Of course, there is a much longer history of forced transportation of enslaved Africans to the Arabian Peninsula and other parts of Asia, such as India. While much of our knowledge of Africans outside Africa is based on their presence in the Americas and Europe, the African presence in Asia may come to form part of the overall narrative, as recent scholarship and this volume suggest. It is not, of course, enough simply to identify their presence in these places to make them part of a diaspora - it is important to demonstrate consciousness of diaspora existence. In the main, therefore, the notion of the African diaspora derives from the African experience in the Americas - particularly the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil, but nearly all countries in the region were affected in one way or another by the presence of Africans and their descendants, who constitute a major pillar of the post-Columbian American (both North and South) world.  
Mass migration (economic migration and migration of refugees/asylumseekers; free and forced) in the post-Atlantic slavery period, from the end of slavery in Brazil in 1888 (earlier in Haiti, in the Dutch, Danish and British Caribbean, and in the United States), involved both the movement of Africans across the Americas and Western Europe and periods of return to the African homeland. The end of the Second World War further intensified the movements of Africans in all these directions. Consequently, sizeable communities of people of African descent in Western Europe and in North, Central and South America, as well as sprinklings of such persons (if not necessarily communities) on nearly all the continents, have added to, but do not share, the transatlantic 'memory' of slavery, perhaps because Africa has yet to acknowledge her active part in the Atlantic slave trade. The notion of the African diaspora is, therefore, a complex matter.
![img-6.jpeg](img_ref_7)
figure 3. A depiction of the Atlantic African diaspora
Source: Harry Goulbourne.