They were pre-eminent in creating new cultural forms such as calypso, reggae music, and Rastafari within the Caribbean. Beyond the region, a new Afro-Caribbean diaspora, including such figures as Stokely Carmichael and DJ Kool Herc in the United States, was influential in the creation of the black power and hip hop movements. Influential political theorists such as Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall contributed to anti-colonial theory and movements in Africa, as well as cultural developments in Europe.

Several migration waves to the Americas, as well as relocations within the Americas, have brought people of African descent to North America. According to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the first African populations came to North America in the 16th century via Mexico and the Caribbean to the Spanish colonies of Florida, Texas and other parts of the South. Out of the 12 million people from Africa who were shipped to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade, 645,000 were shipped to the British colonies on the North American mainland and the United States. In 2000, African Americans comprised 12.1 percent of the total population in the United States, constituting the largest racial minority group. The African-American population is concentrated in the southern states and urban areas.

In the establishment of the African diaspora, the transatlantic slave trade is often considered the defining element, but people of African descent have engaged in eleven other migration movements involving North America since the 16th century, many being voluntary migrations, although undertaken in exploitative and hostile environments.

In the 1860s, people from sub-Saharan Africa, mainly from West Africa and the Cape Verde Islands, started to arrive in a voluntary immigration wave to seek employment as whalers in Massachusetts. This migration continued until restrictive laws were enacted in 1921 that in effect closed the door on non-Europeans. By that time, men of African ancestry were already a majority in New England's whaling industry, with African Americans working as sailors, blacksmiths, shipbuilders, officers, and owners. The internationalism of whaling crews, including the character Daggoo, an African harpooneer, is recorded in the 1851 novel Moby-Dick. They eventually took their trade to California.

Today 1.7 million people in the United States are descended from voluntary immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, most of whom arrived in the late twentieth century. African immigrants represent 6 percent of all immigrants to the United States and almost 5 percent of the African-American community nationwide. About 57 percent immigrated between 1990 and 2000. Immigrants born in Africa constitute 1.6 percent of the black population. People of the African immigrant diaspora are the most educated population group in the United States—50 percent have bachelor's or advanced degrees, compared to 23 percent of native-born Americans. The largest African immigrant communities in the United States are in New York, followed by California, Texas, and Maryland.

Due to the legacy of slavery in the colonial history of the United States, the average African American has a significant European component to his DNA. According to a study conducted in 2011, the African American DNA consists on average of 73.2% West African, 24% European and 0.8% Native American DNA. The European ancestry of African Americans is largely patrilineal with an estimated 19% of African American ancestors being European males, and 5% being European females. The interracial mixing occurred before the Civil War and largely in the American South, beginning during the colonial era.

The states with the highest percentages of people of African descent are Mississippi (36%), and Louisiana (33%). While not a state, the population of the District of Columbia is more than 50% black. Recent African immigrants represent a minority of black people nationwide. The U.S. Bureau of the Census categorizes the population by race based on self-identification. The census surveys have no provision for a "multiracial" or "biracial" self-identity, but since 2000, respondents may check off more than one box and claim multiple ethnicity that way.

Much of the earliest black presence in Canada came from the newly independent United States after the American Revolution; the British resettled African Americans (known as Black Loyalists) primarily in Nova Scotia. These were primarily former slaves who had escaped to British lines for promised freedom during the Revolution.

Later during the antebellum years, other individual African Americans escaped to Canada, mostly to locations in Southwestern Ontario, via the Underground Railroad, a system supported by both blacks and whites to assist fugitive slaves. After achieving independence, northern states in the U.S. had begun to abolish slavery as early as 1793, but slavery was not abolished in the South until 1865, following the American Civil War.

Black immigration to Canada in the twentieth century consisted mostly of Caribbean descent. As a result of the prominence of Caribbean immigration, the term "African Canadian", while sometimes used to refer to the minority of Canadian blacks who have direct African or African-American heritage, is not normally used to denote black Canadians. Blacks of Caribbean origin are usually denoted as "West Indian Canadian", "Caribbean Canadian" or more rarely "Afro-Caribbean Canadian", but there remains no widely used alternative to "Black Canadian" which is considered inclusive of the African, Afro-Caribbean, and African-American black communities in Canada.

At an intermediate level, in South America and in the former plantations in and around the Indian Ocean, descendants of enslaved people are a bit harder to define because many people are mixed in demographic proportion to the original slave population. In places that imported relatively few slaves (like Chile), few if any are considered "black" today. In places that imported many enslaved people (like Brazil or Dominican Republic), the number is larger, though most identify themselves as being of mixed, rather than strictly African, ancestry. In places like Brazil and the Dominican Republic, blackness is performed in more taboo ways than it is in, say, the United States. The idea behind Trey Ellis Cultural Mulatto comes into play as there are blurred lines between what is considered as black.

