African diaspora

Dispersal through slave trade

Many Africans were taken to different parts of the world—including North America, South America, Europe, and Asia—during the Atlantic, Trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades.

The first known records of Africans being slaves outside Africa come from Ancient Greece and Rome. Back in the Greco-Roman world, Africans were usually called Aithiopians, a name connected to a star group (constellation) called Cepheus. In Greek stories, Cepheus was the king of Ethiopia. The name Cepheus also means “gardener” in Greek, and it includes a special star called Delta Cephei. This star helps scientists measure distances in space.

Most Aithiopian slaves came from Kush, which is now part of Sudan.They were often captured during wars (prisoners of war) with Egypt. However, only a small number of slaves in Greece and Rome were Aithiopian because it was hard to bring them from so far away. These slaves usually worked in homes or as entertainers, which suggests they were seen as luxury items. For example, the Roman Emperor Nero once filled an entire theater with Aithiopian slaves to show off Rome's wealth and power to a visiting foreign king.

In the early 700s, Arabs took African slaves from central and eastern Africa. These Africans were called the Zanj. They were sold to places in the Middle East, India, and the Far East to work as slaves in powerful Muslim empires like the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Mamluk Sultanate, and the Ottoman Empire.

From the early 1400s (15th century), Europeans started capturing or buying African slaves from West Africa. At first, they took them to Europe. Later, when Europeans began settling in the Americas in the late 1400s, they sent many of these African slaves there too. The Atlantic slave trade ended in the 1800s (19th century).

This forced movement of people is one of the largest in human history. It caused great harm to Africa. Many young people were taken away, and whole communities were damaged.

Some communities made up of African slaves' descendants still exist today in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. In other cases, African slaves married people from other groups, and their descendants became part of the local population.

In the Americas, people from many different ethnic backgrounds came together, creating mixed societies. In Central and South America, most people today have ancestors from Europe, Native American groups, and Africa. By 1888 in Brazil, nearly half the people were descended from African slaves, and their looks showed a wide mix of features (Northern Tier).

In the United States, there were more European settlers compared to African slaves, especially in the North. In places like colonial Virginia, there was a lot of intermarriage between races, both during and after slavery.

After the Civil War (1861–1865) and the Reconstruction period (1863–1877), southern states passed laws to keep races separate. These included Jim Crow laws and bans on interracial marriage. In the late 1800s (19th century) and early 1900s (20th century), many new European immigrants also arrived, which helped keep racial groups more separate.

In the early 1900s, many southern states used a rule called the "one drop rule." This rule said that if a person had even a small amount of African ancestry, they were legally considered Black. This caused problems for people from mixed backgrounds—especially Native American groups—who were often wrongly labeled as only Black, and their Native identity was erased in official records.