Defining the African Diaspora Edward A. Alpers University of California, Los Angeles Paper presented to the Center for Comparative Social Analysis Workshop October 25, 2001 Introduction Anyone who seeks to write about the African diaspora is almost certain to get entangled in the exercise of definition. At first sight, the phrase “the African diaspora” appears to be a straightforward descriptor. Indeed, it is. Flexible and all encompassing, its very capaciousness is precisely what gives the term both its functional utility and, perversely, its analytical imprecision. We are familiar with it primarily as an historical artifact of the Atlantic slave trade that is used to refer to the forced dispersal of African peoples in the Atlantic world, especially in the western hemisphere. By extension, the term has come to be extended to similar historical processes in both the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds.1 Yet the phrase is neither unproblematic nor deeply rooted 1 See, i.a., Edward A. Alpers, “The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: reconsideration of an old problem, new directions for research,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa & the Middle East, 17/2 (1997), pp. 62-81 and “Recollecting Africa: Diasporic memory in the Indian Ocean world,” African Studies Review, 43/1 (2000), pp. 83-99; John Hunwick, “African Slaves in the Mediterranean World: A Neglected Aspect of the African Diaspora,” in Joseph E. Harris (ed.), Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, Second Edition (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993), pp. 289-323; “Black Slave Religious Practices in the Mediterranean World,” Paper presented to the SSHRC/UNESCO Summer Institute “Identifying Enslaved Africans: The ‘Nigerian’ Hinterland and the African Diaspora,” York University, Canada, 1997; and “The Same but different: Approaches to Slavery and the African Diaspora in the lands of Islam,” Paper presented to the Northwestern University Workshop on Slavery and the African Diaspora in the Lands of Islam, 30 April-2 May 1999. My thanks to Professor Hunwick for sharing these unpublished papers with me. 1 historically, having been first employed by George Shepperson in a paper presented at the International Congress of African history held at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, in 1965.2 Furthermore, the closer one examines the phenomenon of diaspora in the African context, the less clear it is that there is a single phenomenon that we can call “the African diaspora,” quite apart from any epistemological objections that one might raise regarding the applicability of the term itself to the African experience. In this paper, I seek to explore the applicability of the term “diaspora” to the African diaspora as a global phenomenon. My reasons for adopting a global perspective derive from my continuing work on African diaspora in the Indian Ocean world, which regularly causes me to interrogate this phrase so embedded in the experience of and scholarly literature on the Atlantic world. Here I do so in several ways. I begin by examining the use of and debates around “diaspora” as an analytical category with respect to Africa and in the broader context of other peoples and cultures. I then discuss the different components of what we generally refer to as “the African diaspora” and ask whether, if the term itself proves to have salience, we should not instead speak of African “diasporas.” Finally, I argue for retention of the term as a method for advancing the comparative study of Black history on the continent and around the world. 2 George Shepperson, “The African Abroad or the African diaspora,” in T.O. Ranger (ed.), Emerging Themes of African History (Nairobi, 1968), pp. 152-176. In fact, Shepperson published his paper two years previously in African Quarterly, 2, 1 (1966), pp. 76-93, but virtually everyone cites the 1968 publication. 2 Naming the African diaspora As many before me have declared, “diaspora” is a largely untheorized or at least undertheorized term.3 In a world in which identity politics and recourse to ethnicity are regularly invoked, it is a term that is also, as James Clifford has observed, loaded with political meaning.4 Around the world, many different ethnicities, nationalities, races, and religions claim diaspora identity for themselves, while scholars who study them often use the term without much analytical precision.5 What this bears witness to is that defining diaspora and deciding who gets to be regarded as belonging to a diasporic community is not a little problematic. Because the etymology of “diaspora” and history of the term as it was originally applied in Greek translations of Deuteronomy 28:25 are both well established in the literature I will not discuss them at this time.6 Suffice it to state that with the exception of 3 See, i.a., William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora, 1, 1 (1991), pp. 83-99; Stefan Helmreich, “Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy’s Concept of Diaspora,” Diaspora, 2, 2 (1992), pp. 243-249; Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora, 5, 1 (1996), pp. 3-36; Brian Keith Axel, “Time and Threat: Questioning the Production of the Diaspora as an Object of Study,” History and Anthropology, 9, 4 (1996), pp. 415- 443; Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle, 1997), at p. x; Artemis Leontis, “Mediterranean Topographies before Balkanization: On Greek Diaspora, Emporion, and Revolution,” Diaspora, 6, 2 (1997), pp. 179-194, at 180-181; Steven Vertovec, “Three meanings of ‘Diaspora,’ Exemplified among South Asian Religions,” Diaspora, 6, 3 (1997), pp. 277-299, at 277; Jon Stratton, “(Dis)placing the Jews: Historicizing the Idea of Diaspora,” Diaspora, 6, 3 (1997), pp. 301-329, at 301; Martin Baumann, “Shangri-La in Exile: Portraying Tibetan Diaspora Studies and Reconsidering Diaspora(s),” Diaspora, 6, 3 (1997), pp. 377-404. 