Defining the African Diaspora
That’s my new favourite class of the semester, and so you will find that over the next couple of months, my focus will shift from colonization to the African diaspora. Let’s refrain from defining “African” for now, and what it’s doing qualifying the word diaspora. Let’s look instead at what a diaspora is.
Some scholars have identified four basic criteria: 1. there must be a dispersal to at least two locations. 2.There must be self-awareness as a group. 3. It must be multi-generational. 4. There must be some relationship, real or imagined, with the “homeland.” Now obviously, this last one is what I am most interested in. The relationship with the homeland. I’m interested in first thinking about the relationship of two broad groups, with Africa: African Americans and Africans living abroad. With the former, there have historically been impressive strides made towards imagining a “black” nation, where black at different times has included African people and people of African descent even outside the US. There’s been Pan-Africanism and Negritude and countless other movements in which people have supported each other at crucial times like during the civil rights movement or anti-colonialist struggles. But that generation is almost gone. Sure, there are a few relics still around, but exclusivity has become the name of the game, with “black” now being restricted to specific geographic boundaries in addition to all the other criteria that have existed before. Which of course has implications on the relationship, real or imagined, with the “homeland.”
I pause here. I do not make value judgments.
Then there is the latter group, whose relationship, I am finding, is astonishingly schizophrenic. I talk here of a specific class of Africans living abroad. The educated ones who on the surface are proponents of a “pro-Africa” sort of image. We are the ones who want the world to know that Africa is not one country, that there’s more to it than you see on National Geographic etc. I think it’s fashionable in certain circles. And we are the most defensive people you will find, because the more we exist in a whitewashed world, the more we see Africa through white eyes and the more we dislike what we see. And so even though we love where we come from, we love the food and the people and the music, (in our minds the “culture”) we do not love everything that Africa is. We go to particular pains to be everything that is the opposite of the stereotype, because we want this world, this whitewashed one, to see that we can be as good as they are, as eloquent as they are, speak with the same accent as they do…the list is endless. I am having a conversation with the other Africans around me, who by the way will not countenance being called African because we are all from different countries and Africa is not just one country is it? I am having a conversation about what images we want to present as part of that “showing the positive sides of Africa” campaign that our kind is so fond of. The consensus so far is that there will be no pictures of huts, only of mansions, highways, swimming pools…in Africa of course, because we have those things too. Is this not as problematic as the one-sided National Geographic images we are struggling so hard against? Have we not learnt that the problem is not with a negative portrayal but with a one-sided portrayal?
And so there is our relationship with the homeland. Whitewashing a continent which we are unable to define because we are unable to accept all of it. And we are the educated ones, the ones who read, the ones who write and who speak and who believe that we can change things. Of course we want to change things…change things the way we have changed ourselves. One day, maybe soon, I will find that just about any place in Africa will leave me homesick as Cape Town did. And then what will my relationship with the “homeland” be?
What is our relationship with the “homeland” now? If we all (and I come full circle to include both groups I mentioned) have found such ingenious ways to slowly but surely sever ourselves from a reality that should be ours…all ours, then that’s one criteria gone. And if I were a scholar, my conclusion would be that the African diaspora cannot survive.
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Anni@ “The Africans living abroad”. You I believe consciously left out the millions of migrants living in Europe – I imagine but dont know for sure that this group far out number the ‘educated’ ones you mention. I do think there is a tendancy to whitewash Africa. But it is this group that a) have the means to return home on a regular basis and b) return home permanently. Yet it is the latter group (migrants) that have the most too loose and the most to gain by the development or lack of development of their homeland as they remain the marginalised economically and socially invisible masses of Africans in the diaspora at effect of race, class and whiteness on a daily basis.
An important discussion in this year that remembers the abolition of slavery!
ps – in no way am do i feel any connection with CT – I will probably return before I leave this complex country – there are a few there I would like to see and find out how they are doing – I imagine not so well.
