The African Diaspora: Backgrounds
Short Cuts this webpage: Definitions: African "Holocaust" & "Diaspora" |
"Involuntary Immigrants" | WWW Links on African Diaspora

DEFINITIONS

The African Holocaust: 

"(hol e kost), n. 1a. a great or complete slaughter or reckless destruction of life.
"The Black Holocaust is one of the more underreported events in the annals of human history. The Black Holocaust makes reference to the millions of African lives which have been lost during the centuries to slavery, colonization and oppression. The Black Holocaust makes reference to the horrors endured by millions of men, women, and children throughout the African Diaspora. In sheer numbers, depth and brutality, it is a testimony to the worst elements of human behavior and the strongest elements of survival." 
--The Black Holocaust: From Maafa to Colonization KAMMAASI / Sankofa Project Guide, 1999:
 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Classroom/9912/blackholocaust.html 

John Barbot, an agent for the French Royal African Company,
made at least two voyages to the West Coast of Africa, in 1678 and 1682.
Read Barbot's account of the African Slave Trade (1682):
 http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/1.htm 
Excerpts from Slave Narratives (ed. Steven Mintz, Univ. of Houston)

The African / Black Diaspora:

The forced and brutal dispersal of millions of Africans into foreign lands created the African / Black Diaspora. African slaves and their descendants carried skills and communitarian values, rich cultural traditions, resiliency, and resistance ethos that transformed and enriched the cultures they entered around the world. Thus, as African peoples are globally dispersed, they carried their traditions of cultural creativity and oral arts with them, such as "common musical rhythms, exploration of multicolors…and diverse textures, play on repetition, and call-and-response modes of verbal activity" (Asante and Abarry 111). African folktales, often featuring the tortoise, hare, and spider, are widespread on the African continent and were carried from Africa to the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.

From HUM 211 African Timelines Part III:
African Slave Trade & European Imperialism (CE/AD 15th - early 19th centuries):
 URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/timelines/htimeline3.htm

"While abroad, individuals maintain their social identity by living in communities which trace their origins to the homeland."  "Diaspora" has meaning only so long as the "idea of an ancestral home" is kept alive.    
--P.E. Lovejoy, "The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery."  Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, II, 1 (1997).  
Available:  http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~slavery/essays/esy9701love.html [last accessed 21 Jan. 2002].

"INVOLUNTARY IMMIGRANTS"
by McPherson, James M.   Excerpt from
Review of The Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
New York Times Book Review, 27 Aug. 1995.
Rpt. “The New York Times on the Web,” The New York Times Company, 1997

“During  the four centuries after Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, some 12 million people left sub-Saharan Africa for the Western Hemisphere. They were not voluntary immigrants. They came aboard slave ships, packed almost literally like sardines. At least one-tenth of them died before they reached the New World. Millions of others perished on the trek from the interior of Africa to the coast, or during the hard months of "seasoning" in the Western Hemisphere. The slave trade brought a demographic disaster to Africa outweighed only by the deaths of even greater numbers of indigenous peoples in the New World from the epidemic diseases Europeans unwittingly carried with them.

“Africans provided most of the labor in the mines and plantations of the New World that produced much of Europe's wealth from the 16th to the 19th centuries. These Africans and their descendants constitute the black diaspora whose history is recounted in this encyclopedic study by Ronald Segal . . . . It was not the only black diaspora. From the 8th to the 20^th centuries, Islamic slave traders from North Africa carried another 12 million black Africans into slavery around the rim of the Mediterranean and into the Near and Middle East. . . .

"The story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the New World “is a story of European cruelty and African suffering, punctuated with the author's frequent sallies into sardonic irony: ‘The New World encountered by Columbus was duly claimed for Christianity and Spain. Conquest and plunder followed fast.’ Describing the fate of Haitians at the hands of a descendant of the Conquistadors four centuries later, Mr. Segal writes: ‘Trujillo's professed commitment to European culture and Catholic values took the form of ordering an estimated 20,000 of these migrants to be driven into stockades and slaughtered with carbines and machetes.’"

