# BIOGRAPHIES OF AFRICANS IN DIASPORA  
Individual Trajectories and Collective Identities<br>Nielson Rosa Bezerra  
As a field of study, the history of the African diaspora has yet to face a significant challenge. Even considering the continuous advances made over the years, we still need to listen to the voices of the Africans narrating their personal histories. Using biography as a historiographical method has been a valuable tool in confronting this challenge. Thanks to this perspective, more than 12 million Africans, who came from different parts of Africa to the Americas during the period of the Atlantic slave trade, can be seen not as mere statistical data, in terms of numbers and percentages, but rather as human beings, with personalities, interests and, above all, as creators of their own histories. ${ }^{1}$ Besides, biography as a method for studying the African diaspora offers a powerful alternative to the idea of slavery as the central feature of the history of Africans in the Americas. ${ }^{2}$ However, the challenges that historians face begin long before, with the selection of historical sources capable of offering information about the lives and trajectories of African people who were taken from their homelands to live in other places, all too frequently under slavery. Not only the  
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[^0]:    1 For the number of Africans who were taken from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade, see http://www. slavevoyages.org/. This project also supports research on the origins of Africans in diaspora. See http:// www.slavevoyages.org/about/origins.
2 For biographies of Africans in diaspora, see http://www.freedomnarratives.org and https://www.yorku. ca/research/tubman/.  
method of treating sources but also the criteria used for choosing documents and information about people must be rethought. This way, documents that have been used only to generate numbers and statistics can also be used to reconstruct the trajectories of these people.