Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin 1995: 332). Nevertheless, the all-embracing, spiritualizing
liberalism of this philosophy is thoroughly compromised by the historical persecutions to
which genealogical Jews have often been subjected especially in the western world, so
much so that, the word Jew is a metaphor for the dreaded, rootless and rejected “Other”
against whom all measures of exclusion must be executed (Gorge Mosse 1995: 196). Not
surprisingly, therefore, exile, as soberly reviewed by Edward Said (2001:173) with
insightful acuity, invariably becomes that strangely compelling condition whose
“achievements... are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind”.
In terms of Black Africa’s first major dispersal of diasporic magnitude to the West, the
period is generally, but not exclusively, agreed to date back to the 16th century.
Nevertheless, scholarly evidence abounds to the effect that it is not in all cases that the
“pre-Columbian scheme” (Okpewho 1999: xii) can be wished away. The circumstances
of this dispersal were as epochal as they were evolutionary. Again, I have chosen to
invoke Okpewho’s paradigm which identifies three imperatives in the said dispersal and
making of Black diaspora in the West. The first of the imperatives is the “ labor
imperative ” which stresses the era of the West’s unbridled quest for the slave labour of
Africa’s “sons and daughters” via the agency of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Logically
following on the trail of the first is the “ territorial imperative ” which, in response to
America’s monopoly and foreclosure of any further European colonization of Latin
America, pushed European imperial powers to convergently scramble and partition
Africa. The third imperative is the “extractive imperative” , an era “when Africa’s
mineral wealth had become the main focus of western interest in the continent”.^8 In their
cumulative significance, the imperatives have built a major Black presence in the West.
Indeed, the historical circumstances under which the unenviable condition of exile
translated into diaspora have resulted in a dispersal experience. However, this experience
for the most part continues to point to how the posterity of the uprooted Black race lives
through a world with evidence to the fact of “the loss of something left behind” on the
8
Although in expounding these imperatives Okpewho limits his focus to America, it is nevertheless
important to state that given that American imperialism did not and still does not operate in isolation from
European imperialism, whatever effect it has had on Africa cannot be said to be exclusive as it is in league
with European imperialism. This is why the paradigm, though restrictive in Okpewho’s explication, is
however considered vicarious in this context.