global studies paper

3 AFRICA

The Rise of Ethnic Politics in a Global World

In this and the next seven chapters of this book, we will explore the way that global forces have affected different regions of the world and the way that these areas have contributed to global culture, society, economy, and political life. You might call this the “global-in” and “global-out” approach. We are interested in the global currents that have flowed into a particular region at different moments in history (global in) and the way that elements of those societies have gone out into other areas of the world (global out). We begin with Africa. It is a logical place to start, since the African

continent is the birthplace of all humanity. In Ethiopia, bones have been discovered from precursors of ancient African Homo sapiens who roamed the earth 190,000 years ago. Archeologists have found evidence of our human predecessors in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania that are over a million years old. Eventually, the descendants of these ancient Africans— humans, or Homo sapiens—spread out from Africa to the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and everywhere else. What we think of as ethnic differences of skin and hair color and eye shapes are all later adaptations to the environmental conditions in different parts of the world. So the propagation of the human species from Africa throughout the planet is Africa’s first global out. In more recent history—the past thousand years or so—Africa has

continued to play a global role. In the thirteenth century, a great empire was established in West Africa, based in what is now the country of Mali, extending over much of the adjacent region. The wealth of this Manden Kurufaba empire was based on three huge gold mines; other resources included copper, salt, and profits from overland trade. For several

centuries, it was one of the richest and most influential empires in the world. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Africa began to feel the effects of

European maritime trade. Initially, this was a case of global in, as European ships plied their wares along the West African coast and traded their goods for local resources. But soon this trade turned into a global out of disastrous proportions—the slave trade, called by some the “African holocaust.” The slave trade involved the buying and selling of Africans. Some local

African leaders rounded up individuals from their enemies and sold the captured men and women to European traders. The Europeans, in turn, loaded them onto boats and sailed across the Atlantic in what was called “the Middle Passage.” Crowded into cargo holds like cattle, many of these unfortunate Africans died en route of disease, starvation, and brutality. Those who survived found themselves in Havana and other slave ports of the New World, where they were sold as workers for cotton fields in the United States and for sugar plantations in the Caribbean islands and the northeast coast of South America—from the three Guianas (Dutch, French, and British) all the way down to Brazil. Exact figures are hard to come by, but it is estimated that ten million to twenty million Africans were exported from the continent before the trade in enslaved Africans—and later, slavery itself—came to an end in the nineteenth century. This wretched trade had a crippling effect on Africa both economically

and socially. Not only did it rob the continent of some of its most able workers, but it also disrupted traditional social patterns and cultural homogeneity. At the same time, it enriched the European countries— especially Portugal, Spain, and England—that were involved in the trade. Some historians claim that the wealth gained from the trade of enslaved Africans helped to fuel the economies that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Others argue that the slave trade provided the excess wealth— the capital—to develop European capitalism into a formidable economic engine. Though other historians dispute these assertions, there is no question that the slave trade had a global economic impact. There were also cultural effects from the global diaspora of Africans

following the years of the slave trade. In some areas of North and South America and the Caribbean basin, the numbers of enslaved Africans were vastly greater than those of white European settlers. Descendants of the African diaspora became leading citizens of countries such as Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Brazil, and the United States. African music, religion, and customs became integral parts of the cultures of these areas of the New World, creating a

new synthesis of African, European, and Native American cultures in the Western hemisphere. In time, the trade with European commercial interests led to further

plundering of African resources and political control of African regions. By the nineteenth century, the map of Africa began to look like a crazy quilt of different European-controlled colonies, including those ruled by Spain, France, England, Germany, and Belgium. In the twentieth century, when the colonial powers retreated and these regions gained their independence, what remained were the nation-states of contemporary Africa. Thus, the colonial period of global-in European control resulted in the African nationalisms of the latter part of the twentieth century. The old colonial divisions that created the new boundaries of nation-

states did not always follow the cultural boundaries of traditional ethnic and linguistic groups. In Rwanda, for example, the Hutus and Tutsis warred over which group would dominate the independent nation. In other places, such as the countries of South Africa and what was Rhodesia—later renamed Zimbabwe—the issue was the role of the European settler communities that controlled the politics and economy of the countries, even though they were in the minority numerically as compared with the indigenous African populations. In both countries, the white Europeans have learned to live with black majority rule. In the twenty-first century, African resources have again become an

