Diaspora

Background of the Concept

Diaspora derives from the Greek verb speiro (to sow) and the preposition dia (over) and was first applied by ancient Greeks to signify expansion, migration, and settler colonization. Earlier conceptions of diaspora have changed to acquire new definitions and meanings, partly representing a collective trauma, forced exile with myths of home and return. The biblical exile of the Jews represents one classical notion of diaspora. In recent times, diverse ethnic-national groups living outside their local communities and countries of origin who maintain collective identities have often engaged in self-description as diaspora. One unifying thread of diasporic communities is their settlement, temporary or permanent, outside their imagined old-home, natal territories.

African diaspora was employed from the mid-1950s and 1960s when the discourse on the historical phenomenon of dispersion and settlement of Africans abroad began to lay claim to diaspora as a descriptive label. The African diaspora assumes a dynamic character of an ongoing, complex process located across space-time. It embodies the voluntary and forced dispersion of Africans, their descendants, and their cultures at different historical phases and into diverse directions (such as the Americas, Europe, Asia, Mediterranean, Arab worlds, and the cross-migration within Africa). In recent years, African diaspora is transforming to include a rising influx of voluntary as well as forced emigrants, refuge-seekers, and refugees within and beyond the continent. African diaspora is one theoretical construct to describe this global dispersal of indigenous African populations at different phases of world history.

Historical Perspective

The transcultural encounter between Africa and the rest of the world is not a recent phenomenon. Contacts between Europe and Africa in particular were constant throughout Europe's Antiquity, Middle Ages, and the so-called Modern Age. European presence and interest in Africa through these periods is split along the contours of commerce, politics, and religion. The imperial expansionist agenda generated new situations and posed as a catalyst toward diaspora formation. One inherent consequence was in creating situations that brought Africans at varied times to Europe and the New World.

The emergence of diaspora communities is linked to different waves of emigration. The earliest included virile Africans collected in human trafficking and moved involuntarily to various metropolises in Europe and the Americas. Prior to the transatlantic African diaspora, Africans had prolonged encounters of slave trade and forced migration during the Islamic hegemony of the 7th and 8th centuries, in which slaves were trafficked across the Sahara, up the Nile Valley and the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and India. Survivors of these ordeals constituted the first African diaspora enclaves.

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