African Diaspora

The African diaspora describes the movement of people from Africa to other countries both freely and forcibly. The slave trade is largely responsible for the movement of Africans across the globe. The word diaspora is derived from the Latin word diaspairein, which means "to disperse." Colonists from Arab countries began enslaving and moving Africans all the way back to the 5th century into the Middle East and Asia.

Then in the 15th century European countries began to trade slaves first into Europe and then into the Americas across the Middle Passage. This is the result of European countries seeing the Africans as a "resource" that they could exploit and enslave when the Europeans began to settle in Africa. As a result of the Atlantic slave trade, African families and communities were destroyed and many of Africans were killed in the process. Not only were Europeans involoved but also some Africans would sell their own communities in order to trade for something of value to themselves.

The Atlantic slave trade is referred to as Maafa by Africans and African Americans, which is Swahili for "great disaster." Many people died as a result of the slave trade, either from warring kingdoms trying to sell slaves, or from the movemetn of slaves to coastal cities to the New World because of the shortage of labor.

As many European countries began to colonize Africa some tried to legitimize slavery claiming that Africans had been selling each other since long before the Europeans arrived. As this continued the Europeans established borders of Kingdoms that did not exist before their arrival. This in turn broke up some existing tribes and their interaction amongst other tribes. Europeans also carefully manuevered their way into the local legal systems and in turn chabnged many of them around in order to lessen the status of the native Africans.