Historiographical Examination of the African Diaspora

This essay seeks to examine various selected historical works on the history of the African Diaspora with the aim of providing a meaningful analysis of the trend of historians’ interpretations of the concept. It pays much attention on the historical production about the Black Atlantic Diaspora that predominantly emerged out of the Atlantic interaction of Euro-America with Africa during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST). The essay however, shares common concerns with historiographies of other African Diasporic streams in general. As emphasized by Zeleza, ‘Diasporas are complex social and cultural communities created out of real and imagined genealogies and geographies of belonging, displacement, and recreation, constructed and conceived at multiple temporal and spatial scales, at different moments and distances from the presumed homeland’ and the African Diaspora is no exception to these dynamisms. Hence, providing historiographical examination of this field is central to understanding the historians’ evaluations and interpretations that have engulfed the discipline for some time now.

¹ As such, this essay argues that, historians have held a dramatically different views about the concept and complexities of the African Diaspora since the 1990s: conservative historians, alongside with others who focus on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade tended to see descendants of the trade in the Americas as most qualified to be termed as African Diasporans, while the newly emerged liberal historians think the conceptualization is incomplete if African descent communities in other part of the world including within Africa that possibly preceded the Atlantic trade is not holistically considered.

The history of the African diaspora is old as human civilization as people of African origin have been in constant motion for over 100,000 years. But a tradition of African Diasporic historiography only gained much recognition in the 1990s.² However, the term African diaspora appeared in public domain from the 1950s and 1960s, but ‘African peoples were mobilized using other terms, such as Pan-Africanism.’³ Just as Joseph Adjaye pointed, ‘it was the rise of nationalist and independence movements in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s that brought in its wake revolutions not only in political, economic, and social development, but in historical practice’⁴ in many aspects of Africa except in the field of the African Diaspora which only receive maximum scholarly attention from the 1990s. To be ascertained, historical knowledge production on the subject goes as far back as Frank M. Snowden (1970) and Abner Cohen (1971) and even beyond.⁵ But anything written about the past does not constitute historical work. Since ‘there is a clear difference between writing about the past and writing base on the use of historiographical “tenets,” for the mere mention of, or reference to, the past does not constitute a work of Historiography unless it is accompanied by the application of the “historian craft.”’⁶

As a term paper, it primarily examines the nature and content of history practice in the field of the African Diaspora: both historical writing and historiography, interrogate related issues, and explores the prevailing debates. Moreover, the essay does not intend to exhaustively examine all historical publications in the subject; rather, a consciously selected items of historical writings will be interpreted to provide a subjective conclusion. It must however be noted that, some of the materials analyzed here are not products of historians in the sense of the profession. Nonetheless, to achieve the purpose of this paper, their utilization is part and parcel.

The main works that revolutionized the field of the African Diaspora in the early 1990s were the classic works of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall. It is beyond dispute that the sociologist, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, published in 1993, marks an important turning point in the study of not only the African Diaspora but also Diasporas in general. And it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that, more than any other, this book embodies the theoretical and conceptual positions associated with the rise of Black cultural studies in the 1990s. Stuart Hall just like Gilroy equally provided an important and similarly perspective conception of the African diaspora three years before the Gilroy’s publication. Unlike Gilroy who focus on the newly emerged creolized culture and identity of Blacks in the US, Hall pays attention to the cultures of the Afro-Caribbean societies. What these two works have in common is their application of new conceptualizations to the case of Africans in the Americas, who are figured for Gilroy as the ‘Black Atlantic’ and for Hall as the ‘Afro-Caribbean’.

Although both of them looked at the newly emerged cultural identity of Blacks in the Americas from sociological anthropology perspective, their works place well in shaping the historiographical development of the African Diaspora. While historian were well acquainted with the Jewish Dispersal as the model representation of the classical notion of diaspora, in Hall and Gilroy’s conception of the Black people and cultures in the Americas offer a paradigm of a new notion of diaspora history and studies. In fact what is so unique about these two works is that, their case on the people who emerged out of the painful experience of the Atlantic slave trade and subsequent slavery, presented to historians a new way to think about diasporic peoples.

