Africa has been central to the construction of the modern world in all its dimensions.[1] Yet, Africa has not benefitted much from this, partly due to how the continent has been unequally integrated into the world system, beginning with the Transatlantic Trade in Africans, imperialism and colonialism, and the exploitative mechanisms of global capitalism. Nonetheless, these trajectories have resulted in an African diaspora in every region of the world today. At the same time, advances in genomic sciences, telecommunications, digital media, and travel have drawn Africa and its diaspora(s) closer than ever before;[2] as a result, the making, remaking, unmaking, and negotiating of the meaning of Africa in diasporic settings happens in greater interaction with information, ideas and peoples coming from Africa itself on an ongoing basis.[3] There is both challenge and opportunity present in the Africa-African Diaspora(s) relationship, which need to be continually explored.
Diverse Ways
The multiple and diverse ways of being “African” is captured in such terms as Afropolitans or Afrocentrics and continue to be debated and embodied in today’s globalised world.[4] Afropolitans are a new generation of young Africans working and living across the globe who feel at home in several geographies; they are often in tension with some older generation Africans, who say they are “not African enough”. Afrocentrics have a renewed concerns with African roots, history, and self-style to reflect notions of African identity; the RastafarI in Jamaica, are examples, even as they claim a biblically based African identity.[5] “[These n]ew African globalities and the multiple ways in which Africanness is lived on the ground complicate any oversimplified understanding of ‘Africa’ or ‘the African diaspora’, as well as any easy distinction between these terms”.[6]
Complicating Notions of State and Identity
Ongoing immigration from Africa and other African diasporic communities to North America and Europe complicates notions of the nation state and challenges existing racial categories. For example, demographic flows to the US from Africa, the Caribbean or Europe complexifies America-centric ideas of the USA. More specifically, such flows have challenged categorisation of African-descended people.[7] How should Jamaicans, Senegalese, or Afro-Cubans be categorised? Caribbean, African, Hispanic? “[T]he processes of immigration have not only changed the ethnic and racial identities of immigrants, but they have often forced U.S. African Americans, Whites, Latinos, and incoming immigrants to interrogate, reconsider, and renegotiate U.S racial categories”.[8]
Furthermore, many African-descended immigrants have had to contemplate and confront the meaning of their African heritage, some for the first time in their lives, when confronted with White Supremacy and anti-Black racism in host countries as varied as France, Sweden, the Ukraine and the USA. Nonetheless, the impact of such African Diasporas is enormous. They affect political, cultural, and economic patterns on the continent, individual nations as well as the society of the host country in which they now reside.[9]
Challenge(s)
While there are many commonalities among Africans in the modern Diaspora, there are also important differences arising from societal, political, socio-economic, and racial context. In exploring the nature and meaning of the African Diaspora, it is important not to impose frameworks that reflect singular experiences on the wider Diaspora.[10]
Class and race do not function in the same way in the Caribbean as it does in the USA or Brazil or even in Scandinavia. The history of peoples in Jamaica, Haiti or Barbados, where Afro-descendants are the majority, cannot be conflated with the experiences of Afro-descendants in Trinidad, or Guyana where they are a significant majority. The differences are vast between the experiences of Afro-descendants in Cuba or Brazil where they are the majority but do not hold political power, much less in the USA, England or Columbia, where they are both a distinct minority and a less powerful grouping.
Nonetheless, modern African Diaspora’s have immense potential, which is not fully realised due to the circumstances within their host countries, their ancestral homeland, and their home countries. Discrimination is concretely experienced in the labour or housing markets as well as education, and so African Diaspora’s may not be able to fully realize their potential.[11] Experiences of discrimination against and exclusion of African Diaspora people in their host countries sometimes provide an incentive for some to maintain and assert their African/African diasporic identity and dream of returning to a better place, whether it is to ancestral Africa, homeland Africa or some other home territory. It deepens their emotional connections to these home spaces, which often leads to philanthropic, economic and other forms of support.
