Diaspora

The African Diaspora

Scholars began adopting the term diaspora as a tool to analyze the experience of people of African descent during the 20th century, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Africans in the diaspora in the United States of America during slavery implicitly expressed the ideas of dispersion and a desire to return to the homeland when they invoked the idea of “Ethiopia,” using biblical imagery, as they pondered the reasons for their suffering. Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement during the first two decades of the 20th century had embedded in it the concept of a homeland to which diasporic black men and women were encouraged to return. However, diaspora as a concept never succeeded in becoming a political tool capable of galvanizing black people and providing a common identity and purpose for those living in the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

The concept of the diaspora has, however, been used implicitly and explicitly by both intellectuals and nonintellectuals, and it has been the focus of and inspiration to many cultural movements and practices in the black world designed to advance black people's agendas. For the sake of completeness, the following is a list of the contributors to the concept noted by scholars: Edward Blyden from the Danish West Indies (now the Virgin Islands); T.E.S. Scholes, J.A. Rogers, Robert Lowe, Marcus Garvey, Leonard Barret, Erna Brodber, Lorna Goodison, and Mutabaruka from Jamaica; Molefi Kete Asante, Sheila Walker, and Wade Nobles from the United States; Arthur Schomberg from Puerto Rico; Jean Price-Mars from Haiti; John Jacob Thomas, George Padmore, C.L.R. James, Chalkdust, Bob Marley, Burning Spear, and Peter Stalin from Jamaica; George James, Norman Cameron, Ivan Van Sertima, and Walter Rodney from Guyana; Aime Césaire, Joseph Zobel, and René Maran from Martinique; George Lamming and Kamau Brathwaite from Barbados; Maryse Condé, Ama Mazama, and Simone Schwartz-Bart from Guadeloupe; and Nicolas Guillen from Cuba. The Rastafarian movement, calypso, reggae, and negritude have all, in one way or the other, contributed to the acceptance of diaspora as a collective term referencing the experience and culture of people of African descent.

In today's usage, the concept of the diaspora has two meanings and purposes. First, as a layperson's term, it has been applied to all peoples of African descent who are scattered around the globe in countries such as France, Great Britain, Brazil, Belize, Mexico, the United States of America, and virtually every Caribbean island. Interestingly, some experts have recently included a segment of the Indian population, the Dalits (formerly known as the untouchables), as a black diaspora, and many Dalits now claim to be of African ancestry and identify their struggle with that of the African Americans from whom they take inspiration. These and others make up part of what some scholars have called the Afro-Asian diaspora, whose constitutive element was the Indian Ocean slave trade carried out mainly by the Arabs and Middle Eastern traders and merchants. The third layer of the black diaspora is made up of voluntary migrants who have left their African homeland and are now found in other parts of the world, especially France, Great Britain, and the United States. Therefore, viewed from this vantage point, the African diaspora is a set of communities, not a sovereign state with its own language, and connotes simultaneously a process and a condition.

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