# Conclusion  
Thus, regardless of the Western European languages communities of African descent in the Americas speak - English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch - and regardless of the cultures into which they were transplanted as of the sixteenth century, the dream of a united Africa persists. Host cultures draw upon elements of African and European cultures (as well as of South Asian and Chinese cultures, for example), including language, religion, music and so forth, to give rise to what historians describe as Creole societies. What Herskovits called African "retentions" imbue the languages in question and have spawned new forms of expression in speech, music, dance, painting, poetry, religions and forms of worship, and general perspectives. The cultures that have sprung up in the post-Columbian Americas have, therefore, been as much a contribution of enslaved Africans as one of European settlers, although formally this is still only grudgingly acknowledged. Unlike the Jewish diaspora, the African diaspora is not unified by the powerful factor of religion, a claim to a specific and highly contested physical site, such as Jerusalem/Zion, or a particular language. Indeed, even the specific territory or physical terrain in Africa to which members of the African diaspora feel committed is imprecise and highly generalized, but this is of little or no relevance. Like the scattered Jewish communities, many people of African descent in the West long for a return, and in the nineteenth