# The concept of diaspora and its uses as intellectual capital in Black communities  
At different points in history, from very early on, millions of Africans were part of the African diasporas. They were moved across the oceans to places in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania and, above all, the Americas. These diasporas are the result of various, usually forced, migratory waves that occurred over a long period. Most, but not all, of the people concerned were victims of  
the slave trade. It is estimated that between the seventh and the nineteenth centuries, the trade in enslaved Africans across the Indian Ocean involved about 14.4 million persons who were taken to places in India, the Indian Ocean islands, the Middle East and China (Austen, 1979, p. 68). It has been estimated that about 12.5 million people were taken from Africa to the Americas between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database). According to Joseph Inikori (1982, p. 20), this figure was probably much higher, reaching 15.4 million. Thus, in the Indian Ocean basin, the Middle East (Jayasuriya and Pankhurst, 2003) and the Americas, the African presence was significant. However, the production of knowledge about African peoples and their descendants has been marked by silence as to their contributions and by the erasure of their memory from national narratives as presented via textbooks, public monuments, national heroes, street names, museums and so on. In this volume, there are several examples of how silencing worked in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Reunion Island, Iran and other nations. Ideas about the 'inexistence' of black people, their disappearance or miscegenation are still part of official national narratives to deny African heritage in different countries, independently of African demographic representation.