4 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translations in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1997), p. 244. 5 For an intriguing commentary on contemporary usage of “diaspora” in the mid-1990s as reflected in the number of web sites and academic titles including that word, see Joseph Barton, “QUERY: Diaspora in Contemporary Usage,” 11 July 1995 in H-Ethnic’s July logs: uhttp://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbr…g=JAPtemsK63k37kzttuVvcw&user=&pw=. A further indication of this phenomenon may be seen in the theme of the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, “Diasporas and Migrations in History.” See the report by Karen J. Winkler, “Historians Explore Questions of How People and Cultures Disperse Across the Globe,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 January 1999, pp. A11-12. 6 For an especially perceptive discussion, see Baumann, “Shangri-La in Exile,” pp. 392-395. 3 its use “in Greek literature as a term for traumatic migrations,” and in some early twentieth-century journals on the Greek and Armenian diasporas,7 until the 1960s its use was confined to the scholarship of the Jewish and Christian religions. Indeed, when George Shepperson first joined “African” to “diaspora” in 1965, he explicitly did so because of the close parallels he saw between the Jewish diaspora and the dispersal of Africans as a consequence of the slave trade. Shepperson argued that African American and Caribbean intellectuals themselves had for a long time recognized and articulated connections between their own people in exile and that of the Jews.8 By his application of “diaspora” to the experience of “The African Abroad,” as the session at which he presented his paper was entitled and his paper makes plain, he declared as an historian and an outsider that he, too, saw such parallels. Shepperson’s achievement here was to recognize the great similarities in the comparative histories of these two great dispersions, especially the role of “slavery and imperialism” in the forced migration of both Jews and Africans, and to name the one by the term used for the other. As he notes, it as “not difficult to see why the expression ‘the African Diaspora’ has gained currency as a description of the great movement” which resulted in millions of people of African descent in the Western hemisphere.9 Moreover, as Martin Baumann observes, “The disciplinary application of ‘diaspora’ to non-Jewish and non-Christian peoples and their 7 Leontis, “Mediterranean Topographies,” p. 180; Barton, “QUERY.” 8 Shepperson elaborates on this point in his “”Introduction” to Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg (eds.), The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 1-17. See also, e.g., William Miles, “Negritude and Judaism,” The Western Journal of Black Studies, 21, 2 (1997), pp. 99-105. 9 Shepperson, “The African Abroad,” p, 152. In his “Introduction to the African Diaspora” in Ranger’s Emerging Themes, p. 147, Joseph Harris indicates that the session for which Shepperson’s paper was the key text was listed in the program as “the African Diaspora, or the African Abroad,” but in a more immediate report on the Dar es Salaam congress, he notes that he was Chair of the session on “The African Abroad and African History.” See Harris, “The International Congress on African History, 1965,” African Forum, 1, 3 (1966), pp. 80-84 at 83. I am seeking to clarify this small point with Terry Ranger. 4 exile situation seems to have been undertaken first within African Studies.”10 It was a brilliant bit of thumbnail comparative history. Shepperson was determined, however, to extend the definition of the African diaspora “both in time and space” so that it could “be made of maximum value for the new African historiography.” At the same time, he was clear in his understanding that not all African migrations could be subsumed under this rubric, restricting “the concept of the African diaspora” to that “which is the study of a series of reactions to coercion, to the imposition of the economic and political rule of alien peoples in Africa, to slavery and imperialism.” He did, however, include within the African diaspora “the migration of Negro slaves and servants to Europe before the opening of the trans-Atlantic slave trade’ and “the enslavement of Negroes by Muslim powers.” Nevertheless, he asserted that “the period of almost four hundred years of the European enslavement of Africans remains the heart of the African diaspora.”11 Shepperson further extended his definition of what was properly within the orbit of the African diaspora to include “the dispersal of Africans . . . inside [Africa], both as a consequence of the slave trade and of imperialism. Thus, he offered “the creation of Sierra Leone,” on the one hand, and “the dispersal of Africans from Malawi” throughout eastern and southern Africa, on the other.12 Finally, he spoke about pioneering Pan-African nationalist Duse Mohamed Ali, about whom he concluded: “The more we know of the complex careers of men like Duse Mohamed Ali the more we shall come to appreciate the full intricacies and influence of the African diaspora.”13 10 Baumann, “Shangri-La in Exile,” p. 386. 