important aspect of the global economy. In the contemporary situation, however, it is unlikely that these resources will be exploited from the outside without providing substantially greater benefit to Africans than was the case in preceding centuries. The new situation is one in which investment in the region and extraction of its resources come not from Europe but from Asian countries, especially China. In the readings that follow, several of these aspects of global influences

in, and global impact out, will be explored. In the first reading, the African origin of global humanity is described by Nayan Chanda. Chanda was born in India and trained in history in Kolkata and in international relations at the Sorbonne in France. He then became a foreign correspondent during the Vietnam War and served as an editor of the Far East Economic Review in Hong Kong before launching a new career in the emerging field of global studies. Based at Yale University, where he edits the Internet journal YaleGlobal Online, Chanda has written an introductory book of global history, Bound Together, from which this excerpt is taken. The next excerpt is also by a journalist and historian born in South Asia.

Dilip Hiro, based in London, writes on historical themes and issues of contemporary global politics, including jihadi activism in South Asia. In the

excerpt below, he puts the trade of enslaved Africans into global and historical context. The diaspora of African culture and society as a result of the forced dispersion of Africans to the Western hemisphere is described in the succeeding excerpt by Jeffrey Haynes, a political scientist studying the relation of religion and politics in Africa and the Middle East who teaches in London. Following it is an excerpt from an essay by Jacob Olupona, who explores the cultural aspects of Africa’s experiences with globalization. Olupona traces the development of Christianity and Islam in the continent and shows how these traditions have become intertwined with traditional religious cultures. Olupona, originally from Nigeria, is a scholar of comparative religion who specializes in West African society. He taught at the University of California, Davis, before becoming a professor of African Studies at Harvard. The final excerpt in this chapter is from an essay by Okwudiba Nnoli, an

African political scientist who focuses on one of the enduring problems created by the nation-state system left behind by retreating European colonial powers. This is the problem of the relationship between national identity and ethnic communities. Because colonialism and nationalism are worldwide, this is a global problem, a continuing issue that confounds Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world where the idea of nationalism is still an unfinished project.

THE HIDDEN STORY OF A JOURNEY

Nayan Chanda

How do we know that we all are originally from Africa? Twenty years ago the proposition was mostly guesswork. In his work on human evolution The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Charles Darwin suggested that because Africa was inhabited by humans’ nearest allies, gorillas and chimpanzees, “it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” Although voluminous biological and paleoanthropological evidence gathered since this statement has fortified the evolutionary history of life on earth, it has been a long wait to validate Darwin’s insight about Africa. Opportunity emerged with our new ability to look deep into our cells and decode the history written there. The first step was taken in 1953 when British scientist Francis S. Crick and his American colleague James D. Watson discovered the structure of DNA. “We’ve discovered the secret of life,” Crick announced with justifiable pride. With the discovery of the double

helix structure of DNA—the complex molecules that transmit genetic information from generation to generation—we received the most powerful tool to dig into our ancestral history. As Watson wrote, “We find written in every individual’s DNA sequences of a record of our ancestors’ respective journeys.” Since these early days, sequencing DNA has gotten much easier, faster, and cheaper. With help from archaeologists, climatologists, and linguists, geneticists and paleoanthropologists have been able to reconstruct the histories of human populations—a reconstruction that was unimaginable only two decades ago. The discovery of fossils of Homo erectus in Indonesia and China—the

so-called Java and Peking men—showed that the ancestors of Homo sapiens, or anatomically modern humans, had begun to travel and colonize Asia and the Old World about two million years ago. The dedicated work of paleoanthropologists like Louis and Mary Leakey in the 1950s and a slew of researchers in the following thirty years established that ancestors of modern humans lived in East Africa’s Rift Valley. The remains of a hundred- thousand-year-old Homo sapiens were found in Israel, but that species met a biological dead-end, blocked perhaps by the more robust Neanderthals who then inhabited the area. Amazingly, so far the only other remains of modern man dating back to forty-six thousand years have been found in Australia. Did these anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens—have multiple origins, or did they evolve as a single species in Africa? The first intriguing evidence that those fossil finds in Africa were, not just the earliest humans, but our direct ancestors, came to light, not in some ancient fossils, but in the history contained in cells of modern women. This startling discovery was built on the earlier discovery of the structure of DNA. By analyzing the DNA of living humans from different parts of the world, geneticists can reconstruct the movement of their ancestors and track the prehistoric human colonization of the world. We now know that around sixty thousand years ago, a small group of people—as few as perhaps one hundred fifty to two thousand people from present-day East Africa—walked out. Over the next fifty thousand or so years they moved, slowly occupying the Fertile Crescent, Asia, Australia, and Europe and finally moving across the Beringia land bridge to the American continent. The rising waters at the end of the Ice Age separated the Americas from the Asian continent. It was not until Christopher Columbus’s encounter with the Arawak on the shores of San Salvador in 1492 that the long- separated human cousins from Africa would meet each other. . . .

