African diaspora

Many Africans dispersed throughout North America, South America, Europe, and Asia during the Atlantic, Trans-Saharan, and Indian Ocean slave trades.

The earliest recorded evidence of Africans as slaves outside of Africa comes from Ancient Greece and Rome. In the Greco-Roman world, almost all native Africans were known primarily as Aithiopians, a term that means "burnt face" (αἴθω, aíthō, 'I burn' + ὤψ, ṓps, 'face'), rather than referring to the geographical location of Ethiopia.[47] Most Aithiopian slaves in the Greco-Roman world came from Kush (modern-day Sudan), after they became prisoners of war in altercations with nearby Egypt. Archaeological evidence shows that a very small proportion of slaves in the Greco-Roman world were Aithiopian, in part due to the distance required for import. Aithiopian slaves were primarily engaged in domestic and entertainment work, leading archaeologists to believe that they were considered an expensive luxury. In one ostentatious display, the Roman Emperor Nero filled a theater with Aithiopian slaves to demonstrate the wealth and power of Rome to a visiting foreign king.[48]

At the beginning of the 8th century, Arabs took African slaves from the central and eastern portions of the African continent (where they were known as the Zanj) and sold them into markets in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and the Far East.

Beginning in the early 15th century, Europeans captured or bought African slaves from West Africa and brought them first to Europe and then, after the start of European colonization there in the late 15th century, to the Americas. The Atlantic slave trade ended in the 19th century.[49] The dispersal through slave trading represents the largest forced migrations in human history. The economic effect on the African continent proved devastating, as generations of young people were taken from their communities and societies were disrupted. Some communities formed by descendants of African slaves in the Americas, Europe, and Asia have survived to the present day. In other cases, native Ethnic groups of Africans intermarried with non-native Africans, and their descendants blended into the local population.

In the Americas, the confluence of multiple ethnic groups from around the world contributed to multi-ethnic societies. In Central and South America, most people are descended from European, Native American, and African ancestry. In 1888, in Brazil nearly half the population descended from African slaves, the variation of physical characteristics extends across a broad range. In the United States, there was historically a greater European colonial population in relation to African slaves, especially in the Northern Tier. There was considerable racial intermarriage in colonial Virginia, and other forms of racial mixing during the slavery and post-Civil War years. Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws passed after the 1863–1877 Reconstruction era in the South in the late-19th century, plus waves of vastly increased immigration from Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, maintained much distinction between racial groups. In the early-20th century, to institutionalize racial segregation, most southern states adopted the "one drop rule", which defined and recorded anyone with any discernible African ancestry as "black", even those of obvious majority native European or of majority-Native-American ancestry.[50] One of the results of this implementation was the loss of records of Native-identified groups, who were classified only as black because of being mixed-race.[51]

From the very onset of Spanish exploration and colonial activities in the Americas, Africans participated both as voluntary expeditionary and as slave laborers.[40][52] Juan Garrido was such an African conquistador. He crossed the Atlantic as a freedman in the 1510s and participated in the siege of Tenochtitlan.[53] Africans had been present in Asia and Europe long before Columbus's travels. In the late 20th century, Africans began to emigrate to Europe and the Americas in increasing numbers, constituting new African diaspora communities not directly connected with the slave trade.[54]

20th-century American philosopher and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote extensively on the black experience in his homeland and abroad; he spent the last two years of his life in the newly independent Ghana and got citizenship there.

Many scholars have challenged conventional views of the African diaspora as a mere dispersion of African people. For them, it is a movement of liberation that opposes the implications of racialization. Their position assumes that Africans and their descendants abroad struggle to reclaim power over their lives through voluntary migration, cultural production and political conceptions and practices. It also implies the presence of cultures of resistance with similar objectives throughout the global diaspora. Thinkers like W. E. B. Dubois and more recently Robin Kelley, for example, have argued that black politics of survival reveal more about the meaning of the African diaspora than labels of ethnicity and race, and degrees of skin hue. From this view, the daily struggle against what they call the "world-historical processes" of racial colonization, capitalism, and Western domination defines blacks' links to Africa.[56]

In the last decades, studies on the African diaspora have shown an interest in the roles that Africans played in bringing about modernity. This trend also opposes the traditional eurocentric perspective that has dominated history books showing Africans and its diasporans as primitive victims of slavery, and without historical agency. According to historian Patrick Manning, blacks toiled at the center of forces that created the modern world. Paul Gilroy describes the suppression of blackness due to imagined and created ideals of nations as "cultural insiderism." Cultural insiderism is used by nations to separate deserving and undeserving groups[57] and requires a "sense of ethnic difference" as mentioned in his book The Black Atlantic. Recognizing their contributions offers a comprehensive appreciation of global history.[58]

