mental Revolution re entering the African Diaspora
A MENTAL REVOLUTION RE-ENTERING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA In simple terms, the Diaspora as a concept, describes groups of people who currently live or reside outside the original homelands. We will approach the Diaspora from the lenses of migration; that the migration of people through out of the African continent has different points of origin, different patterns and results in different identity formations. Yet, all of these patterns of dispersion and germination/ assimilation represent formations of the Diaspora. My paper will focus on the complexities of the question of whether or not Africans in the Diaspora should return to Africa. This will be focused through the lenses of the different phases in the Diaspora. The historical Diaspora confirms pre-colonial global dispersion and resettlement of Africans. ... This brings us to a new question, what exactly then are the identities of the African Diaspora and how was that identity forged under (in and after) slavery? Avatar Brah best illuminates the journey of identity formulation through the literature of the African Diaspora she wrote: “Diasporic identities are at once local and global. ... The Diaspora originated from historical and cultural experiences of the Jewish and Greek people, which mean dispersal, the African Diaspora is the forced removal of Africans from Africa, which led to enslavement. According to (Harris 2001), “the importance of the historical Diaspora was that Africans like other people have traveled abroad as free people, settled down and made important contributions to many Europeans and Asian countries.” The Historical Diaspora was mainly the dispersion of Africans in the world and their settlements. ... This made them create an identity of who they want to be because in the historical Diaspora there was “free fluidity” and that enabled them to do whatever they wanted for that reason there was no constraints. ... Due to this Arabian slave trade, in our present day, several discrete communities of African descent can be found in cities, towns and regions of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and India. ... In this modern Diaspora their identity was taken away from them and they were confined to a description (definition) of who they are. ... ” With this mind set of thingafication, the colonizers thought they owned the Slaves and could therefore do anything they feel like doing to them because they are not humans As of the modern Diaspora, the abolition of the slave trade led to the colonial period in African History and resulted in qualitative and quantitative differences in the dispersion of Africans abroad. ... The existence of more than fifty African countries, which vary from each other with varying social and political conditions and different international interests, complicates further the relationships between Africa and its Diaspora. ... Unlike the Irish the African Americans, have a whole continent made of different countries and cultures to choose from which can be almost impossible. African Americans are left with the choice of calling themselves Black Americans due to their skin color.