# Global africanity and the African diaspora: epistemological considerations  
In an essay entitled "From Pax Africana to Global Africa" in The Global African: A Portrait of Ali A. Mazrui (1998), Darryl C. Thomas demonstrates that "Global Africa" starts to arise for Mazrui in 1974, when he reaffirmed the clarion call by Du Bois for African and Third World peoples 'to escape death and isolation, and to nurture the latent African genius' (p. 84). According to Locksley Edmondson's personal communication, Mazrui coined the term even earlier, during their days together (1967-1970) at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, as they sought to build an African international relations project from their location in East Africa. Here, the idea of Global Africa encounters the theoretics of pan-Africanism, of which Mazrui identified five dimensions: sub-Saharan, trans-Saharan, transatlantic, Western hemispheric and global (p. 85). According to Thomas, Mazrui would continuously refine the scope of Global Africa and go on to use it as a framework for his television series The Africans: A Triple Heritage (1986). ${ }^{4}$ Mazrui would subsequently define Global African identity to include Africa and its diaspora in his 'Africans and African Americans in changing world trends: globalizing the black experience'.