Origins of the African Diaspora

African American Studies is an interdisciplinary field: it uses history, literature, art, politics and more to study people of African descent in the United States and across the African diaspora. It became a college field after the Black Campus movement (1965–1972), when students at more than 1,000 colleges protested to demand Black studies courses and more support for Black students and faculty.

Africa is the world's second-largest continent, with five main climate zones: desert (like the Sahara), the semiarid Sahel, savannah grasslands, tropical rainforest and a Mediterranean zone. Its great rivers (the Nile, Niger, Congo, Zambezi and Orange) and the seas and oceans around it linked regions to each other and to the wider world, and the differences between zones encouraged trade.

New crops (such as bananas, yams and grains) and new tools helped West and Central African populations grow, setting off the Bantu expansion: waves of migration by Bantu-speaking peoples across much of the continent between about 1500 BCE and 500 CE. Today hundreds of Bantu languages, such as Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa and Kikongo, are spoken, and much of African Americans' ancestry traces back to West and Central Africa.

Some of the world's earliest complex societies grew up in Africa. Egypt and Nubia (Kush) rose along the Nile around 3000 BCE, and Nubian kings later ruled Egypt for about a century; Aksum, in today's Ethiopia and Eritrea, grew rich on Red Sea trade, minted coins, wrote in Ge'ez and adopted Christianity under King Ezana; and the Nok people of present-day Nigeria worked iron and made striking terracotta sculptures.

Ghana, Mali and Songhai, the Sudanic (Sahelian) empires, rose one after another in West Africa from about the 600s to the 1500s, growing rich from gold and from their place on trans-Saharan trade routes, which also brought Islam. Mali's Mansa Musa made a famous hajj to Mecca in 1324 that spread word of Mali's wealth to Europe; Songhai, the largest, weakened as Portuguese trade on the Atlantic coast pulled business away from the desert routes.

West African trading cities were also centers of learning: Timbuktu, in the Mali Empire, had a thriving book trade, schools and scholars in fields from astronomy to law. Griots, women and men who served as historians, storytellers and musicians, kept a community's history alive through oral tradition, such as the epic of Sundiata, the founder of Mali.

When rulers in places like Mali, Songhai and Kongo adopted Islam or Christianity, many of their people blended the new faith with older local beliefs, a process called religious syncretism. Enslaved Africans carried these blended practices, such as honoring ancestors, divination, healing and group song and dance, to the Americas, where they live on in diasporic religions like Louisiana Voodoo; about a quarter of the Africans brought to North America came from Christian societies and another quarter from Muslim ones.

Great Zimbabwe, capital of a Shona kingdom in southern Africa from the 1100s to the 1400s, grew wealthy from gold, ivory and cattle and is famous for its massive stone walls, such as the Great Enclosure. On the East African Swahili Coast, city-states that shared the Swahili language and Islam linked Africa's interior to Arab, Persian, Indian and Chinese traders, until the Portuguese attacked them in the 1500s to take over Indian Ocean trade.

In 1491, Kongo's king Nzinga a Nkuwu and his son Nzinga Mbemba (later King Afonso I) chose to adopt Catholicism, which built trade ties with Portugal and created a distinct African Catholicism that blended Christian and Kongo traditions. Portugal then pressed Kongo for captives, and Kongo's rulers could not control the trade: Afonso protested its damage in a 1526 letter to Portugal's king, and West Central Africa became the largest source of enslaved people taken to the Americas.

Many West and Central African societies were built on extended kinship ties, and women served as spiritual leaders, political advisers, traders, teachers and farmers. Queen Idia, the first iyoba (queen mother) of Benin in the late 1400s, advised her son the king and led troops; Queen Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba (in today's Angola) fought the Portuguese for about 30 years in the 1600s while also trading in captives to build her power, and both became symbols of Black women's leadership across the diaspora.

From the late 1400s, Portuguese trade with West African kingdoms in gold, goods and enslaved people went around the Saharan routes and brought many Africans, free and enslaved, to Iberian port cities like Lisbon and Seville, where they worked as everything from servants and boatmen to vendors, knights and diplomats. Portugal also set up sugar and cotton plantations worked by enslaved Africans on Atlantic islands such as São Tomé and Cabo Verde, a model later copied across the Americas.