Essay: African diaspora

Throughout prehistoric and ancient times, Africans have migrated from their home continent to different parts of the world. These migrations and dispersals of Africans throughout the years have fostered the African diaspora. The term “African diaspora” however recently emerged and became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but the African diasporas existed long before then in other parts of the world, and African peoples were mobilized using other terms, such as Pan-Africanism. Nevertheless, the study of the African diaspora has become very prevalent in the study of diasporas though the understanding of the African diaspora is finite because of the notional challenges of defining diaspora in a broader term and the African diaspora in particular.
In “Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic,” Paul Tiyambe Zeleza analyzes a couple of notions about the African diaspora, centered by a critique of, “The Black Atlantic” by Paul Gilroy. He elaborates on the four dominant dimensions of the global African diasporas, which are the intra-Africa, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Atlantic diasporas. Moreover, this paper will focus on the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean world. Being the third largest of the world’s oceanic divisions, the Indian Ocean falls between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.  Additionally, the migrations and continual growth of Africans in the Indian Ocean world was encompassed with both positive and negative attitudes the societies of the Indian Ocean had towards the Africans.
In lecture, we discussed that diaspora involves migration of people from their homeland to a hostland.  The Indian Ocean diasporas comprised of both forced and free or voluntary migrants, which was quite different in comparison to other diasporas such as the historic Atlantic diasporas.  From the thirteenth century, the records of the African presence in the Indian ocean became abundant, and is seen that Africans came to the Indian Ocean as, different occupations including, traders, servants, sailors, bodyguards, bureaucrats, soldiers, concubines and clerics.
The Africans that freely migrated to the Indian Ocean did so because of various reasons.  Most of those reasons were a direct result of the harsh living conditions of their homeland as well as the incentive to use their skills as a form of labor and also to gain skills to earn a living.  Others were also freedmen, who came to the Indian Ocean to seek both work and asylum. Many freedmen, found themselves working alongside slaves, especially on the boats and ships on the port of the Indian Ocean. Although, African slaves and slavery itself were not central in creating the Indian Ocean world, both slaves and freedmen, working on the ships and in the ports played an important role in sustaining the Indian Ocean world.
Although the Indian Ocean has experienced a more modest tradition of free labor migration, whereas the slave trade was not as cruel and severe in comparison to the Atlantic slave trade. It also has a history of forced migration through slavery.  Looking at the geographies of the Indian Ocean, there are different sources of the slave trade for the diaspora of African peoples. One of the prominent sources of the slave trade was located in Northeast Africa. In countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Sudan, which extended to western Sudan was where the captives were acquired from. Also analyzing the export markets, one can included the Red Sea littoral, to the Hadramaut, South Asia, Persian Gulf and down to Zanzibar. There were also captives from East Africa, which included the hinterland of the Swahili coast and extended to the west of Lake Tanganyika, these captives were mainly dispatched to the markets of Zanzibar, the Hadramaut, southern Somalia Persian Gulf, the Seychelles and South Asia. As of East Central Africa, the captives were drawn from Zimbabwe,  northern Mozambique, Zambia, and Malawi. Finally, there is Madagascar, which was a primitive source for slaves at the Cape.
The slave trade kept on growing over the centuries after the rise of the Portuguese seaborne empire and also the introduction of the European powers, which included the French, the Dutch and the British. As trading started growing along the port cities and ships, business that were thriving and flourishing had an increase in demand for slaves. Thus, slaves started working side by side with both freedmen and freeborn men. However, the line that distinguished slaves from freedmen was a very blurred line.