EKWE JONAL

The term African diaspora, as George Shepperson (1993) reiterated, did not emerge in the Anglophone world until the 1950s and 1960s, however, African diaspora existed long before then, and so did ideas and movements of African and black internationalism, which were captured by the concept and ideology of Pan Africanism. Furthermore, interventions by George Shepperson (1968), and Joseph Harris (1968, 1982, 1993), played prominent role to popularize diaspora studies in the Anglophone academy, particularly in the United States where the civil rights and the black studies movements were assaulting the barricades of Eurocentric scholarship and white institutional exclusion. Thus, the term African Diaspora, today, enjoys pride of place in the increasingly crowded pantheon of diaspora studies. Often times, the term diaspora is used in a fuzzy as well as uncritical manner in which all manner of movements and migrations between countries and also within countries are encapsulated in its generous conceptual bosom, and besides, no adequate attention is paid to the historical conditions and experiences that produce diaspora communities. Indeed, not all dispersals result in the formation of diaspora and once formed a diaspora does not exist in perpetuity. To this end, some Diasporas disappear, some dispersals turn into Diasporas long after the original dispersals. The term diaspora is simultaneously a state of being as well as a process of becoming, a kind of voyage that encompasses the possibility of never arriving or returning, a navigation of multiple belongings, of networks of affiliation. Undoubtedly, it is a mode of naming, remembering, living and feeling group identity molded out of experiences, positioning, struggles, and imaginings of the past and the present, and often times, the unfolding, unpredictable future, which are shared or seen to be shared across the boundaries of time and space. 

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