At the same time, “diaspora attitudes and attitudes towards them in the homeland may introduce new or reinforce old class and ethnic stratifications, resentments, and divisions”.[12] Some diasporans suffer from superiority complexes, often looking down on the people and processes of the homeland. A cursory read of letters to the editor in major newspapers and online blogs related to Africa and the African Diaspora provide numerous examples of this often-disparaging attitude. It goes without saying that this is deeply resented. Of course, elites and even ordinary people in the homeland harbour their own resentments against the diasporans for abandoning the homeland.[13] The deputy mayor of the City of Montego Bay in Jamaica caused quite a furore, in 2022, when he took a swipe at the Jamaican community overseas. He said:
Only cowards run away to go to America because they are seeking out opportunity. Opportunities are there overseas, but do not run away and leave your country, especially leaving indefinitely, and you don’t want to contribute to the further development of your country…You same ones who are saying that the country is not going on with anything, what are you doing to develop your own country? They made the sacrifice in America and all the First-World countries so they can live the life that you admire, so do the same for your country and your parish.[14]
Of course, his utterances did not go unanswered, but such careless rhetoric fuels friction and hostility among the diaspora community to whom the country is looking for support. This can exact a toll on development efforts by delaying or thwarting them altogether. For their part, the Diaspora often complains of inefficient bureaucracies, and crime and corruption that make it difficult for them to invest or return home safely.
Opportunity
The political, economic, and socio-cultural contributions of the Afro-descendants is largely mediated through the political economies of their host lands and homelands.[15] There is much opportunity for African Diasporas to continue to contribute to their ancestral homelands or continent in multifaceted and multidimensional ways. These contributions are channelled through formal and informal networks in the homeland, host country, and the international system. Remittances to individuals are usually identified as the major economic contribution made from the Diaspora. However, economic contributions are diverse in their range and impact. Such engagements are most effective when undertaken through collective organisations such as hometown, ethnic, alumni, religious and other associations. Important also are NGOs, investment/business and national development groups.[16]
The Diaspora is a source of immense social and cultural capital – attributes and attitudes, skills and sensibilities, networks of engagement – that they acquire or refine in their host country. These need to be better mobilised. African-descended persons living in the metropoles can develop activities and practices that can be leveraged for development and democratisation in their countries of origin. An example is Perry Mars’s study which demonstrated how Diaspora Guyanese contributed meaningfully to the conflict resolution arising from political and ethnic tensions.[17] Diaspora Guyanese contributed to efforts to value the existing symbiotic pluralist arrangement, recognising that struggle does not have to entail violence. Similarly, the extensive transnational political, social, religious, and cultural networks of the Diaspora can be mobilised for the development and democratisation of their homelands.[18]
Governments, development agencies, and researchers have become increasingly vocal about the importance of the African Diaspora’s for the continent’s sustainable development.[19] This has been recognised in the African Union’s Agenda 2063, the national development plans of numerous African nations, as well as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.[20] Diaspora has also found a place in policy discourse among various African nations and international organisations. Some African nations make distinctions between migrants and diaspora, often with the latter meaning economically powerful groups settled in other countries for whom there is a developmental mandate.[21] International institutions such as the UN or the World Council of Churches have been impacted by the participation, protest, public relations campaigns, mobilizations, and diplomatic pressure from African diaspora persons.
In lieu of a Conclusion
Discourse on the African Diaspora have proliferated, changed trajectory, engaged global revivals and been characterised by great diversity, global movement and creative mixture.[22] Indeed, “significant historical changes have radically diversified the nature and composition of African diasporas”.[23] We are not by any means dealing with a “conceptually tidy” subject matter.[24] Every era has developed particular links with Africa and engendered notions of African and African identity that “differ and intersect in complex ways between ‘old’ and ‘new’ diasporas”.[25]
The Diaspora has significant potential to contribute to the sustainable futures of the ancestral homeland even as this is constrained by circumstances in the host countries, among the Diaspora communities and within the Diaspora(s) themselves. One area which should be given sustained attention is deepening the connections between continental Africans and Afro-descendants as well as among Afro-descendants globally. This will certainly deepen their impact on the future of a deeply divided world, demonstrating how community can be formed beyond and through difference.
