The African diaspora was the movement of Africans and their descendants to places throughout the world - predominantly to the Americas, then later to Europe, the Middle East and other places around the globe. Much of the African diaspora is descended from people who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade, with the largest population living in Brazil (see Afro-Brazilian). People of Sub-Saharan descent number over 900 million, representing around 14% of the world's population.

History

Based on human genetics, it is widely believed that prehistoric Africans who left the continent within the past 100,000 years are the ancestors of all non-African humans. But as communities began to form, especially in Egypt and the Middle East, these migrations were greatly reduced because the only land route out of the African continent is through the Sinai Peninsula. After the rise of civilization and the development of sailing, black Africans traveled to the Middle East, Europe, and Asia in a number of occupations. Many of these individuals settled in Europe and Asia and invariably intermarried with the local populations. Today, human genetic research suggests that mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome haplotypes in Europeans and Asians have distant African ancestry. But these early migrations out of Africa are dwarfed by those associated with the Atlantic and Arab slave trades.^[1]

Dispersal through slavery

Much of the African diaspora was dispersed throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas during the Atlantic and Arab Slave Trades. Beginning in the 9th century, African slaves were taken from the northern and eastern portions of the continent into the Middle East and Asia. Then beginning in the 15th century, Africans were taken from much of the rest of the continent, especially West Africa, to Europe and later to the Americas. Both the Arab and Atlantic slave trades ended in the 19th century.^[2]

The dispersal through slave trading represents one of the largest migrations in human history. The economic effect on the African continent was devastating. Some communities created by descendants of Black African slaves in Europe and Asia have survived to the modern day, but in other cases, blacks intermarried with non-blacks and their descendants blended into the local population. In the Americas, the confluence of multiple racial groups from around the world created a widespread mixing bowl effect. In Central and South America most people are descended from European, American Indian, and African ancestry. In Brazil, where in 1888 nearly half the population was descended from African slaves, the variation of physical characteristics extends across a broad range. In the United States, racist Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws maintained a distinction between racial groups. The adoption of the one drop rule defined anyone with any discernible African ancestry as African, even though the strictest application of that rule would categorize nearly all Americans as African.^[1]

Dispersal through migration

From the very onset of Spanish activity in the Americas, Africans were present both as voluntary expeditionaries and as involuntary colonists.^{[3] [4]} Juan Garrido was one such black conquistador. He crossed the Atlantic as a freedman in the 1510s and participated in the siege of Tenochtitlan.^[5]

African immigration has become the primary force in the modern diaspora. It is estimated that the current population of recent African immigrants to the United States alone is over 600,000.^[6]. Countries with the most immigrants to the U.S. are Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and South Africa. Some immigrants have come from Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique(see Luso American), Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, and Cameroon. Immigrants typically congregate in urban areas, moving to suburban areas over time.

There are significant populations of African immigrants in many other countries around the world, including the UK^[7] and France.^[8][9]

Definitions

The African Union defined the African diaspora as "[consisting] of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union." Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African Diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union."

Between 1500 and 1900, approximately four million enslaved Black Africans were transported to island plantations in the Indian Ocean, about eight million were shipped to Mediterranean-area countries, and about eleven million survived the Middle Passage to the New World.^[10] Their descendants are now found around the globe. Due to intermarriage and genetic assimilation, just who is a descendant of the Black African diaspora is not entirely self-evident.

A few examples of populations on continents away from Africa who are seen as "Black" or who see themselves as "Black" because they descend from Black Africans are:

• African Americans

• Afro-Latin Americans. Among these populations in South and Central America are those who identify as negros. Some identify as Afro-Latin Americans when they have high levels of admixture of other ethnicities, as well.

• Afro-Arabs. Various people of the Middle East whose ancestors were brought during the Arab slave trade period.^[11]

• Siddis. Inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent (Pakistan and India) of Black African descent.

Estimated population and distribution

(*)Note that population statistics from different sources and countries use highly divergent methods of rating the "race", ethnicity, or national or genetic origin of individuals, from observing for color and racial characteristics, to asking the person to choose from a set of pre-defined choices, sometimes with an Other category, and sometimes with an open-ended option, and sometimes not, which different national populations tend to choose in divergent ways. Color and visual characteristics were considered an invalid way to determine the genetic "racial" branch in anthopology (the field of science that original conceived of "race", as a genetic branch of people who could have a relative success together compared with other branches, now considered invalid) as of 1910, thus not fully reflecting the percentage of the population who actually are of African heritage.

Top 12 African diaspora populations

North America

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.^[28] Out of the 12 million people from Africa who were shipped to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade,^[29] 645,000 were shipped to the British colonies on the North American mainland and the United States; another 1,840,000 arrived at other British colonies, chiefly the West Indies.^[30] 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.^[31]

In the construction 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.^[28]

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, but 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, eventually bringing their trade to California.^[32]

1.7 million people in the United States are descended from voluntary immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. 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.^[33] 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.^[34] The largest African immigrant communities in the United States are in New York, followed by California, Texas, and Maryland.^[33] The states with the highest percentages of Africans in their total populations are the District of Columbia, followed by Mississippi, and Louisiana. Refugees represent a minority.

