The African Diaspora

Abstract

The movement of African people from their homelands to the far reaches of the Atlantic empires was to be, in retrospect, the most significant and large-scale enforced movement of peoples in the pre-modern world. The compulsory emigration of black Africans took place over a period of many centuries. If we include the trans-Saharan shipment of Africans to the Mediterranean which became significant in the ninth century, then we are dealing with a migration which spanned 1000 years. It was, however, in the years of European ascendancy, from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, that this African diaspora reached staggeringly high levels; draining certain African societies of their healthy and largely young labour force and in the process transforming the economics and demographic face of the New World settlements. Naturally enough from such complex and confused historical upheavals it is enormously difficult to assess the numbers of people involved and in fact this topic has become a major academic growth industry. The numbers of Africans forced to leave their homelands is still disputed and various scholars have calculated the total to be anything from ten to twenty-five million. The standard authority, Philip Curtin, convincingly argues that somewhere in the region of ten million Africans landed in the Americas, but there were also to be counted in their millions many more who did not survive capture, upheaval and transportation.¹