The African Diaspora
**Please note that this page contains references to violence and assault**
Overview
The creation of the modern African Diaspora in the Americas is largely the result of a tumultuous period in world history in which Africans were scattered abroad by the pressures of plantation slavery and the ideologies associated with white supremacy. The formation of the black societies and cultures in the Americas that trace their beginnings to this unfortunate period in world history represent a socio-historical phenomenon in which enslaved Africans and their descendants persevered to create a vibrant cultural legacy owing much to both Africa and the Americas, despite the systematic pressures of slave owners and overseers to erase the memory of Africa from the hearts and minds of the population. Regardless of where one travels throughout the Diaspora, whether in Latin America, the Caribbean, or North America, it is impossible to elude the numerous similarities in art, cuisine, religion, community organization, speech patterns, and world view that pay homage to the legacy of the African experience in the Americas.The African Diaspora has been defined by the noted historian Joseph Harris as the voluntary and involuntary dispersion of Africans globally throughout history; the emergence of a cultural identity based on origin and social condition; and the psychological and physical return of those in the Diaspora to Africa. Within this definition, Africa is clearly based at the center of any discussion of the Diaspora and has created a tenuous debate within both scholarly and popular circles as to whether the Diaspora remains connected directly to Africa as evidenced by the numerous Africanisms and cultural retentions in the Diaspora that demonstrate to some an unyielding linkage between Africa and the Diaspora unaffected by slavery, or is the Diaspora something else, with its members impacted as much by the social, cultural, and economic legacies of slavery and colonialism in the Americas as by their ancestral homes on the African continent.
It is probable that the answer lies somewhere in the middle depending on the particular situation and how sustainable the relationship between Africa and the country of arrival. In areas such as the Caribbean and Latin America, particularly Brazil and Cuba, clearly discernible African influences persist well into the twenty-first century due to the short life span of enslaved labor on sugar plantations in the region and therefore, the continuous importation of Africans into these areas legally and later clandestinely well into the nineteenth century.
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Transatlantic Slave Trade
Any discussion of the African Diaspora in the Americas must begin with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Michael Gomes describes the event as the “quintessential moment of transfiguration, the height of human alienation, and disorientation” of a group of people unlike any other in history. The slave trade began on African soil and involved Africans, Arabs, and Europeans alike. It would be disingenuous to over-simplify the trade as Africans selling other Africans into slavery. Notions of African or Black unity in the Western sense did not exist.Some have used such arguments to shift the blame for the horrors of the Middle Passage and the plantation experience in the Americas from the European traders who profited from the buying and selling of humans and the American slave owners who capitalized on over three centuries of free labor to Africans. Ethnicity was a marker of identity on the African continent. Raids, kidnappings, and warfare produced the majority of captives brought to the Americas. There were instances of African rulers selling their own subjects into bondage as well as criminals, house servants, and debtors. However, the majority of the enslaved were captured in ethnic conflicts or kidnapped by slave traders.
European slavers often relied on native African or mixed raced (African and European) middlemen to penetrate the interior of the continent and capture men and women to be sold along the coast. This experience alone was traumatic. Once captured, Africans were tied together by rope, and later marched hundreds of miles while suffering from thirst, hunger, exhaustion, physical injuries, and the anxiety of not knowing where they were going or their fate once they reached their final destination. Many did not survive the journey from the interior to the coast. Some died en route while others were too emaciated and weak to endure the transatlantic voyage.
John Blassingame notes that once the captured Africans arrived on the coast, they underwent physical “examinations” in which they were made to jump up and down, and had their genital organs handled by a doctor. Those Africans chosen to make the voyage to the Americas were branded with the seal of the European companies who transported them.
Dr. Glenn Chambers, Asst. Professor of History
Texas A&M University
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African Diaspora in Cuba
From the 1500s, Spanish colonizers brought about 8,000 Africans, largely from West Africa, to Cuba as slaves, to work the sugar plantations. By 1838, at their peak, there were nearly 400,000 slaves on the island. As their numbers increased, so did the tons of sugar Cuba produced. Slavery didn’t end in the country until 1886. But even when it did, Black Cubans were shut out of education and schools.
Unlike in the United States following slavery’s end, there were no separate schools or Historically Black Colleges and Universities established to educate those who had been enslaved. Following the 1959 Cuban revolution, institutional racism and the color line was supposed to be erased. Free education for all was among the social gains. So when the doors to education flung open, poverty kept some Blacks from taking advantage. Slavery wasn’t that far behind them. But for those who did enter, thrived.
By the 1980s, many had managed to become professionals—doctors, lawyers and teachers. Then in the 1990s, just a decade later, Blacks found themselves again on the margins and falling behind, says August Nimtz, who teaches a course on the Cuban revolution at the University of Minnesota.
Blacks who were already struggling tumbled further economically in the late 1980s and 1990 when Soviet support to Cuba dried up, and the economy tanked. Analyzing numbers from 2005, DomÃnguez, in a recent cover story, “Race as a Challenge to Cuba’s Educational System,” in the Havana Times.org, offers a rare statistical look at the employment scene for blacks and whites: “73 percent of scientists and technicians were white; 80 percent of professors at the University of Havana, too. These numbers held for the rest of the country. Blacks were unemployed at double the rate of whites. Blacks spearheaded more black-market activities; jails held 85 percent darker-skinned Cubans.”
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