The African diaspora spans three slave trades, not one, plus modern migration
When people picture the African diaspora, they usually think of the Atlantic slave trade. But between 1500 and 1900, millions more Africans were forced north across the Sahara or east to Indian Ocean plantations. Their descendants live today from Brazil and Jamaica to Oman, Iran, Turkey and western India.
The word diaspora comes from the Greek for scattering and was first widely used in English for the Jewish dispersal. Applied to Africa, the phrase only became common around the turn of the 21st century. The African Union defines the diaspora as people of full or partial African origin living outside the continent, whatever their citizenship, who are willing to contribute to its development, and it formally invites them to take part in building the Union.
The forced migrations were enormous. Roughly eleven million people were carried to the Americas, about eight million across the Sahara, and some four million to island plantations in the Indian Ocean. Descendants of that eastern trade include Afro-Arab and Afro-Iranian communities and the Siddis of India and Pakistan. In the Americas, the first African to arrive with Europeans was a free man: Pedro Alonso Niño, who piloted for Columbus in 1492. Most who followed were enslaved, their labour demanded as epidemics devastated Indigenous populations.
The numbers today are large. Roughly 43 million Americans trace black African ancestry, and a Pew estimate puts Latin Americans of African descent at around 100 million, though racial categories vary widely between countries. In Brazil in 1888 nearly half the population had African ancestry. Many diaspora definitions count mixed-race people, much as other diasporas include people with a single immigrant grandparent.
Historians increasingly push back on a picture of Africans as passive victims. Patrick Manning argues that black workers stood at the centre of the forces that made the modern world, and thinkers from W. E. B. Du Bois to Robin Kelley have framed the diaspora as a shared struggle rather than a matter of skin tone. Its cultural reach is plain: jazz, samba, reggae, and hip-hop, which Black Americans and Afro-Caribbeans created in the Bronx.
Source: African diaspora