A MOTHER IN AFRICA

The discovery that all humanity stems from the same common parents came in 1987. The New Zealand biochemist Allan Wilson and his American colleague Rebecca Cann reached this conclusion at the University of California, Berkeley, by looking into a so-far ignored part of human DNA. Wilson and Cann’s team collected 147 samples of mitochondrial DNA from baby placentas donated by hospitals around the world. Unlike the DNA that is recombined as it is passed from one generation to the next, mitochondrial DNA (abbreviated mtDNA) has tiny parts that remain largely intact through the generations, altered only occasionally by mutations that become “genetic markers.” MtDNA is maternally inherited, transmitted only from a mother to her offspring, and only daughters can pass it on to the next generation. The mtDNA leaves intact all the mutations that a daughter inherits from her maternal ancestors, thus allowing one to find the traces of the earliest mutation. Since the rate of mutation is roughly constant, the level of variation in mutations allows us to calculate the age of the family tree created by the mtDNA string passed down through the generations. The result of Wilson and Cann’s research was a bombshell. Going down the human family tree of five geographic populations, they found that all five stemmed from “one woman who is postulated to have lived about 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa.” The press inevitably, if misleadingly, called her the “African Eve.” She indeed was, as James Watson put it, “the great-great-great . . . grandmother of us all,” who lived in Africa some two hundred thousand years ago. Obviously, she was not the only woman alive at that time: she was just the luckiest because her progenies survived to populate the world, while the lines of descendants of other women became extinct. Or, in genealogical terms, their lines suffered a “pedigree collapse.” Children of the three surviving lines of daughters—identified by mtDNA markers L1, L2, and L3—now populate the world. While the first two lines mostly account for the African female population, the non-African women of the world all carry in their cells the inheritance of the two daughters of L3 line—M and N. A scientist has given these lines the nicknames Manju and Nasrin based on the assumption of where the two mutations are likely to have occurred: India and the Middle East. Our most recent common mother may have been African, but what

about the father? Significant recent progress in elucidating the paternal Y chromosome has filled in the gap. In a groundbreaking research paper in 2000, Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleague Peter Underhill established that the Y chromosome that determines male sex also has an African ancestry. Just as mtDNA is transmitted only from a mother to her children, the Y chromosome that is passed on from a father

to his son also does not undergo the shuffling—or recombination—that the rest of the chromosomes do. But there are mutations just like mtDNA. The result is that the history of our fathers is carried in perpetuity by sons. Human ancestors who left Africa all carried in their cells either the African Adam’s Y chromosome, which has been given the prosaic label “M168,” or the mtDNA of one of the African Eve’s daughters. Based on extensive study of the world’s population, geneticists now say that the most recent common ancestor of us all left Africa just fifty thousand years ago. Wilson and Cann’s thesis of the human out-of-Africa origin was, of

