Ho Technical University

(Department of Multidisciplinary Studies)

AFS 100: African Studies

Africa in the Diaspora

Dr. Bright Lumor, Mensah

Lecturer, HTU
Ho
0209197306
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 Lectures 5:Racism, resistance and the creation
of a new African identity in the Americas
Learning objectives

The course aims to help students to:

 Conceptualize racism against African Diaspora in the Americas
 Discuss some successful slave rebellions in the Americas
 Trace the root of the labels Negro, Black, Colored, African American, etc.
 Discuss the role of the divide-and-rule tactic as a tool for controlling the enslaved
Africans. House Negro Vs Field Negro
 Discuss the origin of Pan-Africanism in the diaspora

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Introduction: African Diaspora in the Americas
• African Diaspora in the Americas is mainly a product of
history with European Contact with Africa in the 15th Century.
• Since the end of the 20th century, the concentration of Africans
in the diaspora has grown exponentially
• African Diasporic populations in the Americas include African
Americans, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin Americans, and Afro-
Canadians – descendants of enslaved West Africans brought to
the United States, the Caribbean, and South America during
the Atlantic slave trade.
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Diaspora
• People in the diaspora often portray a sense of longing for the
continent, some even romanticize it as the land of glory to which
they must return. Rastafarians often refer to Africa as their
“Zion” flowing with milk and honey.
• This glorification of Africa also provides the necessary
psychological boost for survival in the harsh social and
economic conditions in which the African Diasporic populations
have lived.

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African Diaspora concentrations in the Americas

Concentration of the African Diaspora in the Americas

Brazil 108,200,000 (Blacks and mixed) 50.7%

United States 46,300,000 (including multiracial) 12%

Haiti 9,925,365

Colombia 4,944,400 including multiracial

Jamaica 2,510,000

Mexico 1,386,556

Canada 1,198,540

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 Transatlantic slave trade:
• It involved about 15 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic
Ocean to the Americas from the 15th to the 19th century.
1440-1880. It peaked around the 18th and 19th centuries.
• The transatlantic Slave trade was the largest forcible
transportation of human beings from one part of the world to
another.
• An estimated 10 to 15 percent of the captives died on their way
to the coast.
• The European slave masters usually left behind persons who
were elderly, physically challenged, or otherwise dependent—
groups who were least able to contribute to the economic health
of their societies

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Triangular Trade
• The Trans-Atlantic
slave trade was also
called the triangular
trade because it
involved three
continents, Europe,
Africa, and the North
and South Americas
(the new world)
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In the new world
• Slaves from the Gold Coast/Ghana were known in the Americas
and the West Indies as the Coromantine negroes, a name
derived from fort Fort Kormantine in the Ghanaian town of
Kormantse, Central Region
• Edward Long in 1774 described the Coromantines as haughty,
ferocious, and courageous; the proudest and unyielding of the
slaves who mostly led slave mutinies/rebellions
• Some of the slaves run away and joined maroon gangs in
Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Guyana, among others.
• When runaway enslaved people and Amerindians banded
together and subsisted independently they were called maroons

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Racial Labels
• Negro/ Nigger
• Black
• Black American
• Colored
• African American (accepted now)

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Racism in the new world
• Throughout American history, the hallmarks of American
democracy – opportunity, freedom, and prosperity – have been
largely reserved for white people through the intentional
exclusion and oppression of other races especially people of
color.
• The deep racial and ethnic inequities that exist today are a direct
result of structural racism. That is historical and contemporary
policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain white
supremacy.
• Don’t forget that in the US, the “one drop” rule made anyone with
African blood irredeemably black, in Brazil, the issue of gradation
was more complex and crossed color lines.

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Jim crow laws (laws legalizing racism)
• Jim Crow laws were State and local laws that enforced racial
segregation mainly in the Southern United States.
• These laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries by white Southern Democrat-dominated state
legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and
economic gains made by black people during the
Reconstruction period. Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.
• They were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying
them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education, or other
opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws
often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence, and death.

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Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
White Supremacist groups were founded
against Black People

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The KKK
• The KKK grew into a secret society terrorizing Black
communities and seeping through white Southern
culture, with members at the highest levels of
government and in the lowest echelons of criminal
back alleys
• The KKK perpetrated violence in Black communities,
making danger a regular aspect of African American
life. Black schools were vandalized and destroyed,
and bands of violent white people attacked, tortured
and lynched Black citizens in the night. Families were
attacked and forced off their land all across the South.
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Lynching
• Blacks were lynched indiscriminately, some for wife
beating, stealing pigs, being "saucy to white people",
sleeping with a consenting white woman, for being in
the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Through violence and legal restrictions, whites often
prevented blacks from working as common laborers,
much less as skilled artisans or in the professions.
Under such conditions, even the most ambitious and
talented black person found it extremely difficult to
advance.
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Human Zoos in America and Europe

Ota Benga was a Congolese pygmy brought to the The 1958 Brussels World’s Fair included a
US and put on display at the New York Zoological "human zoo" of people from Congo
Society in the Bronx

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Field Negroes Vs
House Negroes
• By Malcom X

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The field Negro

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 Nadir of American race relations 1877–1901/1923.

The nadir of American race relations was the period in African-

American history and the history of the United States when
racism in the country was more open and pronounced than it had
been during any other period in the nation's history.

