ጥቂት ስለ ኣፍሪካ ዳይስፖራ

African Diaspora

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.

Defining Diasporas

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 termdiaspora 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.

African Dispersals

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.

African Diasporas in Asia and Europe

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 ArabicKafir, 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

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, inAfrican 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.

The New African Diasporas

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).

Diaspora Linkages

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 .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, Cengage Learning.

Source Citation

Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. "African Diaspora." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz. Vol. 2. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005. 578-583.Student Resources in Context. Web. 3 Oct. 2014.

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