course, not unchallenged by some anthropologists and geneticists. The school that believed in multiregional evolution of the modern human refused to accept a recent or unique origin of Homo sapiens. Its proponents argued that the abundant Homo erectus fossils found in China and other regions in East Asia (such as Peking Man and Java Man) demonstrate a continuity, and to these researchers it was evident that Homo sapiens emerged out of frequent gene exchanges between continental populations, since the earlier species Homo erectus came out of Africa about a million years ago. Besides, they argued, the archaeological evidence does not mesh with the out-of-Africa hypothesis, thus making this conclusion at best premature. At least in the case of Chinese critics, one also suspects that the disclaimer about African origins may be linked to national pride about the antiquity of the Chinese civilization. However, as research in the migration of the human genome has continued to produce more and more evidence of African origins, the scientific opinion has increasingly tilted toward the out-of-Africa school. Some Chinese objections have been countered with a large new body of research based on a massive DNA database collected by both Chinese and international geneticists. In 1998 a consortium of seven major research groups from China and the United States, funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, conducted a DNA analysis of twenty-eight of China’s official population groups and concluded that “modern humans originating in Africa constitute the majority of the current gene pool in East Asia.” Several other researchers, including Chinese, have since sampled a large number of Chinese from all over China and reached the same conclusion. Interestingly, research on both mtDNA and the Y chromosome has shown evidence even in Africa of the early colonization by the original group within Africa. The remaining cousins left in East Africa also spread out to the interior of the continent in search of survival. A strong school of thought in South Africa actually suggests the possibility that the ancestors of the Bushmen also are our ancestors and that the spread of those humans who all became our ancestors was from south to

north. Whichever way they moved, their imprint is left in the DNA of the Bushmen or Khoisan of the Kalahari Desert and in certain pygmy tribes in the central African rain forest. The genome revolution and the discovery of the African Eve have

sparked a new interest in finding one’s roots. The dark-haired New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof thought he knew who he was. His father came to the United States from Europe, so Kristof assumed himself to be of a typical American-European heritage. But he wanted to find out who he really was under the skin and learn more about his origins, and so he sent his DNA sample for analysis. He was in for a surprise. A mere two thousand generations ago his great-great-great-grandmother was an African, possibly from Ethiopia or Kenya. Under his white skin and Caucasian features, exclaimed Kristof, “I am African-American!” After the publication of his column he received a flood of e-mails. One particularly droll one read, “Welcome to the club. But look out while driving in New Jersey.” However, the African continent alone cannot lay sole claim to Nicholas Kristof. The genetic markers found in his DNA showed he was also related to people who now inhabit Finland, Poland, Armenia, the Netherlands, Scotland, Israel, Germany, and Norway. “The [DNA] testing just underscored the degree to which we’re all mongrels,” Kristof told me. One trait of the human community makes it possible to track the

genomic journey. Humans prefer to settle down in one place if conditions permit, but they are equally ready to migrate in search of a better life. The result has been that people who settled along the path of the human journey are marked by a lineage associated with geographic regions. The fact that humans have mostly practiced patrilocality—in which women come to their husband’s homes after marriage—enables one to associate the Y chromosome with a particular location. Looking at my DNA, geneticists could tell I was from the Indian subcontinent. My M52 Y chromosome, shared by a large number of Indians, was a giveaway. This ability has allowed geneticists and anthropologists to sketch out a better picture of when and how the progenies of the African Eve left the old continent and found themselves in their current habitat. DNA shows that this migration, spanning forty to fifty thousand years, came in successive waves, mostly in gentle ripples and sometimes in large swells. The Wilson team found that all the world populations they examined, except the African population, have multiple origins, implying that each region was colonized repeatedly.

THE BEACHCOMBER EXPRESS TO AUSTRALIA

The lack of archaeological evidence does not allow us to answer with certainty why our ancestors left Africa. Probably a dry spell of the late Ice Age shrank the forests and dried the savannas that provided game for the hunter-gatherer population. When a small group took the momentous step of crossing the Red Sea into the southern Arabian coast, the whole world was open. Following game herds up into the Middle East or following the shellfish beds around the Arabian Peninsula and on into India, the humans were launched on a journey that would result in populating the entire planet. One of the most striking of those journeys was the arrival of the

ancestral population from Africa to Australia in just seven hundred generations. Some have called this journey an “express train” to Australia. Of course, the ancestors did not know they were headed to Australia: they were just following food. But the eastward movement of generations of people along the Indian and Southeast Asian coasts brought them to a continent twelve thousand miles from their East African origins.

SLAVERY

Dilip Hiro

Slavery has had an enormous impact on the history of the global economy in the past five centuries and has a long checkered history dating back to antiquity. It evolved differently in war and peace: In armed conflicts, victors sometimes turned their prisoners of war into slaves. During peace, it became a form of punishment for crimes or failure to discharge loans.

