![img-6.jpeg](img_ref_7)
figure 3. A depiction of the Atlantic African diaspora
Source: Harry Goulbourne.  
Central to an understanding of the African diaspora are the key concepts of shared suffering and belongingness, irrespective of differential social class, cultural identities and nation State status/citizenship, and the need to return and repair a historic breach. An interesting and perhaps unique feature of the African diaspora is that while diaspora Africans may form the majority population in specific regions (such as the Caribbean), account for significant numbers within the population of specific countries (as in Brazil and the United States), and dominate popular culture, sports and general forms of representation of the societies in those places, the sense of, or sensibility regarding, membership of the diaspora remains a constant. Even so, the African diaspora is forever plagued or undermined by racism or exclusion from the mainstream of the larger societies in which individuals or groups find themselves and where they themselves have  
successfully established democratic societies. The discrimination has been based on colour differentiation, and consequently nearly all points of contestation or assertion and the struggles for rights have revolved around the question of blackness, as so much of the literature on the African diaspora reflects (see, for example, Bonnett and Holder, 2009; Gilroy, 1993).