In Search of the Diaspora: A Personal and Intellectual Odyssey

Essay specially prepared for presentation at the Inaugural Lecture of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor

Let me begin by thanking Dean McBride for that generous introduction and for his energetic and visionary leadership of the College, and the College Executive Committee for selecting me as a recipient of this great honor. I count myself extremely fortunate to have worked, in the course of one year, under two exemplary deans committed to intellectual excellence, accessibility, diversity, and interdisciplinary scholarship. I am indebted to Dean Comer, for luring me from Penn State's scenic Happy Valley to UIC, the public university of this enchanting global city, for his unflinching support for me personally and the Department of African American Studies. And my colleagues in the department: I marvel at their intellectual vitality and enthusiasm for engaged scholarship, their infectious collegiality, qualities that are often rare and which proved critical in my decision to join them. Already their work has contributed immensely to the expansion of my intellectual horizons.

My fortunes extend to friends in various locations along the multiple routes of my transnational and diasporic sojourns who share in my joy including those from my first and endearing American home, Urbana-Champaign, and my current beloved home, Chicago, some of whom are here. And there is always family: my adorable daughter, Natasha Thandile, who came from Atlanta, and who has done so much to teach me the infinite joys of fatherhood and to cherish the future amidst the harshness of our often unhappy and stubbornly unjust world; and my lovely wife, Cassandra Rachel Veney my partner and dearest friend for many years, who is my anchor in a life of constant departures and arrivals, of multiple homes and belongings.

When I was first informed I would be named Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor I was very excited, but I quickly began to despair when I was told there would be a public ceremony where I would be expected to give a lecture. Like most of you, I am of course paid to talk, in classrooms, at conferences, or even at public forums; but this is a humbling occasion, it makes me almost speechless. What could I say, I asked people in the Dean's office. Anything, they said, talk about your research, anything. I consulted friends and family. Same answer. I finally settled on sharing with you, and I seek your indulgence in advance, my personal and intellectual journey from southern Africa to the global North, from African history to diaspora studies, how this fascinating voyage has framed and enriched my scholarship and social engagements.

It is tempting to trace my personal and professional journeys, the research roads I have travelled from African economic history to African diaspora studies to my undergraduate studies at the University of Malawi where I studied between 1972 and 1976 majoring in History and English. It has been a fascinating transnational and transdisciplinary odyssey, traversing and negotiating different academic climes and political cultures, trying to understand and function intelligently in our exceedingly complex and increasingly integrated world. This journey is fairly typical of scholars of my generation notwithstanding the obvious differences of detail. We were beneficiaries of Africa's decolonization, one of the pivotal events of 20^th century world history. Colonial rule left behind very few universities, so that one of the key challenges facing the new independent states was to establish or expand their higher education systems. Across Africa the growth in higher education after independence was simply phenomenal. The University of Malawi was merely seven years old when I enrolled; it had been established in 1965, a year after independence.

Our generation differed from the generations immediately before and after us: the former were pioneers in the establishment of African studies as respectable academic fields and they did most of their training in the 1950s and 1960s in overseas institutions, while those who came after us in the 1980s and 1990s could receive their entire education at home, although by then many public universities were already suffering from underfunding, a story we are all familiar with even in these rich United States. Thus students of my generation were educated during the golden years of African universities when they were valued as engines for the realization of the historic and humanistic dreams of African nationalism: decolonization, nation building, development, democratization, and regional integration.

It is difficult to capture, today, how intoxicating those times were, intellectually and ideologically; our generation's belief that we were being certified into something higher than the charms of middle class comfort. Our professors and politicians told us we were being educated to remake Africa's place in the world and the place of the world in Africa, to lift Africa from internal underdevelopment and external dependency bequeathed by the unrelenting and cruel assaults of slavery and colonialism. This is the emancipatory epistemic impulse that runs through the work of many scholars of my generation including mine despite its interdisciplinary range.

We sought to answer the three fundamental questions that have confronted African and African diaspora intellectuals since Africa's tragic encounter with Europe in modern times: parity, purity, and personhood-equality with Europe, difference from Europe, and humanism denied by Europe. We of course posed these questions with the vocabulary of our own generation, the radical discourses of the late 1960s and early 1970s: Marxism, socialism, feminism, black consciousness, etc., before postcolonial Africa and the postwar world as a whole were defanged by neoliberalism and went into a protracted recession of expectations and systemic options.

