# Diaspora and transnational communities  
Generally, the notion of a diaspora is constituted by the crucial members of a scattered population, who come to believe that they share a common past and a common future or a common destiny to return to a homeland. Throughout history, there have been three very powerful narratives of this kind of construction of community and identity. In the Greek version, groups of people spread out across the Mediterranean trading, conquering and establishing colonies in the eighth to sixth centuries BCE, while retaining a memory of, and a wish to return to, the homeland. In this narrative, there is no sudden disruption of community and social action is largely voluntary. In the more powerful Jewish version, the central elements of a people's identity - Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple to Yahweh, their singular God - are destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, the leaders of the people are carried off into captivity, and there is a resurgence of an identity that demands a return to Zion to repair the breach. The experience was repeated when future Roman emperor Titus destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE. Later still, the emperor Hadrian suppressed rebellion in Judaea, renaming the territory Palestine, with the Jews forcibly scattered across the Roman world and beyond. The third narrative, which in several ways resembles the Jewish experience, is that of the African diaspora, discussed below.  
Given the features described, it is not surprising that attempts to understand the growth of transnational communities across the globe are often interspersed with aspects of, or overlap with, our understanding of what constitutes the African diaspora. Transnational communities and diasporas or diasporic communities may, however, be distinguished along a continuum of consciousness and/or aspirations, as crudely suggested by the pyramid in Figure 1.