or home abroad (Harris, 2003). At a conference of the UNESCO Slave Route Project (2003), Joseph Harris, an African American historian, who first drew scholarly attention to Afro-Asian communities, suggested that the field could be moved further by those who knew the languages spoken in the area. Responding to his suggestion is an onerous task given the diversity of Asia. A team of scholars is needed, working with numerous ethnolinguistic groups. Clearly, this would be a way of unlocking memories of the diasporists and mapping their routes to their Asian hostlands. Identifying migration streams, points of origin and destination are important processes in this work. Africans moved from both coasts of Africa, including the Swahili Coast and also from adjacent islands such as Madagascar, Mauritius and Zanzibar.  
African diaspora researchers encounter numerous problems which were well articulated by Hubert Gerbeau (1978) at a UNESCO conference in Haiti: 'et qu'un bistorien étudiant la diaspora africaine devait également être archéologue, ethnologue, spécialiste de la tradition orale, biologiste, linguiste, voire psychiatré, meaning: 'a historian studying the African diaspora should also be an archaeologist, ethnologist, specialist in oral traditions, a biologist, a linguist and a psychiatrist'.