In Colombia, the African slaves were first brought to work in the gold mines of the Department of Antioquia. After this was no longer a profitable business, these slaves slowly moved to the Pacific coast, where they have remained unmixed with the white or Indian population until today. The whole Department of Chocó remains a black area. Mixture with white population happened mainly in the Caribbean coast, which is a mestizo area until today. There was also a greater mixture in the south-western departments of Cauca and Valle del Cauca. In these mestizo areas the African culture has had a great influence.

Some European countries make it illegal to collect demographic census information based on ethnicity or ancestry (e.g. France), but some others do query along racial lines (e.g. the UK). Of 42 countries surveyed by a European Commission against Racism and Intolerance study in 2007, it was found that 29 collected official statistics on country of birth, 37 on citizenship, 24 on religion, 26 on language, 6 on country of birth of parents, and 22 on nationality or ethnicity.

Estimates of 3 to 5 million of African descent, although one quarter of the Afro-French population live in overseas territories. This number is difficult to estimate because the French census does not use race as a category for ideological reasons.

As of 2020, there were approximately 1,000,000 Afro-Germans. This number is difficult to estimate because the German census does not use race as a category.

Some black people of unknown origin once inhabited southern Abkhazia; today, they have been assimilated into the Abkhaz population.

African emigrants to Italy include Italian citizens and residents originally from Africa; immigrants from Africa officially residing in Italy in 2015 numbered over 1 million residents.

There are an estimated 500,000 black people in the Netherlands and the Dutch Antilles. They mainly live in the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao and Saint Martin, the latter of which is also partly French-controlled. Many Afro-Dutch people reside in the Netherlands.

As of 2021, there were at least 232,000 people of recent Black-African immigrant background living in Portugal. They mainly live in the regions of Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra. As Portugal doesn't collect information dealing with ethnicity, the estimate includes only people that, as of 2021, hold the citizenship of a Sub Saharan African country or people who have acquired Portuguese citizenship from 2008 to 2021, thus excluding descendants, people of more distant African ancestry or people who have settled in Portugal generations ago and are now Portuguese citizens.

As of 2021, there were 1,206,701 Africans. They mainly live in the regions of Andalusia, Catalonia, Madrid and the Canaries.

There are about 2,500,000 (4.2%) people identifying as Black British (not including British Mixed), among which are Afro-Caribbeans. They live mostly in urban areas in England.

The first Black people in Russia were the result of the slave trade of the Ottoman Empire and their descendants still live on the coasts of the Black Sea. Czar Peter the Great was advised by his friend Lefort to bring in Africans to Russia for hard labor. Alexander Pushkin's great-grandfather was the African princeling Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who became Peter's protégé, was educated as a military engineer in France, and eventually became general-en-chef, responsible for the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.

During the 1930s fifteen Black American families moved to the Soviet Union as agricultural experts. As African states became independent in the 1960s, the Soviet Union offered their citizens the chance to study in Russia; over 40 years, 400,000 African students came, and some settled there.

Afro-Turks are people of Zanj (Bantu) descent living in Turkey. Like the Afro-Abkhazians, they trace their origins to the Ottoman slave trade. Beginning several centuries ago, a number of Africans came to the Ottoman Empire, usually via Zanzibar as Zanj and from places such as present-day Niger, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Kenya and Sudan; they settled by the Dalaman, Menderes and Gediz valleys, Manavgat, and Çukurova. In the 19th century, contemporary records mention African quarters of İzmir, including Sabırtaşı, Dolapkuyu, Tamaşalık, İkiçeşmelik, and Ballıkuyu. Africans in Turkey are around 100.000 people.

There are a number of communities in South Asia that are descended from African slaves, traders or soldiers. These communities are the Siddi, Sheedi, Makrani and Sri Lanka Kaffirs. In some cases, they became very prominent, such as Jamal-ud-Din Yaqut, Hoshu Sheedi, Malik Ambar, or the rulers of Janjira State. The Mauritian creole people are the descendants of African slaves similar to those in the Americas.

The Siddi (pronounced ), also known as the Sheedi, Sidi, Siddhi, or Habshi, are an ethnic group inhabiting India and Pakistan. Members are mostly descended from the Bantu peoples of Southeast Africa, along with Habesha immigrants. Some were merchants, sailors, indentured servants, slaves and mercenaries. The Siddi population is currently estimated at 850,000 individuals, with Karnataka, Gujarat and Telangana states in India and Makran and Karachi in Pakistan as the main population centres. Siddis are primarily Muslims, although some are Hindus and others belong to the Catholic Church.

Although often economically and socially marginalised as a community today, Siddis once ruled Bengal as the Habshi dynasty of the Bengal Sultanate, while the famous Siddi, Malik Ambar, effectively controlled the Ahmadnagar Sultanate. He played a major role, politically and militarily, in Indian history by slowing down the penetration of the Delhi-based Mughalss into the Deccan Plateau of South central India.

