The Black Man’s Burden: The Diaspora's Urgent Mandate to Awaken Africa's Sleeping Giants
Part III: How the African Diaspora can unlock African economic growth and success - who are the African Diaspora?
Now, let’s get to the heart of the series in what is the black man’s, or more broadly speaking, the overseas African’s burden, to lead Africa into an economic nirvana. If not you - as a New African Diaspora - or me - as an Old African Diaspora - then who? The African Diaspora seems lacking in intention and a call to arms. And the longer this goes unaddressed, Africa’s emergence as a great economic power, finally awoken from its deep slumber, will continue to be deferred.
Let’s start off by parsing together what we mean when we speak of the African Diaspora. The term is sometimes used broadly or quite specifically, depending on the context of the conversation and the listening audience. Within different fields of African studies, the African Diaspora tends to be split off into two groups: the Old African Diaspora and the New African Diaspora.
The Old African Diaspora are those whose ancestors were forcefully removed from Africa, and were subsequently relocated to several far-flung corners of the world to work as slaves. These involuntary migrations can be split into two groups.
The more recent and more well-known of the two is the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It first began in the mid-1400’s, with the Portuguese, in later centuries over 10 million African slaves would be shipped off to New World. Virtually every country throughout the Americas and the Caribbean (including my ancestral country of Jamaica) practiced slavery at some point or another. The vast scale, geography and ecology of the Western Hemisphere led colonial powers and independent republics to extensively rely on slave labour for developing and building land, infrastructure and cities across the region.
The second, less spoken about arm of the Old African Diaspora are located across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. Their ancestors were instead victims of the Arab Slave Trade - a trade in which 10-20 million human bodies were trafficked, that lasted for over a thousand years. Discussions around this trade aren’t visited upon as often because many of the female African slaves (who constituted as the majority kidnapped) procreated with local Arab men, with their descendants assimilating with ethnic Arabs. While male African slaves were castrated and made into sterile eunuchs. Thus, the visibility of African slave descendants across the region is much less prominent, and easier to overlook.
Furthermore, to really come to grips with the Arab Slave Trade is to confront some uncomfortable truths. These include the fact that many white Europeans (likely at least 1 million) also fell victim to this trade. Indeed, the seemingly controversial lines, “Britons never ever shall be slaves.” that are valiantly uttered in Rule Britannia might actually be alluding to past conflicts with Barbary pirates from North Africa. We would also have to acknowledge that the Arab Slave Trade largely came to an end as a result of Western (mostly British) political, economic and naval pressures. For instance, Leaders of the Ottoman Empire signed the Brussels Conference Act of 1890, which aimed to "put an end to Negro Slave Trade by land as well as by sea, and to improve the moral and material conditions of existence of the native races". The shortest war in history - fought in Zanzibar between the British and Omani descendent colonialists - did lead to the end of slavery in that part of Africa shortly thereafter.
The total population of the Old African Diaspora is probably over 200 million. A realistic estimate once you factor in over 40 million African Americans and more than 100 million African descendants scattered across Central and South America. You can go and visit countries like Brazil, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and this quickly becomes apparent.
Then there is the New African Diaspora, who are the main focus of this article series. These are Africans living overseas with direct, and much more recent ties to Africa. They voluntarily migrated, and continue to do so in larger numbers, to different parts of the planet from the first half of the 20th Century onwards. With them numbering close to 40 million according to recent estimates. By 2050, estimates point to this number rising to 100 million, increasing its share of world population from 0.5 percent today, to 1 percent. Because of their strong familial, ethnic and linguistic ties to Africa, coupled with the fact that many are already passport holders or are eligible for citizenship in a given African country, the New African Diaspora are best placed to lead an African business and cultural renaissance.
Next, we will look at what actions the community can take right now to improve prospects for the continent, and grapple with the hard questions surrounding the lack of urgency and cohesiveness found among much of the Diaspora.