"The barbarity of the slave trade is attested by the slavers themselves:  a Dutch slave trader on the West African cost in the 18^th century wrote: “’The Invalides and the Maimed being thrown out . . . the remainder are numbred. . . . In the mean while a burning Iron, with the Arms or Name of the Companies, lyes in the Fire; with which ours are marked on the Breast. . . . I doubt not but this Trade seems very barbarous to you, but since it is followed by meer necessity it must go on; but we yet take all possible care that they are not burned too hard, especially the Women.’"

"Students new to the study of the Black Diaspora may be surprised to learn that '[w]hen slavery ended in the United States in 1865, this country contained 30 percent of the Western Hemisphere's population of African descent.  Yet fewer than 5 percent of the Africans who reached the New World came to the region that became the United States. The 10 million brought to the West Indies and Latin America did not even reproduce themselves under slavery, while the 427,000 brought to North America became 4,500,000 by 1865. The principal reason for this startling contrast was not the greater humanity of North American slaveholders.  The causes included the healthier climate of North America, the lesser physical demands of cotton and tobacco cultivation compared with sugar and coffee, and the legal abolition of the African slave trade by the United States in 1808, at the beginning of the cotton boom, which led Old South planters to increase their labor force by the reproduction of slaves rather than by their importation.  In Brazil and the Caribbean, by contrast, the slave trade remained open during the heyday of sugar and coffee, and it was cheaper to import slaves from Africa than to raise them from birth.'

"Even after legal Emancipation of black slaves in the New World, legalized slavery was gone, but not “the relationship of exploiter and victim….The description of Jamaica applies as well to most other parts of the hemisphere with a substantial black population: ‘Virtually all the poor are black, the middle class is mainly light in complexion and the heights are occupied disproportionately by whites.’   The legacy for contemporary blacks of the African Diaspora is “scarcely less bleak than it has for the past five centuries. The vaunted racial mixture and tolerance of Brazil, for example, translate into a stratified class system with most blacks in ‘effectively segregated poverty’ and disproportionately victimized by notorious death squads that murder homeless black youths on the streets of Brazilian cities.”  A close look at the black population of Detroit in the United States offers “a case study of North American urban decay that has rotted the lives of the black underclass.”  Detroit in the 1990s has a population of one million, “almost 80 percent black, where ‘some 70 percent of teen-agers . . . never make it to the end of high school’ and ‘an estimated half of all young blacks . . . have never had a job.’”  Nor is the situation better in the Caribbean:  In Haiti and Guyana [Grace Nichols’ country of origin], for example, “…the average daily wage is equivalent to one United States dollar and ‘despair, indeed, was the prevailing Guyanese mood.’

"If this situation for Diasporic blacks of African descent sounds bleak, it is well to balance the picture by considering the “culture and institutions wrought by these groups out of their lives and experiences that elevate them from mere victims to real people who have done much to shape their own destinies”-- for example, in black religion, music, orature and other performance arts, which have provided  sources of strength, resistance, and hope.  Segal believes that the 'soul' of the Black Diaspora

“is freedom. . . . It was in slavery that the diaspora was born,
together with the longing and struggle for freedom. . . .
The diaspora, indeed, has still to free itself.
And to do so, it has to accept its past,
as a source not of degradation but of dignity;
to assume its proper identity, as one of victimization and suffering
but also one of courage and resilience and creativity."

WWW Links on African Diaspora:

From HUM 211 African Timelines Part III:
African Slave Trade & European Imperialism (CE/AD 15th - early 19th centuries):
 URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/timelines/htimeline3.htm

More on The African Diaspora:
Hum 211 Course Pack Table of Contents
for more course web resources on 
The African Diaspora: Backgrounds;
Olaudah Equiano; Amistad: The True Story;
I Is a Long Memoried Woman (Introduction & Film Notes);
Religions of the New World African Diaspora; African Griots, & more:
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/coursepack/index.htm

Hum 211 Links: Diaspora
for more WWW African-Caribbean web resources:
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/linksdiaspora.htm

 HUM 211 Open Campus Course Information - Winter 2002
HUM 211 Home Page Syllabus Course Plan Assignments Course Pack TV Meetings
  Printing Announcement 

African Storytelling Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
African Links African Timelines: History, Orature, Literature, & Film
African "Literary" Map African Films African Contexts: Film Afrique, Je Te Plumerai 
Student Writing  Site Map

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URL of this page: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/coursepack/Diaspora.htm
Last Updated: 31 March 2005  

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