Cultural and political theorist Richard Iton suggested that diaspora be understood as a "culture of dislocation." For Iton, the traditional approach to the African diaspora focuses on the ruptures associated with the Atlantic slave trade and Middle Passage, notions of dispersal, and "the cycle of retaining, redeeming, refusing, and retrieving 'Africa.'"[59]^: 199 This conventional framework for analyzing the diaspora is dangerous, according to Iton, because it presumes that diaspora exists outside of Africa, thus simultaneously disowning and desiring Africa. Further, Iton suggests a new starting principle for the use of diaspora: "the impossibility of settlement that correlates throughout the modern period with the cluster of disturbances that trouble not only the physically dispersed but those moved without traveling."[59]^{: 199–200} Iton adds that this impossibility of settlement—this "modern matrix of strange spaces—outside the state but within the empire"—renders notions of black citizenship fanciful, and in fact, "undesirable". Iton argues that we citizenship, a state of statelessness thereby deconstructing colonial sites and narratives in an effort to "de-link geography and power," putting "all space into play" (emphasis added)[59]^{: 199–200} For Iton, diaspora's potential is represented by a "rediscursive albeit agonistic field of play that might denaturalize the hegemonic representations of modernity as unencumbered and self-generating and bring into clear view its repressed, colonial subscript".[59]^: 201

Haiti has the largest Afro-Caribbean population (almost 11 million) and also has the highest percentage of its population descended from the African diaspora (95%).

The first Africans in the Americas arrived in the region during the initial period of European colonization. In 1492, Afro-Spanish sailor Pedro Alonso Niño served as a pilot on the voyages of Christopher Columbus; though he returned to the Americas in 1499, Niño did not settle in the region.[92] By the early 16th century, more Africans began to arrive in Spanish colonies in the Americas, sometimes as free people of color, but the majority were enslaved. Demand of African labor increased as the indigenous population of the Americas experienced a massive population decline due to the introduction of Eurasian infectious diseases (such as smallpox) to which they had no natural immunity. The Spanish Crown granted asientos (monopoly contracts) to merchants granting them the right to supply enslaved Africans in to Spanish colonies in the Americas, regulating the trade. As other European nations began establishing colonies in the Americas, these new colonies began importing enslaved Africans as well.[93]

During the 17th and 18th centuries, most European colonies in the Caribbean operated on plantation economies fueled by slave labor, and the resulting importation of enslaved Africans meant that Afro-Caribbeans soon far outnumbered their European enslavers in terms of population.[94] Roughly eleven to twelve million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade.[55]

Beginning in 1791, the Haitian Revolution, a slave rebellion by self-emancipated slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue eventually led to the creation of the Republic of Haiti. The new state, led by Jean Jacques Dessalines was the first nation in the Americas to be established from a successful slave revolt and represented a challenge to the existing slave systems in the region.[95] Continuous waves of slave rebellions, such as the Baptist War led by Samuel Sharpe in British Jamaica, created the conditions for the incremental abolition of slavery in the region, with Great Britain abolishing it in the 1830s. The Spanish colony of Cuba was the last Caribbean island to emancipate its slaves.[96]

During the 20th century, Afro-Caribbean people began to assert their cultural, economic and political rights on the world stage. The Jamaican Marcus Garvey formed the UNIA movement in the United States, continuing with Aimé Césaire's négritude movement, which was intended to create a pan-African movement across national lines. From the 1960s, the decolonization of the Americas led to various Caribbean countries gaining their independence from European colonial rule. They were pre-eminent in creating new cultural forms such as calypso, reggae music, and Rastafari within the Caribbean. Beyond the region, a new Afro-Caribbean diaspora, including such figures as Stokely Carmichael and DJ Kool Herc in the United States, was influential in the creation of the black power and hip hop movements. Influential political theorists such as Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall contributed to anti-colonial theory and movements in Africa, as well as cultural developments in Europe.