Our intellectual and ideological quests were peculiarly post-colonial, but they were also profoundly Pan-African. For many of us knowledge of the African diaspora, the Africa abroad, may have been nurtured by college texts, but it was bred by the seductions of popular culture. I recall the overwhelming impact left on my young seventeen year old mind reading, in our first year, the incisive anti-colonial critique, Black Skin, White Masks by the Martinican revolutionary thinker, Frantz Fanon, and later that searing indictment of American racial inequality and social injustice, Native Son, by Richard Wright, and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by the brilliant Guyanese historian, Walter Rodney, which inflamed our historical imaginations.

But long before I had heard of Fanon, Wright, or Rodney and other weighty diasporan thinkers and writers, we all knew from popular tradition that our national hero, the Rev. John Chilembwe, who led the first nationalist rebellion against the British in January 1915, was educated at a black college (1897-1900) and had returned with his African American wife. And we idolized Pele, the legendary Afro-Brazilian football maestro, who we desperately tried to imitate. We admired Muhammad Ali, but scrawny and short as I was I had no ambitions of following his craft. And there were the musicians, the incomparable James Brown, the exquisite Diana Ross and the Supremes, and legions more. We heard about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and saw the traumatized expressions on our parents' faces when they were assassinated. It was all so confusing, this juxtaposition of consummate creativity and explosive rage, racial terror and heroic struggle.

After graduation, like many others, I found myself trekking to the former imperial metropole for graduate study. By then, it had become evident that the golden years had began to dim for African universities as the euphoria of independence faded from the rising shadows of political authoritarianism and declining economic growth. The conviviality between the political class and the intelligentsia increasingly turned into mutual condescension. When I left Malawi in 1977 I had no idea that I would become part of Africa's new intellectual diaspora, let alone did I reflect on the perils and possibilities of the diaspora condition. I left at the height of the dictatorship of Dr. Banda, a 1931 graduate of the University of Chicago and many other American and British universities, when political disappearances and detentions were quite common, especially for the intelligentsia. I recall several of my professors and fellow students were detained and sent to ‘high school', as the detention centers were euphemistically called. The special branch, the infamous ‘SB'-there was never a more frightening acronym in those days-whom we used to call the ‘soul brothers' to assuage our fears, would come to the campus to pick up new recruits for ‘high school' on Fridays, always on Fridays, and so many of us would try to escape campus on Fridays, even Thursdays, and return the next Sunday or Monday. I later wrote about this harrowing period in my second collection of short stories, The Joys of Exile.

I had been writing short stories since 1972 when I one of my English professors encouraged me to pursue writing after he read a story I had written for his class assignment. For the next four years I wrote many stories, some of which were broadcast on the national radio and others published in magazines. Like my colleagues gathered around what we called the Writers' Group, I was acutely aware of the dangers of writing under such a capricious regime, one wrong word could land you in detention. This came home to me in 1975 when I was invited to meet the Chairman of the Censorship Board to go over some of the stories included in my forthcoming collection, Night of Darkness and Other Stories-the choice of title and the lead story were a deliberate commentary and mockery of the prevailing political order. The Chairman chastised me about six of the stories, warning against their publication or risk detention: a harsh lesson to a 19 year old that the price of writing was not just possible censure or acclaim from exacting teachers or opinionated critics but physical harm. I almost suspended publication of the book, but I was persuaded otherwise by my professors and the publisher, but the book's amputation left sour memories and opposition to all forms of censorship that have lasted to this day.

Not surprisingly, I was immensely relieved when I got out of the country to study abroad, thrilled at the opportunity to rewrite my experiences of the Malawi of the 1970s. The result of my freed, but enraged, imagination was my first novel, Smoldering Charcoal, a bitter commentary of the unfulfilled dreams of independence. Fortunately, for me and my family still in the country the book came out as Malawi was emerging out of the fog of terror and the winds of democratization-what Africans call struggles for the ‘second independence'-were blowing across the continent. In May 1994 Banda's dictatorship was dumped into the dustbin of history. I recall the electric impact during the elections and sense of rebirth and renewal that filled this beautiful land of undulating hills and towering mountains, lavish valleys and meandering rivers and the shimmering waters of Lake Malawi. I returned to bear witness to this historic moment, my first extended return in 17 years.

