by force, who now live away from their country
and culture of origin. Since the 1950s, the term
has been used to describe the worldwide presence
of Africans. As they moved—or were moved—to
other countries, Africans brought with them their
religious views and practices. This entry briefly
describes the history of the concept, looks in more
detail at the African diaspora, and discusses its
impact on religion.
Background of the ConceptDiaspora derives from the Greek verbspeiro(to
sow) and the preposition dia (over) and was
first applied by ancient Greeks to signify expan-
sion, migration, and settler colonization.
Earlier conceptions of diaspora have changed to
acquire new definitions and meanings, partly
representing a collective trauma, forced exile
with myths of home and return. The biblical
exile of the Jews represents one classical notion
of diaspora. In recent times, diverse ethnic-
national groups living outside their local com-
munities and countries of origin who maintain
collective identities have often engaged in self-
description as diaspora. One unifying thread of
diasporic communities is their settlement, tem-
porary or permanent, outside their imagined
old-home, natal territories.
African diaspora was employed from the
mid-1950s and 1960s when the discourse on the
historical phenomenon of dispersion and settle-
ment of Africans abroad began to lay claim to
diasporaas a descriptive label. The African dias-
pora assumes a dynamic character of an ongoing,
complex process located across space-time. It
embodies the voluntary and forced dispersion of
Africans, their descendants, and their cultures at
different historical phases and into diverse direc-
tions (such as the Americas, Europe, Asia,
Mediterranean, Arab worlds, and the cross-
migration within Africa). In recent years, African
diaspora is transforming to include a rising influx
of voluntary as well as forced emigrants, refuge-
seekers, and refugees within and beyond the
continent. African diaspora is one theoretical
construct to describe this global dispersal of
indigenous African populations at different
phases of world history.
Historical Perspective
The transcultural encounter between Africa and
the rest of the world is not a recent phenomenon.
Contacts between Europe and Africa in particular
were constant throughout Europe’s Antiquity,
Middle Ages, and the so-called Modern Age.
European presence and interest in Africa through
these periods is split along the contours of com-
merce, politics, and religion. The imperial expan-
sionist agenda generated new situations and posed
as a catalyst toward diaspora formation. One
inherent consequence was in creating situations
that brought Africans at varied times to Europe
and the New World.
The emergence of diaspora communities is
linked to different waves of emigration. The earli-
est included virile Africans collected in human
trafficking and moved involuntarily to various
metropolises in Europe and the Americas. Prior to
the transatlantic African diaspora, Africans had
prolonged encounters of slave trade and forced
migration during the Islamic hegemony of the 7th
and 8th centuries, in which slaves were trafficked
across the Sahara, up the Nile Valley and the Red
Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to the Persian
Gulf and India. Survivors of these ordeals consti-
tuted the first African diaspora enclaves.
The historical African diaspora in the New
World generated a number of myths about its
origins. Their most important notions of the home-
land were imbricated in “Ethiopia,” with biblical
credence to Psalms 68:31: “Ethiopia shall soon
stretch out her hands unto God.” This connection
was more of a concept of “blackness” and
“Africanity,” rather than any geographical connec-
tion with the country. In the 1930s, Ethiopianism
became the precursor to Rastafarianism in Jamaica.
The initiative to reinvigorate black conscious-
ness, restore self-esteem and human dignity
among African Americans, and revamp Africa
from an image condemned to poverty, enslave-
ment, denigration, and inferiority brought some
populist leaders of the African diaspora such as
Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin
Luther King, Jr. into the limelight. Their ideas
and activities launched the early movements of
Black Consciousness (Garveyism), the Pan-
African Movement, Négritude, and the Civil
Rights Movement.200 Diaspora