HISTORY

Records show the existence of slavery in such ancient civilizations as Assyria, the Nile Valley, Greece, and the Roman Empire. In their expanding realm, the Roman conquerors resorted to enslaving large groups in the vanquished territories, and the slave trade became commonplace in the empire. The Romans’ captured territories included land that is now known as England, Wales, and Scotland. When Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (ruled 193–211 CE), a North African, governed Britain, he once remarked that the British made “bad slaves.” . . . The capture of slaves and slave trading thrived in the Christian world,

where the pope had authority in religious and moral affairs. After taking an equivocal position on slavery and slave trading, the Pope in the mid-15th

century allowed the Portuguese ruler to make slaves of pagans and other nonbelievers. Because the Portuguese, known for their maritime skills, had been exploring West Africa since 1415, the papal clearance opened the gate for taking West Africans first as servants and then as slaves. In 1444, the port of Lagos in southern Portugal saw the establishment of the first slave market for Africans in Europe. In a little over a century, 1 out of 10 residents of the capital, Lisbon, was an African slave. When, in the latter half of the 16th century, the Iberian kings ended

their slave trading monopoly, private slave traders transported slaves to the Iberian colonies in the Western Hemisphere, where there were vast plantations producing labor-intensive products, such as cotton, sugar cane, and tobacco, for export to Europe. The pace of development depended on the availability of labor, consisting of native Indian tribes, poor Whites, and African slaves. As the supply of American Indians and poor Whites dwindled, the Iberian plantation owners began to lean more heavily on the expediency of securing slave labor from Africa. Meanwhile, England, an important European maritime nation, was

busily developing contacts with West Africa and Asia through trade by sea. In 1554, John Locke, an English trader, brought slaves from West Africa to England and sold them as household servants. Sir John Hawkins, a British mariner, transported the first “cargo” of 500 slaves from West Africa to the Western Hemisphere in 1562. Later, during the early 1600s, as England established its own plantation colonies on the North American mainland and Barbados, its economic and political interests in slave trading and slavery increased. In 1655, Oliver Cromwell gave a further boost to this development by seizing Jamaica from Spain. The rise of vast plantations, worked by slaves who cost their owners the

bare minimum of maintenance, marked a qualitative change in the history of slavery. Previously, the relationship between a slave and his or her master had feudal characteristics. Now, it turned capitalist in an agrarian environment, with the plantation owner extracting maximum profit out of slave labor by spending just enough to maintain the slaves in a fit state to work. In another context, in the British plantation colonies in the Western Hemisphere, race relations emerged in their starkest form: Whites, as masters, were conceptualized as the superior race, and the Blacks, as slaves, as the inherently inferior race. Under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Britain acquired from France the

contract to supply African slaves to the Spanish colonies from its Caribbean territories. As a result, within 50 years, Britain became the leading slave trading nation in the world, the foremost slave carrier for other European nations, and the center of the triangular trade: British

ships ferried manufactured goods to West Africa, transported slaves to the New World, and brought back sugar, tobacco, and cotton to Britain. The slaves’ transatlantic journey of 9 to 13 weeks became known as the Middle Passage.

JUSTIFYING SLAVERY

As the British involvement in, and the profits from, slavery and the slave trade increased, the concept of the slave as a commodity began to emerge. Aboard ship, Africans were considered items of cargo. On plantations, African slaves were catalogued along with livestock and treated as work animals, to be worked to the maximum at the minimum cost. A similar view of slaves as property was taken by the courts in England

where, by the mid-18th century, thousands of households of English aristocrats and retired planters used African slaves as serving boys and menservants. They and slave traders had a strong vested interest to maintain the status quo of slavery and slave trade and often rationalized these practices. To counter criticism from liberal, humane quarters, slave masters and merchants argued that African slaves were subhuman. In other words, essentially to justify their economic gain, while simultaneously exorcizing themselves of any guilt they might have felt, slave masters and merchants argued that slaves were subhuman and received the treatment they (naturally) deserved. The fact that slaves were of a different race led many British masters and traders to apply their beliefs to the whole race. They ceased to call slaves African and, instead, referred to them by a racial label—negro. Generalizations about negroes proliferated and became part of popular beliefs and myths in Britain. Religious and cultural justifications were often advanced to establish

the inherent inferiority of negroes, as a race. It was argued that they were the descendants of Ham, the Black son of Noah. As such, they were natural slaves, condemned for ever to remain “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Joshua 9:23). This justification reasoned that negroes were not only physically black, the color of Satan, but also morally black. They were, in short, savage creatures, who jumped from tree to tree in the steamy jungles of Africa and ate one another. Thus, from this perspective, to transport these supposedly subhuman, biologically inferior, mentally retarded creatures from the hell of African jungles to the tranquility and order of the plantations of the New World, where they were assured of protected existence, was an act of Christian charity.