11 Ibid., pp. 152-153, 156-157. 12 Ibid., p. 170. Shepperson’s identification of the Malawi (also known as the Nyasa) diaspora, rather than any number of other such examples, dates to his service with the King’s African Rifles during World War II in what was then Nyasaland, now Malawi. 13 Ibid., pp. 171-172. 5 To a very large extent, whether or not one agrees with everything that he proposed in this classic paper, Shepperson had it right. Ironically, however, until very recently, historians of Africa have resisted embracing Shepperson’s bold initiative, preferring to treat African history as something distinct from that of the African diaspora.14 But as the combination of multiculturalism and the so-called “new” African diaspora have fueled a rising tide of interest in diaspora studies in the academy, many variations on his initiative have been proffered up. Indeed, the paths that lead from Shepperson to the present are many, and while I do not propose to follow them all, I shall explore several to see to what extent they challenge, adjust, or refute the architecture of his thesis. Adopting the African diaspora The first scholar to apply Shepperson’s idea in print to his on work was apparently R.W. Beachey, who employed the new phrase in his inaugural lecture at Makerere University.15 Addressing the generally ignored East African diaspora, Beachey accepted the core of Shepperson’s definition as having “chiefly to do with the dispersion of East Africans, not of their own free will, but by forcible extraction from the mainland, and their transport overseas or to other parts of Africa as slaves.” He also wondered, though without being able to offer any answers, “What has happened to all these millions of slaves who have gone out from East Central Africa to Mauritius, Réunion, the Seychelles, the Makran coast and the countless thousands who were absorbed into the 14 For a set of papers that call this separation into question, see the African Studies Association’s Issue; A Journal of Opinion, 24, 2 (1996), which is devoted to “African [Diaspora] Studies” and edited by Lisa Brock; see also Pier M. Larson, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), p. 270. 15 R.W. Beachey, The African Diaspora and East Africa: An inaugural lecture delivered at Makerere University College (University of East Africa), Kampala, Uganda on 31 July, 1967 (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1969). Beachey no doubt attended the Dar es Salaam Congress in 1965, since Shepperson’s paper was not published in the proceedings until 1968. 6 great areas of the Middle East.” In concluding his lecture Beachey asked, “What is the result of this great diaspora for East Africa?” and astutely observed that, in the absence of any seminal figures like Blyden, DuBois, Césaire and Garvey, “Pan Africanism and East African nationalism have drawn little or no strength from those nameless thousands who were wrenched from their homelands and transported overseas in past centuries.”16 This particular challenge was taken up earliest, most seriously, and to greatest effect, however, by Joseph Harris in a book that evolved from his participation as chair of the panel at which Shepperson presented his Dar es Salaam paper. Although Harris employed the phrase “African diaspora” in his introduction, for whatever reasons he did not incorporate it into the title of his pioneering study.17 Despite Beachey’s deployment of the phrase, and Harris’ researches on “the African presence in Asia,” the concept of “the African diaspora” did not generally catch on in the scholarly literature until about a decade after Shepperson first coined it. This time-lag is what Baumann calls “the ‘ten-year adoption gap’,” since it re-occurs in the history of other disciplinary adoptions and adaptations of “diaspora.”18 Edited volumes by Jacob Drachler, Martin Kilson and Robert Rotberg, and Graham Irwin each contributed to legitimating the concept within the larger field of Black Studies.19 Indeed, Shepperson wrote the introduction to the Kilson and Rotberg volume.20 The principal intellectual contribution of these volumes was to make explicit the extension of the 16 Ibid, pp. 2, 14-15; cf. Alpers, “Recollecting Africa,” pp. 84-85. 17 Harris, The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp. vii, xi-xiv and passim. 18 Baumann, “Shangri-La in Exile,” p. 389. 19 Jacob Drachler (ed.), Black Homeland, Black Diaspora: Cross Currents of the African Relationship (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975); Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg (eds.), The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Graham W. Irwin (ed.), Africans Abroad: A Documentary History of the Black Diaspora in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean During the Age of Slavery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). 20 Shepperson, “Introduction,” in Kilson and Rotberg (eds.), The African Diaspora, pp. 1-10. 