It is on this newly identified Diaspora by Gilroy and Hall that Christine Chivallon’s ‘Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic’ basically provides a distinction between the historic Jewish Diaspora and what Gilroy called the Black Atlantic.⁷ Thus, the difference between the two models of the diasporas-the former is ‘classic’ and the latter is ‘hybrid’ which both resulted from corresponding human experiences and histories. Chivallon broadens the scope of the studies on Black experiences and cultural consciousness in the Atlantic world to a proper understanding of the process and forms of the creolization the slave trade left on those societies.

Notwithstanding its considerable prominence and contributions to diaspora studies in Afro historiography, Gilroy’s Black Atlantic for instance has been criticized by a significant number of historians for over simplifying the African American experience and the role of Africa and African connections in its collective memory, imagination and thought; for deliberate privileging male figures in the construction of Atlantic blackness and modernity, despite its ritual gestures to gender; for universalizing the racialized ‘minority’ experience of African Americans (in most Caribbean islands African-descended people constitute the majority); for foreclosing the relationships and connections among the black diasporic cultures themselves beyond the Anglophone world (the largest African diaspora population is in Brazil and speaks Portuguese) and between them and African cultures; while at the same time desperately seeking a ‘black’, not a ‘white’, or ‘multicultural’ Atlantic; for its exclusive concern on cultural politics in its Eurocentric manner and disdain for Africa; and for mystifying modernity as the primary object of black Atlantic critique barring questions of imperialism and capitalism.⁸

Chrisman, who’s ‘Black Atlanticism’ widens the scope of the discourse on African Diaspora in 2000 summarized a comprehensive approach to understanding this complex subject. She writes:

I am arguing for new methods that articulate a version of black Atlanticism that does not contract African America, or the African diaspora, as a sovereign class or icon of modernity that then gets imposed upon African populations. If we are to retain the language of black modernity in our analyses - and I think we should - we need to open up its multiple geographical, economic, philosophical and aesthetic constituents, rather than using it as a singular term for a New World act of cultural selffashioning.⁹

Still on the unfinished sacrifice by historians to define who an African Diasporan is or what can be vividly termed as African Diaspora like the unquestionable Jewish Diaspora, Colin A. Palmer, a distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York in 2000 surfaces with a momentous approach to the ongoing discourse.¹⁰ He argues that it would be unjust to the discipline for historians to think that there is ‘monolithic diasporic community’ to focus on as pioneered by Hall and Gilroy.¹¹ Palmer ask a fascinating question that needs serious attention, if diaspora simply means people dispersedly living outside their original home or continent with a conscious perceptions of belongingness to one original home, are cognizant of their dispersal and, their oppression and alienation in the host countries. Then, ‘is Africa part of the African Diaspora?’

In attempt to address this question with couple of others, Palmer delineates five main streams of what can be historically considered as the African Diaspora which would be reduced to four later by Paul Zeleza. These Diasporic streams are: the first is the great movement within and outside Africa by Africans that began about 100,000 years ago; the second is the Bantu-speaking people movement that began about 3,000 B.C.E; the third is the trading diaspora of Africans interaction with Asia, Middle East and Europe beginning around the 5th century B.C.E; the four major African Diasporic stream is the Atlantic trade in African slave; and final one is the migration of Africans to other parts of the world most importantly starting from the 19th century to the abolition of the slave trade. Based on these categorizations, Palmer concludes that, the whole idea of ‘diasporas are not actual but imaginary and symbolic communities and political constructs’ and that it is the historian who often call them into being.¹²

