African diaspora

The African diaspora refers to people around the world whose ancestors came from Africa. Most often, it describes the descendants of West and Central Africans who were taken from their homes and forced into Atlantic slave trade in the Americas between the 1500s and 1800s. Today, large African diaspora communities can be found in places like Brazil, the United States, and Haiti. via Google Books The term can also include people of African descent who moved to other parts of the world. Experts describe this movement from Africa in four main waves.Harris, J. E. (1993). "Introduction" In J. E. Harris (ed.), Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, pp. 8–9.

The phrase "African diaspora" became commonly used around the start of the 21st century. The word "diaspora" comes from a Greek word  (diaspora which means "scattering"). It was first used in English to talk about the Jewish diaspora, and later began to describe other groups who moved away from their original homeland.In an article published in 1991, William Safran set out six rules to distinguish "diasporas" from general migrant communities. While Safran's definitions were influenced by the idea of the Jewish diaspora, he recognised the expanding use of the term. Rogers Brubaker (2005) also noted that use of the term "diaspora" had started to take on an increasingly general sense. He suggests that one element of this expansion in use "involves the application of the term diaspora to an ever-broadening set of cases: essentially to any and every nameable population category that is to some extent dispersed in space". An early example of the use of "African diaspora" appears in the title of Sidney Lemelle, Robin D. G. Kelley, Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora  (1994). Sometimes, scholars also use the term to talk about more recent migration from Africa.

The African Union (AU) defines the African diaspora as people who are fully or partly of African origin and live outside Africa, no matter their citizenship or nationality, but who are willing to help develop Africa and support the goals of the African Union. The AU’s founding document also says it will invite and support the full involvement of the African diaspora in building the African Union.

 History 

 Dispersal through slave trade 

Many Africans were taken to different parts of the world—including North America, South America, Europe, and Asia—during the Atlantic, Trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades.

The first known records of Africans being slaves outside Africa come from Ancient Greece and Rome. Back in the Greco-Roman world, Africans were usually called Aithiopians, a name connected to a star group (constellation) called Cepheus. In Greek stories, Cepheus was the king of Ethiopia. The name Cepheus also means “gardener” in Greek, and it includes a special star called Delta Cephei. This star helps scientists measure distances in space.

Most Aithiopian slaves came from Kush, which is now part of Sudan.They were often captured during wars (prisoners of war) with Egypt. However, only a small number of slaves in Greece and Rome were Aithiopian because it was hard to bring them from so far away. These slaves usually worked in homes or as entertainers, which suggests they were seen as luxury items. For example, the Roman Emperor Nero once filled an entire theater with Aithiopian slaves to show off Rome's wealth and power to a visiting foreign king.

In the early 700s, Arabs took African slaves from central and eastern Africa. These Africans were called the Zanj. They were sold to places in the Middle East, India, and the Far East to work as slaves in powerful Muslim empires like the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Mamluk Sultanate, and the Ottoman Empire.

From the early 1400s (15th century), Europeans started capturing or buying African slaves from West Africa. At first, they took them to Europe. Later, when Europeans began settling in the Americas in the late 1400s, they sent many of these African slaves there too. The Atlantic slave trade ended in the 1800s (19th century).

This forced movement of people is one of the largest in human history. It caused great harm to Africa. Many young people were taken away, and whole communities were damaged.

Some communities made up of African slaves' descendants still exist today in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. In other cases, African slaves married people from other groups, and their descendants became part of the local population.

In the Americas, people from many different ethnic backgrounds came together, creating mixed societies. In Central and South America, most people today have ancestors from Europe, Native American groups, and Africa. By 1888 in Brazil, nearly half the people were descended from African slaves, and their looks showed a wide mix of features (Northern Tier).

In the United States, there were more European settlers compared to African slaves, especially in the North. In places like colonial Virginia, there was a lot of intermarriage between races, both during and after slavery.

After the Civil War (1861–1865) and the Reconstruction period (1863–1877), southern states passed laws to keep races separate. These included Jim Crow laws and bans on interracial marriage. In the late 1800s (19th century) and early 1900s (20th century), many new European immigrants also arrived, which helped keep racial groups more separate.

In the early 1900s, many southern states used a rule called the "one drop rule." This rule said that if a person had even a small amount of African ancestry, they were legally considered Black. This caused problems for people from mixed backgrounds—especially Native American groups—who were often wrongly labeled as only Black, and their Native identity was erased in official records.

 Related pages 
 African apologies for the Atlantic slave trade

 References 

 Further reading 








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 Other websites 

 "The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World" , Omar H. Ali, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
 The History of Black People in Britain
 "Museum of the African Diaspora", Online exhibits and other resources from the San Francisco-based museum.
 The African Diaspora Policy Centre (ADPC)

Category:African people