Several migration waves to the Americas, as well as relocations within the Americas, have brought people of African descent to North America. According to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the first African populations came to North America in the 16th century via Mexico and the Caribbean to the Spanish colonies of Florida, Texas and other parts of the South.[97] Out of the 12 million people from Africa who were shipped to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade,[98] 645,000 were shipped to the British colonies on the North American mainland and the United States.[94] In 2000, African Americans comprised 12.1 percent of the total population in the United States, constituting the largest racial minority group. The African-American population is concentrated in the southern states and urban areas.[99]

In the establishment of the African diaspora, the transatlantic slave trade is often considered the defining element, but people of African descent have engaged in eleven other migration movements involving North America since the 16th century, many being voluntary migrations, although undertaken in exploitative and hostile environments.[97]

In the 1860s, people from sub-Saharan Africa, mainly from West Africa and the Cape Verde Islands, started to arrive in a voluntary immigration wave to seek employment as whalers in Massachusetts. This migration continued until restrictive laws were enacted in 1921 that in effect closed the door on non-Europeans. By that time, men of African ancestry were already a majority in New England's whaling industry, with African Americans working as sailors, blacksmiths, shipbuilders, officers, and owners. The internationalism of whaling crews, including the character Daggoo, an African harpooneer, is recorded in the 1851 novel Moby-Dick. They eventually took their trade to California.[100]

Today 1.7 million people in the United States are descended from voluntary immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, most of whom arrived in the late twentieth century. African immigrants represent 6 percent of all immigrants to the United States and almost 5 percent of the African-American community nationwide. About 57 percent immigrated between 1990 and 2000.[101] Immigrants born in Africa constitute 1.6 percent of the black population. People of the African immigrant diaspora are the most educated population group in the United States—50 percent have bachelor's or advanced degrees, compared to 23 percent of native-born Americans.[102][103] The largest African immigrant communities in the United States are in New York, followed by California, Texas, and Maryland.[101]

Due to the legacy of slavery in the colonial history of the United States, the average African American has a significant European component to his DNA.[104] According to a study conducted in 2011, the African American DNA consists on average of 73.2% West African, 24% European and 0.8% Native American DNA.[104] The European ancestry of African Americans is largely patrilineal with an estimated 19% of African American ancestors being European males, and 5% being European females.[104] The interracial mixing occurred before the Civil War and largely in the American South, beginning during the colonial era.[104]

The states with the highest percentages of people of African descent are Mississippi (36%), and Louisiana (33%). While not a state, the population of the District of Columbia is more than 50% black.[105] Recent African immigrants represent a minority of black people nationwide. The U.S. Bureau of the Census categorizes the population by race based on self-identification.[106] The census surveys have no provision for a "multiracial" or "biracial" self-identity, but since 2000, respondents may check off more than one box and claim multiple ethnicity that way.

Much of the earliest black presence in Canada came from the newly independent United States after the American Revolution; the British resettled African Americans (known as Black Loyalists) primarily in Nova Scotia. These were primarily former slaves who had escaped to British lines for promised freedom during the Revolution.

Later during the antebellum years, other individual African Americans escaped to Canada, mostly to locations in Southwestern Ontario, via the Underground Railroad, a system supported by both blacks and whites to assist fugitive slaves. After achieving independence, northern states in the U.S. had begun to abolish slavery as early as 1793, but slavery was not abolished in the South until 1865, following the American Civil War.

Black immigration to Canada in the twentieth century consisted mostly of Caribbean descent.[107] As a result of the prominence of Caribbean immigration, the term "African Canadian", while sometimes used to refer to the minority of Canadian blacks who have direct African or African-American heritage, is not normally used to denote black Canadians. Blacks of Caribbean origin are usually denoted as "West Indian Canadian", "Caribbean Canadian" or more rarely "Afro-Caribbean Canadian", but there remains no widely used alternative to "Black Canadian" which is considered inclusive of the African, Afro-Caribbean, and African-American black communities in Canada.

The racial make-up of the Dominican Republic includes many Afro-Caribbeans, mestizos, Taíno-descended persons, and whites.

At an intermediate level, in South America and in the former plantations in and around the Indian Ocean, descendants of enslaved people are a bit harder to define because many people are mixed in demographic proportion to the original slave population. In places that imported relatively few slaves (like Chile), few if any are considered "black" today.[108] In places that imported many enslaved people (like Brazil or Dominican Republic), the number is larger, though most identify themselves as being of mixed, rather than strictly African, ancestry.[109] In places like Brazil and the Dominican Republic, blackness is performed in more taboo ways than it is in, say, the United States. The idea behind Trey Ellis Cultural Mulatto comes into play as there are blurred lines between what is considered as black.