Paul T. Zeleza, a professor of African Studies and History at the Pennsylvania State University in the USA in his 2005 article, ‘Rewriting the African Diaspora’ remapped the concept of African Diaspora beyond the activities of the inhumane slave trade that swept over 11 million Africans into the Americas.¹³ Zeleza as an astute historian never mind spending several years consciously studying other Black communities in Europe and Asia before the historic compulsive movement of Africans across the Atlantic. Zeleza challenges the Euro-Americanization of the African Diaspora by scholars especially Paul Gilroy and his cohorts. With his in-depth knowledge in the field, Zeleza strongly argues that ‘despite the growing popularity of diaspora studies, our understanding of the African diaspora remains limited by both the conceptual difficulties of defining what we mean by the diaspora in general, and the African diaspora in particular, and the analytical tendency to privilege the Atlantic, or rather the Anglophone, indeed the American branch of the African.’¹⁴ As the main task of his essay is to disenfranchise the hegemony of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Zeleza outlines what he called the four dominant dimensions of the African diaspora such as the intra-Africa, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean and Atlantic Diasporas of which Gilroy did not notice except the fourth one.

Because of the conceptual challenge envisages by Zeleza, he went ahead to define the African Diaspora beyond the conceptual frame given by Gilroy and his contemporaries. His conceptualization of the African Diaspora redefined the phenomenon to encompass all Black communities across the globe, thus what he termed as global African Diaspora. Being a historian, Zeleza studies the phenomenon from the historical antecedents that preceded and shaped the Atlantic model. Zeleza’s conceptualization of the African Diaspora makes Gilroy’s most respected book, The Black Atlantic deficient in historical scholarship.

Five years later, Zeleza came out with another valuable historical piece title ‘African Diasporas: Toward a Global History,’ which aims at examining the development of African diaspora studies.¹⁵ Zeleza on this craft continues to offer a vigorous critique of the hegemonous Afro-Atlantic model in the field of African diaspora studies. He built his argument on two critical concerns that he thinks students and scholars of African Diaspora must pay attention to: ‘the terms of analysis that are adopted, and the problems of historical mapping.’¹⁶ Zeleza’s chance of travelling across length and breadth of the globe which was partly funded by the Ford Foundation accords him with a broader knowledge and historical facts for his meaningful analysis of the trajectories of the African Diaspora. However, Zeleza’s advocacy of a global African diaspora through a universal study of Africans in the Diaspora is unrealistic since all the perceived Diasporas occurred in different spaces and times with different historical experiences. It is therefore safer to specifically study them on regional and cultural bases as in the case of Paul Gilroy.

From the foregoing discourse, the African Diaspora emerged out of both forced and free migration, thus involuntary and voluntary movement of Africans within and outside the continent through time. Historiographical study of the African Diaspora would be incomplete if a detailed intellectual engagement is not carried on the historical knowledge produce of the TAST which has the majority of Africans forcefully transported to the Euro-American world. In this regards historians such as Thomas J. Pressly (2006) and Edmund Abaka (2012) fit well in this historiographical examination.¹⁷ Thomas J. Pressly, an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Washington for instance, painstakingly examines Woodson’s new knowledge which brought a baffling information about free Black slave-owners that challenged the hitherto perception that the absolute ownership and control of the enterprise was wholly under the Whiteman. He critiques Woodson for not clearly providing statistical figures on the number of free Blacks who ever held slaves as well as number of slaves owned and controlled by these free Blacks. To Thomas J. Pressly, this would provide a comparative evaluation of the significant contribution of Blacks’ roles in the slaves ownership discourse.

In understanding the dynamism of the operation of the trade from Africa to the Americas, Edmund Abaka’s recently fashioned book, House of Slaves and “Door of No Return” looks about the complex nature of the trade-thus from origin to transit centers (forts and castles as slave dungeons) to the destination to life in the plantations to abolition and to the conception of ‘return to Africa’. He exclusively designated a full chapter captioned, ‘The Long Shadow of the Enslaved: From Africa into the Diaspora’ where he argues that the Gold Coast castles serves as an important center for understanding the history of the African Diaspora. Since the whole syndrome of the African Diaspora started from there as diverse ethnic groups were transported from different geographical places to this temporal abode.¹⁸ Abaka is right in this assertion because it was from these transit centers with their brutalities and evilness that the enslaved Africans began developing a new sense of cultural identity.

