# FOREWORD  
by Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO  
In the first volume of the General History of Africa (GHA), published in 1981, historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo of Burkina Faso wrote: "Unless one chooses to live in a state of unconsciousness and alienation, one cannot live without memory, or with a memory that belongs to someone else".  
The General History of Africa is a pioneering publication project which UNESCO has been carrying out for over half a century. Mr Ki-Zerbo's words shed light on the GHA's aim: to constitute a history of the continent in which African perspectives have pride of place, and to enable, thereby, Africans and people of African descent to reclaim their history.  
Written by the continent's greatest historians (including Djibril Tamsir Niane, Cheikh Anta Diop, Théophile Obenga, Ali Mazrui and Gamal Mokhtar), the first eight volumes of the General History of Africa provide a comprehensive account of the history of Africa and Africans - from prehistory to the present day - which is freed from the hegemonic views imposed by colonialism and slavery.  
I am delighted that this unique intellectual enterprise continues today with the publication of Volume X. At a time when UNESCO has made Africa its strategic priority and the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024) is drawing to a close, the GHA's grounding in openness, pluralism and emancipation has a particularly powerful resonance.  
This resonance is all the more powerful where, as in Volume X, the history of Africa is linked to that of its diasporas. As a result of this major historiographical renewal, which rejects the long-outdated dichotomy according to which the history of Africans is separate from that of people of African descent, Volume X revisits the place and role of Africa in world history.  
Africa and Its Diasporas reveals an Africa of multiple connections: an Africa which, through the circulation of individuals, of ideas and of know-how, has a continuously revitalized influence on the fields of science, art and politics.