The Issues in the African Blood Lines in the African Diaspora

The African slave trade is described as historically the cruelest treatment of any group. African were up rooted from their homes and societies to be taken to foreign lands. Throughout the African slave trade, the word diaspora is used to explain the spreading of blacks. The text explained the word by referencing to the scattering of Jews throughout the West. This term originated in other historical and cultural contexts-namely Jewish and Greek history. Even though diaspora was defined, the real problem of African blood lines come into play.

Even though African bloodlines were a huge question, many bypassed the option of purity. Instead the historians and anthropologists believed in syncretism; which is the blending of two or more culture to for a new one. The people who were former slaves would bind their traditions with others letting go of their differences.

Holidays such as Kwanzaa became a part of the slave cultures around the diaspora, leading the people to come together.

This holiday is a demonstration like any other art during slavery to promote liberation. When the author stated, “The fundamental and still unresolved question in the histories of the African diaspora and the making of the modern world is to what degree is New World black people

“African”; they meant that the people possibly are not of African descent, but of an indigenous origin. The concept of authenticity became a hard subject to find the answer to. Many people did not know what to call these black people, nor did they know how they banded together as a community.

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Stuart Hall in his essay wrote: “The first position defines cultural identity in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves,’ which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.

Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect their common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people,’ with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history”(1990:223).”

This meant that the identity within majority of the former slaves were lost. That complemented the idea of the people living in a made up society. The way modern history is viewed today, it is hard not to mention syncretism. The reason modern history is shaped this way is because of how multiple became one society. Others have not realized that the diaspora was easy because of the mixing of cultures for forward generations.