In Colombia, the African slaves were first brought to work in the gold mines of the Department of Antioquia. After this was no longer a profitable business, these slaves slowly moved to the Pacific coast, where they have remained unmixed with the white or Indian population until today. The whole Department of Chocó remains a black area. Mixture with white population happened mainly in the Caribbean coast, which is a mestizo area until today. There was also a greater mixture in the south-western departments of Cauca and Valle del Cauca. In these mestizo areas the African culture has had a great influence.[110]

Estimates of 3 to 5 million of African descent,[111] although one quarter of the Afro-French population live in overseas territories. This number is difficult to estimate because the French census does not use race as a category for ideological reasons.[112]

As of 2020, there were approximately 1,000,000 Afro-Germans.[113] This number is difficult to estimate because the German census does not use race as a category.[114]

Some black people of unknown origin once inhabited southern Abkhazia; today, they have been assimilated into the Abkhaz population.

African emigrants to Italy include Italian citizens and residents originally from Africa; immigrants from Africa officially residing in Italy in 2015 numbered over 1 million residents.[115]

There are an estimated 500,000 African or mixed African people in the Netherlands and the Dutch Antilles. They mainly live in the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao and Saint Martin, the latter of which is also partly French-controlled. Many Afro-Dutch people reside in the Netherlands.[116]

As of 2021, there were at least 232,000 people of recent Native African immigrant background living in Portugal. They mainly live in the regions of Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra. As Portugal doesn't collect information dealing with ethnicity, the estimate includes only people that, as of 2021, hold the citizenship of an African country or people who have acquired Portuguese citizenship from 2008 to 2021, thus excluding descendants, people of more distant African ancestry or people who have settled in Portugal generations ago and are now Portuguese citizens.[117][118]

As of 2021, there were 1,206,701 Africans. They mainly live in the regions of Andalusia, Catalonia, Madrid and the Canaries.[119]

There are about 2,500,000 (4.2%) people identifying as Black British (not including British Mixed), among which are Afro-Caribbeans. They live mostly in urban areas in England.

The first Black people in Russia were the result of the slave trade of the Ottoman Empire[120] and their descendants still live on the coasts of the Black Sea. Czar Peter the Great was advised by his friend Lefort to bring in Africans to Russia for hard labor. Alexander Pushkin's great-grandfather was the African princeling Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who became Peter's protégé, was educated as a military engineer in France, and eventually became general-en-chef, responsible for the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.[121][122]

During the 1930s fifteen Black American families moved to the Soviet Union as agricultural experts.[123] As African states became independent in the 1960s, the Soviet Union offered their citizens the chance to study in Russia; over 40 years, 400,000 African students came, and some settled there.[120][124]

Afro-Turks are people of Zanj (Bantu) descent living in Turkey. Like the Afro-Abkhazians, they trace their origins to the Ottoman slave trade. Beginning several centuries ago, a number of Africans came to the Ottoman Empire, usually via Zanzibar as Zanj and from places such as present-day Niger, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Kenya and Sudan;[125] they settled by the Dalaman, Menderes and Gediz valleys, Manavgat, and Çukurova. In the 19th century, contemporary records mention African quarters of İzmir, including Sabırtaşı, Dolapkuyu, Tamaşalık, İkiçeşmelik, and Ballıkuyu.[126] Africans in Turkey are around 100.000 people. [34]

A group of Siddi from the state of Gujarat in India

There are a number of communities in South Asia that are descended from African slaves, traders or soldiers.[127] These communities are the Siddi, Sheedi, Makrani and Sri Lanka Kaffirs.[128] In some cases, they became very prominent, such as Jamal-ud-Din Yaqut, Hoshu Sheedi, Malik Ambar,[129] or the rulers of Janjira State. The Mauritian creole people are the descendants of African slaves similar to those in the Americas.

The Siddi (pronounced [sɪd̪d̪i]), also known as the Sheedi, Sidi, Siddhi, or Habshi, are an ethnic group inhabiting India and Pakistan. Members are mostly descended from the Bantu peoples of Southeast Africa, along with Habesha immigrants. Some were merchants, sailors, indentured servants, slaves and mercenaries.[130] The Siddi population is currently estimated at 850,000 individuals, with Karnataka, Gujarat and Telangana states in India and Makran and Karachi in Pakistan[104] as the main population centres.[131] Siddis are primarily Muslims, although some are Hindus and others belong to the Catholic Church.[132]

Although often economically and socially marginalised as a community today, Siddis once ruled Bengal as the Habshi dynasty of the Bengal Sultanate, while the famous Siddi, Malik Ambar, effectively controlled the Ahmadnagar Sultanate. He played a major role, politically and militarily, in Indian history by slowing down the penetration of the Delhi-based Mughalss into the Deccan Plateau of South central India.[133]