During this period, African Americans lost many of the civil

rights which they had gained during Reconstruction. Anti-black
violence, lynching, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and
expressions of white supremacy all increased.
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1906 Atlanta race riot

Atlanta, Georgia
Over 25 African Americans died, 2 white Americans also died
The perpetrators were white mobs, and the city police.
Violent attacks by armed mobs of White Americans against African
Americans in Atlanta, Georgia began on the evening of September 22,
1906, and lasted through September 24.
African Americans were hanged, shot, beaten or stabbed to death. White
mobs invaded black neighborhoods, destroying homes and businesses.
The immediate cause was a newspaper report of four white women
allegedly raped in separate incidents by African American men. The
underlying cause was the growing racial tension in a rapidly-changing city
and economy, competition for jobs, housing, and political power.

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 Tulsa Massacre (1921)
• Date: May 31 and June 1, 1921
• The massacre began when 19-year-old Dick
Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of
assaulting Sarah Page, a white 17-year-old
elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building.
• Mobs of white residents, given weapons by city
officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed
homes and businesses of the Greenwood District
in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US.
• The event is considered one of "the single worst
incident[s] of racial violence in American history".
• The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35
square blocks of the neighborhood – at the time
one of the wealthiest Black communities in the
United States, known as "Black Wall Street".
• About 200 Blacks were killed, and about 50 whites
also died

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Revolutions/Rebellions in the new world
• Haitian Revolution
• Maroon revolutions in Jamaica

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Haitian Revolution
• The Haitian Revolution was an uprising by self-
freed slaves in the French Caribbean colony of
Saint Domingue. It occurred between 1791 and
1804 and involved an armed insurrection by black
and mulatto slaves against the colonial rule of the
French.
• The Haitian Revolution occupies a unique space
among a history of eighteenth and nineteenth-
century revolutions, and in particular slave
revolutions.
• It is the only revolt by self-freed slaves which
resulted in the birth of a free nation, governed by
non-whites. It occurred after the American War of
Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution
of 1789.
• Before this revolution, Haiti was the most profitable
colony in the Americas belonging to a European
power.

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Haiti
• The Haitian revolution challenged the
supremacy of the Western European
powers, and their ruling elites
• It was symbolic of the decline of the old
orders that had governed European
society, and by extension European
colonies, for centuries.
• It was also a warning to those nations that
still relied on a black slave economy,
notably the United States.
• If the slaves of Saint Domingue could
overthrow those who held them in
bondage then what might the far more
numerous slaves in the southern United
States be capable of?

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Ghanaian bravery in the diaspora
• King Tacky/Takyi
• Queen Nanny (Nanny Town)
• Cudjoe/ codjoe, cudjo (1690s-1764) (Cudjo town)
• Accompong

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Rebellions in Jamaica
• Takyi, the Ghanaian king who led a slave
rebellion in Jamaica in 1760
• While he was enslaved in Jamaica, Takyi
rose to the position of overseer on his
plantation. It was from this position of relative
autonomy that he planned his rebellion, with
the aid of many other Akan rebels.
• The rebellion lasted until July when Takyi was
gunned down and killed. After he was shot,
his head was cut and sent to the British as
evidence of his death. It was later displayed
in the center of the town to indicate that the
rebellion had been stopped and the freed
slaves and Takyi’s army were now in danger.

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 Queen Nanny of Jamaica
She led the first maroon war
Maroons utilized exemplary guerrilla warfare
skills to fight their European enemies.
1724-1739

Nanny, the famous Jamaican maroon,

developed guerrilla warfare tactics that are
still used today by many militaries around the
world.

European troops used strict and established

strategies while maroons attacked and
retracted quickly, used ambush tactics, and
fought when and where they wanted to

After her death, Nanny town in Jamaica was

changed to Moore town
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Resilience in the Diaspora
• Despite the conscious effort
to break down the spirit of
the African American, they
survived it
• Phillis Wheatley (1753-
1784) poet and scholar
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Maya Angelou (1928-2014)
• Barrack Obama

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Civil Rights Movements
• One Million March
• Black Lives matter

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Black Lives Matter protests

Protest Against
• White Supremacy
• Police Brutality
• Systemic racism
• Harassment, unequal
opportunities

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Impact of historical and systemic racism on the African
Diaspora

• African Americans continue to be economically

disadvantaged
• General lack of security in “Black” communities
• Suppression of the will and spirit of the African
American
• High crime rates and drug problems in “Black”
neighborhoods
• Development of self-hate among African Americans
• The emergence of Pan Africanism
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Pan Africanism
• Pan Africanism come as a natural consequence of racial discrimination
against the African Diaspora
• Pan Africanism can be described as the global movement that sought to
encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between Africans in the
mainland and Africans in the diaspora.
• It was based on the realization that the destiny of all Africans, home and in the
diaspora are connected. It is thus through coming together that solutions can
be found for common problems
• An ideology that seeks to unite Africans irrespective of wherever they may be.
The core belief of Pan Africanism is that Africans across the world, shares the
same history, identity and destiny
• The concept came as a result of the racial discrimination against Africans in
Europe, America and the West Indies. The original aims of Pan Africanism
was to end racial discrimination against African everywhere.

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Questions
• Discuss racism in America after the
reconstruction
• What is Jim crow
• What are the differences between the field negro
and the house negro according to Malcom X
• What are the major causes of race riots in
America

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References
• Edwards, S. (2011). Raced (Raised) in the
Caribbean: A Comparison of Racialization in the
British West Indies and the United States.
Proceedings of The National Conference On
Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2011.
• Ackah, W. B. (2016). Pan–Africanism: Exploring
the Contradictions: Politics, Identity, and
Development in Africa and the African Diaspora.
Routledge.
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