7 notion to the wider dispersal of Africans across the globe that Shepperson only suggested in his initial paper. It remained once again, however, for Harris to expand the concept to encompass the widest understanding of the African diaspora in his pioneering and still exceptional edited collection of essays on the “global dimensions” of the diaspora.21 In his introduction to Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, Harris offers the following, oft-quoted definition: The African diaspora concept subsumes the following: the global dispersion (voluntary and involuntary) of Africans throughout history; the emergence of a cultural identity abroad based on origin and social condition; and the psychological or physical return to the homeland, Africa. Thus viewed, the African diaspora assumes the character of a dynamic, continuous, and complex phenomenon stretching across time, geography, class, and gender.22 Harris’s statement constitutes the first clear attempt to define the diaspora beyond the original boundaries set forth by Shepperson in 1965. That it continues to hold a central position may be seen, for example, in Alusine Jalloh’s recent reiteration: 21 Harris (ed.), Global Dimensions. It is quite interesting to see how the second edition (1993) differs from the first edition (1982). Harris revised his introduction, reorganized the Table of Contents and the order of some papers, dropped several papers that were less historical in orientation, and added others that emphasized both the non-Atlantic dimensions of the diaspora and the contributions of African women in the diaspora. Another unique publication that was a direct by-product of extending the horizons of research on the African diaspora, but that does not directly take up the central themes in the developing discourse on the topic, is St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA, 1987 and 1990). Drake explains his shift of emphasis from a study of “Africa and the Black Diaspora” to a deeper historical study of race and racial attitudes in the “Preface” to Vol. 1, pp. xv- xxiii. 22 Harris, “Introduction,” in Harris (ed.), Global Dimensions, 2nd ed., pp. 3-4. 8 The African diaspora was born out of the voluntary and involuntary movement of Africans to various areas of the world since ancient times, but involuntary migration through the trans- Saharan, trans-Atlantic, and Indian Ocean slave trades accounts for most of the black presence outside of Africa today. The concept of the African diaspora has also come to include the psychological and physical return of people of African descent to their homeland. Today, the historical relationship between Africans and their descendants abroad is a major subject not only in history but in other disciplines as well.23 More recently, in the wider context of shifting intellectual paradigms of the 1990s and the expanding applications of diaspora, various scholars have sought to contribute further to tightening up this definition. Contending the African Diaspora Some of these interventions take the form of differently couched cautions about the problems inherent in the concept. A decade ago, James Walvin suggested: While the expression [in this instance “Black Diaspora”] is a useful concept which powerfully evokes the extraordinary, far-flung experience of black life as shaped by the forces of imperial and colonial expansion, and by the effects of black slavery throughout the Atlantic economy, it runs the danger of overlooking the specific – the local and the distinctive – black experience in favor 23 Alusine Jalloh, “Introduction,” in Alusine Jalloh and Stephen E. Maizlish (eds.), The African Diaspora (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), p. 3. 9 of the general. Yet the contrary danger is perhaps even more tempting (and has certainly proved more influential) namely the tendency to divorce the experience of the Black Diaspora from its roots in colonial – primarily European – policy and expansion.24 Couched in more philosophical terms, Michael Echeruo contends that “in a major sense, we have appropriated both the language and the theology of another historic discourse into our discourse, without fully addressing, much less acknowledging, the consequences of that appropriation.”25 So far as I know, however, only Tony Martin argues for complete rejection of the term “diaspora” as applied to the African experience. He notes that the semantics of the term was debated at the First African Diaspora Studies Institute held at Howard University in 1979 that gave rise to the first edition of Global Dimensions and stakes out his position forthrightly, declaring that the term diaspora be deleted from our vocabulary, because the term African diaspora reinforces a tendency among those writing our history to see the history of African people always in terms of parallels in white history. . . . we should do away with the expression African diaspora because we are not Jews. Let us use some other terminology. Let us speak of the African dispersion, or uprooted Africa as somebody suggested, or scattered Africa.26 24 James Walvin, “Black slavery in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries: the historical implications for the Black Diaspora,” in Aubrey W. Bonnett and G. Llewellyn Watson (eds.), Emerging Perspectives on the Black Diaspora (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), p. 25. 25 Michael J. C. Echeruo, “An African Diaspora: The Ontological Project,” in Isidore Ekpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali A. Mazrui (eds.), The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 3-18, quoted at 3. 26 Tony Martin, “Garvey and Scattered Africa,” in Harris (ed.), Global Dimensions, 2nd ed., p. 441. 10