# AFRICANS IN THE DIASPORA AND THE EXPERIENCE OF NAVIGATION  
Jaime Rodrigues  
The history of African people has been so much influenced by perceptions stemming from the intercontinental slave trade that it is necessary to emphasize that Africans of their own volition migrated between continents as merchants, clerics, seamen, adventurers and so on. This early free black presence abroad is greatly in need of study to provide a more complete and realistic account of world civilization. It was, however, the intercontinental slave trade which, more than anything else, established a world black presence (Harris, 2010, pp. 162-163).