In most recent times, the interest on African diaspora studies and history have shifted to a new trend of historiography. Thus, historians have swiftly moved aware from the debate surrounding who an African Diasporan is, the TAST, the plights of the Negro in the Diaspora, and justification for the abolition of the slave trade to a more challenging debate about the social and political interactions of Euro-Americans with Africans that occurred on the continent of Africa during the trade before the birth of these ‘hybrid’ cultures in these diasporic communities as well as the relationship that exist between the African Diaspora and Africa. In examining historical works on these aspects of the subject, (interactions with Europeans and Africans that occurred in Africa during the TAST which particularly saw to the emergence of the most widely studied of African Diaspora in the New World) Pernille Ipsen’s Daughters of the Trade and Osei-Tutu’s monograph, Forts, Castles and Society in West Africa are the major historical crafts that speak to the issue.¹⁹

Ipsen for example, provides a fascinating narrative of European-African interactionism in the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century down to the middle of the nineteenth century. The author using archival sources, weaves the narrative around women (daughters of the trade) and their role in the rise of Afro-Europeans at the Gold Coast, showing them not as passive objects but rather as active participants who contributed immensely to shaping the fortunes of the Trans-Atlantic Trade. Her deeper knowledge on the subject makes the book valuable, however, her use of the term ‘colonial’ prior to when it actually started in the Gold Coast territory seems to be out of context.

Likewise, Osei-Tutu’s collection contributes greatly to the varied ways of understanding the interactions that position, utility, and impacts of European forts and castles built in West Africa from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries had on their situated communities. The volume contains works of knowledgeable scholars including historians on the subject of the TAST and its impacts especially in the two West African countries, Ghana and Benin. It provides a compelling case of how the fortresses as buildings within which humans interacted and brokered all kinds of transactions particularly as transitional holding places and markets for enslaved Africans prior to their transportation to the Americas which resulted to what is now known as the Atlantic dimension of the African Diasporas. Most chapters in Osei-Tutu’s volume provide a historical knowledge on how the conscience of African diasporism among the enslaved started from these centers before landing in their new destinations.

Although, the concept of the African Diaspora is latest in African-American studies as well as Diaspora studies in general to receive scholarly attention not only from historians, but more so from multi-disciplinary scholars. It has been among the few areas in contemporary scholarship that experience such a dramatic revolution starting from Paul Gilroy’ 1993 Black Atlantic that raises the eyebrows of scholars in the terrain. This lateness of the African Diaspora into the discourse of historians is partly as a results of its relationship with ‘for the long time unspoken topic,’ the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The unnaturalness nature of the trade which is still shrouded in the minds of both the descendants of the victims and the perpetrators has affected discourses in any field that has its connections. Therefore, since it is considered predominantly as the mother of the historic African Diaspora, it is not for nothing that the topic remained unrecognized in the historical community for a very long time.

Based on the examination of the African Diaspora historical studies from the 1990s, Paul Gilroy, Colin Palmer and Paul Zeleza indisputably stand out as the three pillars to whom modern scholars owe an ocean of debt of extreme gratitude. They have made invaluable contributions to the understanding of the complex history of the African Diaspora. Their collective efforts and other scholars’ contributions have offered a rich knowledge about the past of the African Diasporans to both students and prospecting scholars of Diaspora Studies and History.

Bibliography

Abaka, Edmund. House of Slaves and “Door of No Return: Gold Coast/Ghana Slave Forts, Castles and Dungeons and the Atlantic Slave Trade. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2012.

Adjaye, Joseph K. ‘Perspectives on Fifty Years of Ghanaian Historiography,’ History in Africa 35 (2008), 1-24.

Chivallon, Christine. ‘Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora,’ Translated by Karen E. Fields, Diaspora 11, no. 3 (2002), 359-382.