Some Pan-Africanists also consider other peoples as diasporic African peoples. These groups include, among others, Negritos, such as in the case of the peoples of the Malay Peninsula (Orang Asli);[134] New Guinea (Papuans);[135] Andamanese; certain peoples of the Indian subcontinent,[136][137] and the aboriginal peoples of Melanesia and Micronesia.[138][139] Most of these claims are rejected by mainstream ethnologists as pseudoscience and pseudo-anthropology, as part of ideologically motivated Afrocentrist irredentism, touted primarily among some extremist elements in the United States who do not reflect on the mainstream African-American community.[140] Mainstream anthropologists determine that the Andamanese and others are part of a network of autochthonous ethnic groups present in South Asia that trace their genetic ancestry to a migratory sequence that culminated in the Australian Aboriginals rather than from Africa directly.[141][142][143] Genetic testing has shown the Andamani to belong to the Y-Chromosome Haplogroup D-M174, which is in common with Australian Aboriginals and the Ainu people of Japan rather than the actual African diaspora.[144]

The Kingdom of Aksum at its height, with a presence on the Arabian peninsula outside of the African continent

The Kingdom of Aksum was an ancient empire in what is now northern Ethiopia. There were four invasions and subsequent settlements of Aksumites in Himyar, located across the Red Sea in modern-day Yemen. These invasions and settlements led to one of the first large-scale African diasporas in the ancient world.

In 517 AD, the Himyarite king Ma'adikarib was overthrown by Dhu Nuwas, a Jewish leader who began persecuting Christians[145] and confiscating trade goods between Aksum and the Byzantine Empire,[146] both of which were Christian nations.[147] According to the Book of the Himyarites, a man identified as Bishop Thomas journeyed to Aksum to report on the persecution of Christians in Himyar to the Aksumite Kingdom.[148] As a result, the Aksumite king Ahayawa invaded Himyar.[149] Dhu Nuwas fled this first invasion,[150] and at least 580 Aksumite soldiers remained in Himyar.[151] Himyarites who opposed Aksumite settlement united under Dhu Nuwas,[152] and the formerly expelled king traveled back to kill the Aksumite soldiers and continue the oppression of Christians, forcing some settlers back into Aksum.[153]

Coin of Kaleb

In response to Dhu Nuwas's Christian persecution, the new Aksumite king Kaleb first sent a group of Himyarite refugees in his Aksumite kingdom back into Himyar to stir up underground resistance against Dhu Nuwas. These discontented Himyarites then united under nobleman Sumyafa Ashwa.[154] Kaleb successfully invaded Himyar with an Aksumite army in 525 and installed Sumyafa Ashwa to rule.[155] [156] More Aksumite soldiers remained in Himyar to claim land.[157] The Byzantine ruler Justinian learned of this development and sent an ambassador, Julianus, to ally Aksum and Himyar with the Byzantine Empire against Persia. The overtures made by the Byzantine Empire to influence Himyar demonstrate that the Aksumite settlers in Himyar, due to their sustained residence and political organization, constituted a "stable community in exile," which historian Carlton Wilson deems a necessary condition to classify a settlement as a diaspora.[158] Justinian had two wishes for this proposed alliance: first, for Aksum to purchase and distribute Indian silk to the Byzantine Empire to undermine Persia economically, and second, for Aksum-ruled Himyar to invade Persia, led by the general Caisus. Both of these plans failed, as Persia's proximity to India made the interruption of their silk trade impossible, and neither Himyar nor Aksum saw value in attacking an adversary that was both stronger and far too distant. Caisus was also responsible for killing a relative of Sumyafa Ashwa's, making Aksumites unwilling to go into battle under him.[159]

A third invasion was prompted by a rebellion of Aksumite soldiers between 532 and 535,[160] led by the former slave[157] and Aksumite commander[160] Abreha, against Sumyafa Ashwa. Kaleb sent 3,000 soldiers to quell this rebellion, led by one of his relatives, but these soldiers joined Abreha's rebellion upon arrival and killed Kaleb's relative. Kaleb sent reinforcements in another attempt to end the rebellion, but his soldiers were defeated and forced to turn around. Following Kaleb's death, Abreha paid tribute to Aksum to reinforce Himyar's independence.[157] The new Himyarite nation consisted of several thousand Aksumite emigrants, serving as one of the earliest examples of a large-scale movement of tropical Africans outside of the continent. Just a century later, Aksum's relationship to this southwestern part of the Arabian peninsula would be pivotal to the introduction of Islam at Mecca and Yathrib (Medina), as evidenced by the naming of Bilal,[161] an Ethiopian,[162] as the first muezzin, and the flight of some of Muhammad's earliest followers from Mecca to Askum.[163]