Reassembling Africa: a leading anthropologist proposes an essential library for understanding the Black Diaspora in the Americas

Black Issues Book Review, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Sheila S. Walker

It is estimated that 12 million to 15 million people taken from Africa were shipped to the Americas over an almost 400-year period beginning in the 16th century. We are most familiar with those who came to the North American colonies, but more went elsewhere in this hemisphere. At Spelman College, Dr. Sheila S. Walker has organized the Year of the Diaspora to promote understanding of how these stolen laborers contributed to the technology, wealth and culture of the Americas. For Black History month, BIBR asked Dr. Walker to suggest a reading list for understanding how Africans both shaped and adapted to the Americas.

In 1996, I organized an international conference, "The African Diaspora and the Modern World," in order to discuss some of the most fundamental issues for understanding the African Diaspora in the Americas. From conference presentations and interviews with participants, I edited the volume African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas and produced the video documentary Scattered Africa: Faces and Voices of the African Diaspora. In order to discuss the Diaspora, one must first know who constitutes it and where it is located. It comes as a surprise to many in the United States that the majority of the Diaspora neither lives in North America nor speaks English.

Portuguese-speaking Brazil has the largest Afrodescendant population in the Americas and the second largest in the world after Nigeria. So the world's second-largest African nation is in the Americas. The Spanish-speaking communities of North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean, along with Brazil, constitute the great majority of the estimated 200 million African Diasporans in the hemisphere. All countries in the Americas from chile to Canada have African-descended populations that have made significant contributions to them.

Unfortunately, many of the books about this majority are neither translated into English nor easy to know about outside of their regions. But this essay will reference only those available in English.

The foundational contributions of Africans and their descendants to the creation and development of the Americas have been denied, minimized and distorted throughout the hemisphere based on Eurocentric socioeconomic systems and scholarly traditions. It is therefore important for African Diasporans to tell our own stories on our own terms from an Afrogenic perspective, a perspective that grows out of the experiences and interpretations of African and African Diasporan communities. African Roots/American Cultures privileges the voices of African and African Diasporan scholars and cultural leaders in discussing our own communities and experiences, without, of course, excluding useful contributions from others. It includes, for example, articles by members of the large African-descended populations of Brazil and Venezuela, as well as by members of the Afro-Argentinean and Afro-Uruguayan populations that are claimed not to exist by presumably authoritative sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica.

To really understand the Pan-American African Diaspora it is essential to view it as a single unit of analysis and to see the societies and phenomena within it from a comparative perspective that allows common themes to emerge. In doing so, we see, for example, the essential roles of Africans and their descendants in the creation of the technological foundations and the economic wealth of all of the societies of the Americas. And we begin to understand the transatlantic slave trade not as a random unskilled labor migration, but as a deliberate and specific recruitment process of skilled labor leading to a massive brain drain and transfer of technology from Africa to the Americas. African knowledge of the gold mining that enriched Europe and the rice and other crop cultivation that nourished and determined the tastes the Americas are prime illustrations.

It is also important to situate the African Diaspora in the Americas within a global context, and to relate the societies and phenomena of the Diaspora to the specific African origins that account for many of their structures and meanings. African ethnic and regional groups brought to the Americas cultural elements that continue to manifest in gastronomy, in everyday and esoteric language, in religion and spirituality, in arts and crafts, in aesthetics, in the gift of celebration.

Bibliography for a Scattered People

The articles in African Roots/American Cultures (Rowman & Littlefield, September 2001) address many of these issues that are fundamental for understanding the Diaspora, as do the following volumes:

* Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (Howard University Press, June 1993) historian Joseph E. Harris's edited volume based on the first African Diaspora conference organized in the United States at Howard University in 1979, situates the African Diaspora in the Americas in a worldwide context that includes the African presence in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Asia. It also addresses the issue of returns to and impacts on Africa of African descendants, especially from the United States and Brazil, but also from England and from Jamaica through Nova Scotia in Canada.