Chrisman, Laura ‘Rethinking Black Atlanticism,’ Black Scholar 30, 3/4 (2000), 12-17.

Cohen, A., ‘Cultural strategies in the organization of trading Diasporas’. In Claude Meillassoux (Ed.). The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness (MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Hall, Stuart. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora,’ 1990. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. P. Williams and Laura Chrisman. (London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1994).

Ipsen, Pernille. Daughters of the trade: Atlantic slavers and interracial marriage on the Gold Coast. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Masilela, Ntongela. ‘‘The Black Atlantic’ and African Modernity in South Africa,’ Research in African Literatures 27, no. 4 (1996), 88-96.

Osei-Tutu, John Kwadwo (Eds.). Forts, Castles and Society in West Africa: Gold Coast and Dahomey, 1450–1960. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

Palmer, Colin A. ‘Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,’ the Journal of Negro History 85, no. ½ (Winter - Spring, 2000), 27-32.

Pressly, Thomas J. ‘‘The Known World’ of Free Black Slaveholders: A Research Note on the Scholarship of Carter G. Woodson,’ The Journal of African American History 91, no. 1, The African American Experience in the Western States (Winter, 2006), 81-87.

Snowden, Frank M., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman experience. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1970.

Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. ‘African Diasporas: Toward a Global History,’ African Studies Review 53, no. 1 (April 2010), 1-19.

─── ‘Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic,’ African Affairs 104, no. 414 (Jan., 2005), 35-68.

[...]

¹ Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic,’ African Affairs 104, no. 414 (Jan., 2005), 41-42.

² See for example: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness (MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora,’ 1990. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. P. Williams and Laura Chrisman. (London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1994).

³ Zeleza, ‘Rewriting,’ 39.

⁴ Joseph K. Adjaye, ‘Perspectives on Fifty Years of Ghanaian Historiography,’ History in Africa 35 (2008), 2.

⁵ Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman experience (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1970); Abner Cohen, ‘Cultural strategies in the organization of trading Diasporas,’ in Claude Meillassoux (Ed.), The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).

⁶ Adjaye, ‘Perspectives.’

⁷ Christine Chivallon, ‘Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora,’ Translated by Karen E. Fields, Diaspora 11, no. 3 (2002).

⁸ See for example: Ntongela Masilela, ‘‘The Black Atlantic’ and African Modernity in South Africa,’ Research in African Literatures 27, no. 4 (1996); and Laura Chrisman, ‘Rethinking Black Atlanticism,’ Black Scholar 30, no. ¾ (2000); Zeleza, ‘Rewriting.’

⁹ Chrisman, ‘Rethinking,’ 17.

¹⁰ Colin A. Palmer, ‘Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,’ the Journal of Negro History 85, no. ½ (Winter - Spring, 2000).

¹¹ Palmer, ‘Modern,’ 27.

¹² Palmer, ‘Modern,’ 29.

¹³ Zeleza, ‘Rewriting.’

¹⁴ Zeleza, ‘Rewriting.’ 35.

¹⁵ Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘African Diasporas: Toward a Global History,’ African Studies Review 53, no. 1 (April 2010).

¹⁶ Zeleza, ‘Global History,’ 01.

¹⁷ See: Thomas J. Pressly, ‘‘The Known World’ of Free Black Slaveholders: A Research Note on the Scholarship of Carter G. Woodson,’ The Journal of African American History 91, no. 1, The African American Experience in the Western States (Winter, 2006); Edmund Abaka, House of Slaves and “Door of No Return: Gold Coast/Ghana Slave Forts, Castles and Dungeons and the Atlantic Slave Trade (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2012).

¹⁸ Abaka, House of Slaves, 66.

¹⁹ Pernille Ipsen, Daughters of the trade: Atlantic slavers and interracial marriage on the Gold Coast, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); John Kwadwo Osei-Tutu (eds.), Forts, Castles and Society in West Africa: Gold Coast and Dahomey, 1450–1960 (Leiden: Brill, 2018).