Diasporas, of any kind, are, I suppose, difficult to define in any coherent way almost per definition. It seems that the comment on a diaspora ‘even outside the US’ is a bit indicative of an excessive focus (in the USA) on African diaspora defined as people of African descent in the USA. Clearly this particular diaspora (perhaps less connected with Africa than any of the other substantial ones?) is very substantial with 30 million or so people (employing, more or less, a ‘one drop rule’ for who counts as African-American) but there’s the Caribbean, Brazil (and elsewhere in South America), Europe, and so on.
Sokari and Stefan, I hope I did not give the impression that the groups I consider in my first round of ruminations are in any way the only ones I am interested in, or the only ones that “matter.” I find it interesting to look at the relationships between different groups and “the homeland,” and I suspect that with time I will become more informed to ask what I hope are necessary questions about the many other groups that you have mentioned.
Not at all! A most interesting blog, by the way. Very interesting thing, this diaspora concept. I’m not sure we have what could be called a ‘Swedish diaspora’ – in Delaware, Illinois and Minnesota once upon a time? But now assimilated beyond the point of ‘diasporaness’? But then again, aren’t most African-Americans as well?
Aaaah yes, Stefan…that question of assimilation “beyond the point of diasporaness” is a very interesting one as well. And then there are those who believe that assimilating is different from being assimilated, and one wonders if it’s a question of semantics or if people really have enough agency to make the two different, or mutually exclusive…. And yet where do these mental gymnastics lead us?
Interesting indeed. I look at our own family situation. African-American wife, now living in Europe. Not really interested in Africa. Swedish husband, interested in Africa for sure, never felt part of any ‘diaspora’ (again, the idea of a ‘Swedish diaspora’ seems somewhat odd?) despite having lived away from the country of birth for a long time now. And the children? Swedish-African-American? Considered ‘black’ in the US, ‘mixed race’ or mulatto most anywhere else. Born in the UK. Qualify for four passports currently. A real ‘identity soup’ no doubt!
The American black is still part of the diaspora and I would say black in other countries where there have been slavery. Slavery still shapes our world and I think we still wonder what our world would have been if we would have been left undisturbed. In America we do not easily assimilate, even as a newly arrived person from some country in Africa. We are often told we should be more like the new immigrant. For most blacks there is still an uneasiness and for a few there is unacknowledged feeling of being inferior. I don’t think it is necessary to feel any connection to a homeland to be part of the diaspora, just the effect of the dispersal, especially an unwanted one. I think that may be the key to the definition of diaspora, the unwanted or forced dispersal. The only other group I have heard it applied, are the Jews.
Yes, when we think of diaspora, we normally place the stress on the dispersal aspect of it, on the fact that it’s a diaspora, but what sort of diaspora is it? In this case we talk of the African diaspora, but what is it that justifies/necessitates the use of “African” to describe this diaspora? I would disagree with you here, Hathor, and say that there has to be at least the barest minimum of a connection, real or forged, for this to be and remain an African diaspora. Otherwise it just becomes a diaspora…some diaspora, and the people in it are just some people, whose identity has nothing to do with where they came from, only what they’ve become now.
That being said, it’s all rather complicated, and even now, I’m wondering whether my thoughts are in the right place….
I’m very interested in the “idea” of diaspora and think it stems mainly from the Middle Passage and colonialism. I’ve met South Asians(1st and 2nd generation from India)in the U.S. identify with “their” diaspora. It’s a bit of a misnomer for white Europeans to identify that way, in my opinion.
I would argue that black Americans have in no way, assimilated, an odd term. I’d say we’ve “Americanized” which is a very different state of being to me. We still face incredible odds so the notion that we are a part of the “ethnic” soup is simply not true. We are still very much the “other” whilst other “groups” are, shall I say, more favored groups. The American racial classification system created a framework of race not ethnicity which many Africans (first, second generation, etc.) living in the states now refuse to give in to and feel more compelled to identify as an ethnicity or national as opposed to “African-American”.
I also think for the odd history of black people here, the connection to the African diaspora is so key to our longing for a nearly impossible “direct” connection to make to the motherland.
We strongly need to feel a part of a “larger connection” since so much was cut off unlike most black communities in the Caribbean and the Americas. That’s why I advocate the use of “black” or “Afro” American because those “labels” are more widely used throughout the diaspora.