One ocean cannot break a family.
The Diaspora is not a footnote of African history. It is one of its largest chapters written in many tongues, on many shores.
"We are not five peoples. We are one people, living in five rooms of the same house."
— Florence Cook
African Americans
From the cotton fields of Mississippi to the brownstones of Harlem, from the migrations to Chicago to the protests in Selma a people who built a country and were never paid for it.
African Americans carry a particular gravity in the Diaspora. Most cannot trace a specific village. Most cannot speak the tongue their great-great-grandparents dreamed in. Yet from this very deprivation came one of the most influential cultures the modern world has ever produced...
"My great-grandmother could not read. She memorised every Negro spiritual. That, too, is a library."
— Renée, 34 · Atlanta, Georgia
Afro-Caribbeans
Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guyana a sea of small nations whose cultural reach spans the planet.
The Caribbean is where the Diaspora first improvised itself into existence. Stolen Africans of dozens of ethnicities were thrown together on plantations, and from that violent collision came something new and astonishing: Vodou and Santería, reggae and calypso, soca and dancehall, the first free Black republic on earth...
"In Jamaica we don't say goodbye. We say walk good. The road is long, but you are not walking alone."
— Devon, 58 · Kingston, Jamaica
One family.
Many homes.
We do not ask which is the truest African the one who never left, or the one who was taken. We ask only that each of us know the others, claim the others, and walk together.
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