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[1] Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Africa and the Disruptions of the Twenty-first Century. (CODESRIA, Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2021).
[2] Rasika Ann Mathias, et al., “A continuum of admixture in the Western Hemisphere revealed by the African Diaspora genome,” Nature Communications 7:12522, 11 Oct 2016. 10.1038/ncomms12522 |www.nature.com/naturecommunications. See also Jyothsna Bolleddula, Donald Simeon, Simon Anderson, Lester Shields, Jasneth Mullings, Pilar Ossorio, Averell Bethelmey and Anna Kasafi Perkins, “No person left behind: Mapping the health policy landscape for genomics research in the Caribbean,” The Lancet Regional Health – Americas 15 (November 2022). 100367. https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2667193X22001843
[3] Isidore Okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu, “The Ontological Imperative of the New African Diaspora” in The New African Diaspora, edited by Isidore Okpweho and Nkiru Nzegwu (Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 500-518.
[4] Marlene de Witte and Rachel Sponk, “Introduction: ‘African’ – A Contested Qualifier in Global Africa,” African Diaspora 7 (2014): 165–176.
[5] Anna Kasafi Perkins, “Heartbless and Mek a Trod: Meditation on a Rasta Spirituality for Justice and Peace”, in Transformative Spiritualities for the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace, edited by Fernando Enns, Upolu Lumā Vaai, Andrés Pacheco Lozano and Betty Pries. (Globethics.net, Geneva: WCC Publications & Globethics.net: 2022), pp. 45-62.
[6] de Witte and Sponk 2014, 166.
[7] Colin A. Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora”. The Journal of Negro History 85.1/2 (Winter-Spring, 2000), 27-32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2649097
[8] Michael George Hanchard, “Black Transnationalism, African Studies, and the 21st Century,” Journal of Black Studies 35.2 (November 2004): 139-153 [148].
[9] Hanchard 2004.
[10] Sarah Fila-Bakabadio, “On décalages in the African Diaspora,” African Diaspora 11 (2018) 162–178.
[11] Khalid Koser, “New African Diasporas: An Introduction,” in New African Diasporas, edited by Khalid Koser. (London: Routledge, 2003), 1-16.
[12] Zeleza 2021.
[13] Koser 2003.
[14] Christopher Thomas, “MoBay deputy mayor calls Jamaican expats cowards, Jamaica Daily Gleaner, Friday August 12, 2022. https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20220812/mobay-deputy-mayor-calls-jamaican-expats-cowards
[15] Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “Leveraging Africa’s Global Diasporas for the Continent’s Development,” African Diaspora 11 (2018): 144-161.
[16] Zeleza 2018.
[17] Perry Mars, “The Guyana Diaspora and Homeland Conflict Resolution” in The New African Diaspora, edited by Isidore Okpweho and Nkiru Nzegwu (Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 483-499.
[18] Zeleza 2018.
[19] Aaryan Morrison, The “Year of Return” and the unintended consequences for Ghanaians, Kennedy School Review, January 29, 2020.
[20] Zeleza 2018, 145.
[21] Koser 2003.
[22] de Witte and Spronk 2014.
[23] de Witte and Spronk 2014, 167.
[24] Jayne O. Ifekunigwe, “Black Folk Here and There”: Repositioning Othere(ed) African Diaspora(s) in/and Europe, in The African Diaspora and the Disciplines, edited by Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet. (Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 313-338.
[25] Koser 2003 in de Witte and Spronk 2014, 167.