Caribbean and Organization of American States African Diaspora Affairs

The Caribbean and Organization of American States African Diaspora Affairs (COADA) is actively engaged in improving the lot of diaspora Africans in the Caribbean and America. Below contains information on the various African Diaspora.

The African Union defined the African diaspora as “consisting of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union.” Its constitutive act declares that it shall “invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union.” The AU considers the African diaspora as its sixth region.

United States of America

There is a diverse mix of African Americans that reside in the United States of America. With an estimated 43 million people of black African descent in the United States, the African diaspora is a blossoming community that has contributed vastly to the social, economic and political advance of the country.

There is no doubt that slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow era within the United States contributed to the repression of the dreams of African Americans in the country. Nevertheless, these negative events have built resilience and grit in the character of this group. From the ashes of the era of racism, African Americans have soared to build lasting legacies in every area of the society- a thread that culminated in the election of President Barack Obama, an African American from Kenya, in 2009.

Afro-South Americans

There are an estimated 100 million people of African descent living in Latin America, including 67 million in South America, making up 28% of Brazil‘s population, if including multiracial mulatto pardo Brazilians. Many also have European and Amerindian ancestry, and are also known as pardo, or mixed race. (Brazilian “blacks” are mixed to a significant degree). There are also sizeable African-descended populations in Cuba, Haiti, Colombia and Dominican Republic, often with ancestry of other major ethnic groups.

Afro-Caribbeans

The population in the Caribbean is approximately 23 million. Significant numbers of African-descended people include Haiti – 8 million, Dominican Republic – 7.9 million, and Jamaica – 2.7 million.

The African Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean are a rich and multi-diverse people whose achievements have elevated them to Halls of Fame within every sector in the world. The list of achievers is filled with countless names as the community continues to break new frontiers till date.

This article is about emigration from Africa in historic times. For prehistoric human migration, see recent African origin of modern humans. For recent migration, see emigration from Africa.

Largest African diaspora populations

The African diaspora consists of the worldwide collection of communities descended from native sub-Saharan Africans or people from sub-Saharan Africa, predominantly in the Americas. The diaspora has continued for millennia, but historically,^[ ethnographers, historians, politicians and writers have used the term particularly to refer to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, with their largest populations in Brazil, the United States and Haiti. Some scholars identify “four circulatory phases” of this migration out of Africa. Prior to the Atlantic slave trade, Arab traders took even more slaves from other parts of Africa, selling them to markets in North Africa and the Middle East (Western Asia).

The phrase African diaspora gradually entered common usage at the turn of the 21st century. The term diaspora originates from the Greek διασπορά (diaspora, literally “scattering”) which gained popularity in English in reference to the Jewish diaspora before being more broadly applied to other populations..

Less commonly, the term has been used in scholarship to refer to more recent emigration from sub-Saharan Africa. The African Union (AU) defines the African diaspora as consisting: “of people of native African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union”. Its constitutive act declares that it shall “invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union”.