ABOLISHING SLAVERY

Among small pockets of European settlers in North America, however, arose objections to slavery. In 1688, the Quakers in Pennsylvania were the first to air such views. Yet it was not until 1777 that Vermont, then an independent nation, declared slavery illegal. In Europe, the First Republic of France outlawed slavery in 1794. Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 throughout its empire. It then set out to pressure others to follow suit. The Netherlands, the last European nation to do so, abolished slave trading in 1814. In South America, Brazil did so in 1826. The law abolishing slavery in the British Empire was passed in London

in 1833 and enforced the following year; yet, slavery continued elsewhere. Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1853. The end to slavery in the United States came only at the end of the 1861–1865 Civil War between the proslavery South and the antislavery North. In 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Proclamation of Emancipation, liberating slaves in the United States. Between 1518 and 1853, European nations filled their Western

Hemisphere–bound slave ships with an estimated 20 million Africans, of which only about 15 million survived the grueling conditions of the overcrowded African ports and the months-long Middle Passage across the Atlantic in tightly packed ships, leading to outbreaks of fatal diseases. As a result, many more Africans arrived in the New World during those 335 years than Europeans.

SLAVERY AND RELIGION

During slavery, knowledge of Christianity was often withheld from the slaves, although one of the earliest justifications for embarking on the slave trade and slavery given by Europeans in general, and Sir John Hawkins in particular, was to “Christianize the Africans.” (The first ship that Hawkins used as a slave carrier was named The Jesus.) With the development of a plantation economy in the West Indies, planters tended to consider it imperative to deprive their slaves of any knowledge that might lead to their “enlightenment” and possible disobedience. That included knowledge of Christian doctrine. Furthermore, by intermingling slaves from different tribes to form work

gangs, and banning the practice of their respective language and religious rituals, slave owners encouraged the decline of African religions. Over generations, through “house slaves”—slaves that worked in the owner’s house and were sometimes allowed to stand in at the rear of their owner’s

church on Sundays—and through periodic, distant observation of the Whites at church, field slaves were exposed to Christian ritual and doctrine. The result was an amalgam of orthodox Christianity and African beliefs in witchcraft, spirits, and the supernatural. Several slave masters in Jamaica considered this development

disturbing and attempted to formalize it by importing, in 1745, Moravian missionaries from America to instruct the slaves in Christian doctrine. Later, Baptist ministers from America and England were brought in to preach the gospel. By the time all slaves were emancipated in Jamaica, for instance, almost all had been exposed to Christian doctrine in one form or another. The African belief in the supernatural was blended with the Christian

concept of Jesus the Savior. Out of the marriage of Baptist fundamentalist gospel and African belief grew the Baptize, or Pentecostal school of Christian doctrine which, in the post-emancipation period, attracted thousands of ex-slaves, and which today claims the allegiance of about 20% to 25% of the Jamaican population. The participatory approach to service at a Pentecostal church—consisting of congregational singing and incorporating the spiritualist practices of trances, spirit possession, and “speaking in tongues”—proved particularly popular with the rural and/or poor African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. The claim that slavery, which underwent profound changes during the

past millennia, is now extinct must be qualified. It persists in its feudal form in remote pockets of the Arabian Peninsula. Some argue that an indirect form of slavery—being bound to an economic role from which one cannot be easily extricated—is an unfortunate by-product of the 21st-century global economy.

AFRICAN DIASPORA RELIGIONS

Jeffrey Haynes

As many as 10 million Africans were transported from West and Central Africa to the Americas and the islands of the Caribbean between the 16th and 19th centuries, creating one of the largest and most jarring events of forced population change in global history. This Atlantic slave trade involved their removal from familiar customs and practices, and separation from families and communities. As a result of this diaspora, Africans were scattered and dispersed around the world. Yet they often managed to retain both traditions and identities in their new environments. As a result,