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Facts about The African Diaspora.......http://www.coloradocollege.edu/dept/hy/hy243ruiz/research/diaspora.html....

1. The African Diaspora was the movement of africans and their descendants to places throughout the world - predominantly to the [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas ]Americas, then later to [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe ]Europe, the [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East ]Middle East and other places around the globe. The term is applied in particular to the descendents of the [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Africans ]Black Africans who were [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery ]enslaved and shipped to the Americas by way of the [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade ]Atlantic slave trade, with the largest population in [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil ]Brazil (see [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Brazilian ]Afro-Brazilian). People of [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Saharan ]Sub-Saharan descent number at least 800 million in Africa and over 140 million in the Western Hemisphere, representing around 14% of the world's population.[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora#cite_note-0 ][1][ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora#cite_note-1 ][2]
2. Over a period of almost four centuries, four milion Africans were transported to North America and the Caribbean Islands in the Atlantic slave trade. Captured from their homeland and seperated from their tribes and families they were enslaved in a new world, where all familiar customs were absent. The African diaspora is the story of how Africans, though scattered disperesed, managed to retain their traditions and reform their identities in a new world. Elements of African culture such as religion, language, and folklore endured and were their links to their past lives. In the process of americanization, Africans formed another culture known as Afro-Americans or Creoles. http://www.coloradocollege.edu/dept/hy/hy243ruiz/research/diaspora.html
3. The transatlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in the world. It created permanent ties between Africa and North America. Africans were shipped from many regions of Africa but mostly from those areas along the coast. The Bantu, along the Guinea coast had largest homogenous culture followed by the Mande, thus the culture of African-Americans was influenced the most by the people of these regions. http://www.coloradocollege.edu/dept/hy/hy243ruiz/research/diaspora.html
4. In the colonies the economic demand for slaves and the demographics of the slave population had an enormous effect on the developement of Afro-American culture. Never did their exist one Afro-American culture, for each area had a different social, economic, and political relience on slavery, which characterized a unique slave culture. For example, areas that depended on plantation farming such as the deep South and the Chesepeake had a huge number of slaves, while in comparison the North had relitively few slaves. As a result, the southern colonies more frequently imported new African slaves which constantly re-established African traditions. Each area in the colonies had the developement of a specific Afro-American culture. http://www.coloradocollege.edu/dept/hy/hy243ruiz/research/diaspora.html
5. Though Afro-American culture was specific to each area, there were several general cultural themes that ran throughout the Afro-American population in the colonies, one was religion. Christianinty is an execellent example of how Africans merged their own beliefs with the existing religion, and produced a theology of their own. Christianity spread rapidly throughout the slave communities during the Great Awakening, a surgence of evangelical Christianiy which swept the colonies. This movement illuminated the mystical and magical elements of Christianinty, a side which the Africans could understand and identify with. It is ironic, for white slaveholders originally used Christianinty as a tool to perpetuate obedience and docility in slaves; yet, Africans recognized the hypocrsy in the white's version of Christianity, realizing they were equal in God's eyes. Africans took the tool ment to manipulate them and used Christianinty to give them hope for the future and to strenghten their bonds between one another. While slaves were Christianized and assimilated to white culture they kept elements of their native culture alive.http://www.coloradocollege.edu/dept/hy/hy243ruiz/research/diaspora.html