## Introduction  
The concept of the African, or black, diaspora, partially borrowed from Jewish history, is often understood as the scattering of part of a homogeneous population from Africa, towards the Americas and Europe for the most part, but also towards Asia. The paths taken could be confused with routes of the slave trade or, when in the opposite direction, those of colonial conquest. This pattern invites us to think of the movement of Africans and Afrodescendants towards Africa as a 'return', a restorer of lost unity, or even a liberator, for the regions and players concerned.  
From the 1990s, Paul Gilroy, critical of the notion of geographical centre - and hence of Afrocentrism - emphasized in his work the multidirectional flows of people and ideas within a region, the black Atlantic, characterized by the concomitant emergence of capitalism, the slave trade and modernism. The emphasis was on roads, rupture, hybridity and creolization instead of return or preservation. Diasporic communities would no longer be defined by a dual identity, but instead by tension, since migratory journeys from one or more 'elsewheres' formed part of their identity, and by their presumed difference owing to the fact that they occupied a new geopolitical space.  
Current research on African movements focuses on the 'deep genealogies' of the human and technological circuits within the continent and in the final transatlantic destinations. The historiography of Sierra Leone and its Creole/Krio population is the subject of both theoretical debates and local and Atlantic events.