# The African diaspora  
The third great diaspora narrative, that of the African diaspora, is part of modernity and therefore constitutes a powerful aspect of the definition of this kind of experience in the contemporary world. Mass despoliation of West African communities and the shipment of peoples across the Atlantic to the Americas from the sixteenth century in what we know as the Atlantic slave trade compose the narrative of this experience. Historians generally agree that there were over 10 million souls forcibly transported, and these displaced persons constitute the basis of the populations of African descent in the Caribbean and North and South America. But this was neither the first nor necessarily the most significant exodus of people from Africa. It is a well-established fact in anthropology that humans originated in Africa and spread from the continent to the rest of the world, which suggests that all humans may be said to be Africans and that, therefore, most of the world is made up of many varieties of African diasporas. However, what is important in defining groups of humans is the consciousness they develop with regard to their unique identities and communities, and it may be taken for granted that the prehistoric migrations out of Africa did not lead to the development of a memory of a homeland or of a wish to return. Such constructs - homeland, community, return and so on - are products of history and of the social consciousness of being, identity and destiny or fate. The period, then, with which we are concerned is broadly from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, when Africans were taken mostly to the continents and islands of the Americas.