U.S. Bureau of the Census categorizes the population by race based on self-identification.^[35] 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.

Latin America

At an intermediate level, in Latin 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 Argentina or Chile), few if any are considered Black today.^[36] In places that imported many enslaved people (like Brazil or Dominican Republic), the number is larger, but most are of mixed ancestry.^[37]

Europe

United Kingdom

2 million (not inc. British Mixed) split evenly between African-Caribbeans and Africans, see also Black British.

see: Black British

France

Estimates of 3 to 5 million of African descent, although 1/4 of the Afro-French or French African population live in overseas territories^[38].

Netherlands

About 300,000 of Surinamese and Dutch Antilles descent. Mainly live in the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao and Saint Martin, but many Afro-Dutch people live in the Netherlands.

Russia

The first blacks in Russia were the result of slave trade by the Ottoman empire^[39] and their descendants still live on the coasts of the Black Sea. Czar Peter the Great was recommended by his friend Lefort to bring in Africans to Russia for hard labor. Alexander Pushkin was the descendant of the African slave Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who became Peter's protege, 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.^[40][41]

During the 1930s fifteen Black American families moved to the Soviet Union as agricultural experts.^[42]As African states became independent in the 1960s, the Soviet Union offered them the chance to study in Russia; over 40 years, 400,000 African students came, and many settled there.^[43][39]

Note that there are also non-African people within the former Soviet Union who are colloquially referred to as "the blacks" (chernye). Gypsies, Georgians, and Tatars fall into this category ^[44].

See also: Racism in modern Russia.

Turkey

Afro-Turks, gives an estimate of 2 million for the people of (full or partial) African ancestry (of any skin color), who live on the littoral between Antalya and Istanbul.^[45]

The Americas

• African Americans - There are an estimated 40 million people of African descent in the US. Note that this figure (here, and in the chart, above) directly conflicts with information in this same article that says that 30% of US people have genetic content from the [post 1400] African diaspora.
• Afro-Latin American - There are an estimated 100 million people of African descent living in Latin America, making up 45 % of Brazil's population.^[46] There are also sizeable African populations in Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
• The population in the Caribbean is approximately 23 million. Significant numbers of African-descended people include Haiti - 8 million, Dominican Republic - 7.9 million, Jamaica - 2.7 million,Puerto Rico^[47]

Canada

Much of the earliest black presence in Canada came from the United States, comprising African Americans who came as Loyalists or escaped along the Underground Railroad to locations in Nova Scotia and Southwestern Ontario. Slavery had begun to be outlawed in British North America as early as 1793. Later black immigration to Canada came primarily from the Caribbean, in such numbers that fully 70 per cent of all blacks now in Canada are of Caribbean origin.

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 both the African and Caribbean black communities in Canada.

Indian & Pacific Oceans

Some Pan-Africanists also consider other Africoid 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);^[48] New Guinea (Papuans);^[49] Andamanese; certain peoples of the Indian subcontinent,^[50][51] notably Vedda people and Dravidians such as Tamils; and the aboriginal peoples of Melanesia and Micronesia.^[52][53]Most of these claims are rejected by mainstream ethnologists as pseudoscience and pseudoanthropology 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^[54]. Mainstream anthropologists determine that the Andamanese and others are part of a network of Proto-Australoid and Paleo Mediterranean ethnic groups present in South Asia that trace their genetic ancestry to a migratory sequence that culminated in the Australian aboriginals rather than from African peoples directly (though indirectly, they did originate from prehistoric groups out of Africa as did all human beings on this planet).^{[55][56][57][58]}

See also

• List of topics related to Black and African people
• Africans
• African American
• African immigration to the United States
• Afro-Latino
• Black People
• Black Hispanic
• Afro-Brazilian
• Afro-Puerto Rican
• Afro-Trinidadian
• Afro-Jamaicans
• Afro-Arab
• Afro-Belizean
• Garinagu
• Afro-Colombian and Raizal
• Afro-Cuban
• Afro-Ecuadorian
• Afro-German

• Afro-Irish
• Afro-Mexican
• Afro-Peruvian
• African Australian
• Afro-Turks
• Black British
• Afro-Guyanese
• Black Canadian
• Afro-European
• Black French
• Black people in Ireland
• Capoid
• Chagossians
• Dougla
• Negroid
• Siddi (Black African community in South Asia)

References

External links

• Black History Information and Resources
• "African Diaspora", a resource list, Columbia Universities, African Studies
• "The Blacks of East Bengal: A Native's Perspective," by Horen Tudu
• "Negrito and Negrillo", by M. Stewart
• "Pan-Africanism in South Asia," by Horen Tudu
• ''Report of the Meeting of Experts from Member States on the Definition of the African Diaspora'', African Union, April 2005
• "West Papua New Guinea: Interview with Foreign Minister Ben Tanggahma"
• "Museum of the African Diaspora," Online exhibits and other resources from the San Francisco-based museum.
• "African Diasporic and Indigenous cultures of Colombia and Brasil"
• African Diaspora and Study Abroad Brazil African Studies
• The African Diaspora Policy Centre (ADPC)

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