Some Pan-Africanists also consider other peoples as diasporic African peoples. These groups include, among others, Negritos, such as in the case of the peoples of the Malay Peninsula (Orang Asli); New Guinea (Papuans); Andamanese; certain peoples of the Indian subcontinent, and the aboriginal peoples of Melanesia and Micronesia. Most of these claims are rejected by mainstream ethnologists as pseudoscience and pseudo-anthropology, as part of ideologically motivated Afrocentrist irredentism, touted primarily among some extremist elements in the United States who do not reflect on the mainstream African-American community. Mainstream anthropologists determine that the Andamanese and others are part of a network of autochthonous ethnic groups present in South Asia that trace their genetic ancestry to a migratory sequence that culminated in the Australian Aboriginals rather than from Africa directly. Genetic testing has shown the Andamani to belong to the Y-Chromosome Haplogroup D-M174, which is in common with Australian Aboriginals and the Ainu people of Japan rather than the actual African diaspora.

The Kingdom of Aksum was an ancient empire in what is now northern Ethiopia. There were four invasions and subsequent settlements of Aksumites in Himyar, located across the Red Sea in modern-day Yemen. These invasions and settlements led to one of the first large-scale African diasporas in the ancient world.

In 517 AD, the Himyarite king Ma'adikarib was overthrown by Dhu Nuwas, a Jewish leader who began persecuting Christians and confiscating trade goods between Aksum and the Byzantine Empire, both of which were Christian nations. According to the Book of the Himyarites, a man identified as Bishop Thomas journeyed to Aksum to report on the persecution of Christians in Himyar to the Aksumite Kingdom. As a result, the Aksumite king Ahayawa invaded Himyar. Dhu Nuwas fled this first invasion, and at least 580 Aksumite soldiers remained in Himyar. Himyarites who opposed Aksumite settlement united under Dhu Nuwas, and the formerly expelled king traveled back to kill the Aksumite soldiers and continue the oppression of Christians, forcing some settlers back into Aksum.

In response to Dhu Nuwas's Christian persecution, the new Aksumite king Kaleb first sent a group of Himyarite refugees in his Aksumite kingdom back into Himyar to stir up underground resistance against Dhu Nuwas. These discontented Himyarites then united under nobleman Sumyafa Ashwa. Kaleb successfully invaded Himyar with an Aksumite army in 525 and installed Sumyafa Ashwa to rule. More Aksumite soldiers remained in Himyar to claim land. The Byzantine ruler Justinian learned of this development and sent an ambassador, Julianus, to ally Aksum and Himyar with the Byzantine Empire against Persia. The overtures made by the Byzantine Empire to influence Himyar demonstrate that the Aksumite settlers in Himyar, due to their sustained residence and political organization, constituted a "stable community in exile," which historian Carlton Wilson deems a necessary condition to classify a settlement as a diaspora. Justinian had two wishes for this proposed alliance: first, for Aksum to purchase and distribute Indian silk to the Byzantine Empire to undermine Persia economically, and second, for Aksum-ruled Himyar to invade Persia, led by the general Caisus. Both of these plans failed, as Persia's proximity to India made the interruption of their silk trade impossible, and neither Himyar nor Aksum saw value in attacking an adversary that was both stronger and far too distant. Caisus was also responsible for killing a relative of Sumyafa Ashwa's, making Aksumites unwilling to go into battle under him.

A third invasion was prompted by a rebellion of Aksumite soldiers between 532 and 535, led by the former slave and Aksumite commander Abreha, against Sumyafa Ashwa. Kaleb sent 3,000 soldiers to quell this rebellion, led by one of his relatives, but these soldiers joined Abreha's rebellion upon arrival and killed Kaleb's relative. Kaleb sent reinforcements in another attempt to end the rebellion, but his soldiers were defeated and forced to turn around. Following Kaleb's death, Abreha paid tribute to Aksum to reinforce Himyar's independence. The new Himyarite nation consisted of several thousand Aksumite emigrants, serving as one of the earliest examples of a large-scale movement of tropical Africans outside of the continent. Just a century later, Aksum's relationship to this southwestern part of the Arabian peninsula would be pivotal to the introduction of Islam at Mecca and Yathrib (Medina), as evidenced by the naming of Bilal, an Ethiopian, as the first muezzin, and the flight of some of Muhammad's earliest followers from Mecca to Askum.

Although fragmented and separated by land and water, the African Diaspora maintains connection through the use of music. This link between the various sects of the African Diaspora is termed by Paul Gilroy as The Black Atlantic. The Black Atlantic is possible because black people have a shared history rooted in oppression that is displayed in Black genres such as rap and reggae. The linkages within the black diaspora formulated through music allows consumers of music and artists to pull from different cultures to combine and create a conglomerate of experiences that reaches across the world.