Democratization was exhilarating in its political and intellectual possibilities, yet strangely disorienting. Tyranny had created us, imprisoned and exiled many of us, incensed our consciences, and nourished our imaginations. It had given us the moral inspiration to write, the themes to write about, and often determined the languages, forms and styles of our writing, as well as our audiences and publication outlets. Now we were about to be orphaned from this tyranny. We were being challenged to recreate our messages, imaginations, practices, and ourselves. That is when I decided to recast my literary imagination by writing my next collection of short stories, The Joys of Exile, in which the stories are set in the different locations of my diasporic journeys and deal with various types of exile as a metaphor of human alienation.

If my creative writing represented a deeply charged emotional and existential engagement with the politics of my postcolonial upbringing, my academic work reflected an epistemic and experiential attempt to comprehend the African condition and the way it has been analyzed. I had always been fascinated by both history as the study of the African past, and international relations as the study of Africa's global engagements, so for my Masters degree I took courses in both fields at the University of London. My first year overseas in the legendary city of London, the old imperial capital we had been raised to imagine as the center of cosmopolitan glory, was truly intriguing: the taste of new freedoms, the fascination of new experiences, the joys of making new friends, the challenges of new studies, the unsettling confrontations with the politics of race and my baptism into blackness.

A year later, I enrolled for my Ph.D. at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, home to one of Canada's oldest black communities, descendants of loyalists from the American war of independence and Jamaican Maroons. The grammar of my newly acquired blackness took a fresh North American accent. By then I had grown weary of Britain, of being a postcolonial in the unforgiving and unforgetting imperial metropole. I opted for middling Canada, a country that straddled the settler and multiracial energies of North America and the familiarities of the Commonwealth, and espoused a form of social democracy more amenable to my political tastes.

Since I could not return to Malawi, I chose to do my field research on Kenya, which was close enough to Malawi, and where I hoped I would be able to meet exiled or Malawians in transit since Nairobi was the region's major transportation hub; Johannesburg in South Africa was then isolated in its apartheid laager. It would also give me the opportunity to learn Swahili, the lingua franca of eastern Africa. And Kenya was the quintessential neo-colonial state, on which I could test Marxist and dependency theories that were then the rage in our intellectual circles.

Before the rise of the ‘radical' approaches in African studies, the nationalist school held sway in African historiography. Across the world including the United States the boundaries of scholarship in the human sciences are often enclosed in the imaginary of the nation notwithstanding periodic theoretical imports from abroad. Nationalist historiography overthrew imperialist history that had valorized colonialism and vilified Africa. When Africans appeared in the Eurocentric narratives, it was to reproach their societies and cultures, or to record their alleged westernization or modernization. Nationalist historians focused primarily on African activities, choices, and adaptations, and chronicled the development of Africa's ancient states and empires, trade, migrations, religions, etc., celebrated nationalism and condemned colonialism, and reincorporated Egypt and North Africa into the mainstream of African history from which they had been severed by Hegel and his descendants.

The nationalist historians who had taught me in Malawi and England had done their job well: we never doubted that Africa had its own history, indeed the longest in the world as the cradle of modern humans where they developed their first institutions and technologies, but we were troubled by the continued dehumanization of Africans at home and abroad. By the time I entered graduate school criticisms of nationalist historiography had become common: that it focused largely on the ‘voices' of the ruling classes, rather than the ‘masses;' that it wrote African history by analogy and subsumed it to the teleological logics of European history, and failed to probe deeper into the historical realities of African material and social life before colonial rule; and as for the colonial period, nationalism was made so ‘overdetermining' that little systematic analyses were offered of imperialism, its changing forms, and their impact, not to mention the formation of, and struggles over, class and gender identities.

These critiques were in part inspired by creeping disillusionment with independence and the rise of more radical ideologies. In particular, Marxism became increasingly popular as a paradigm of social science research. I wrote my dissertation on ‘Dependent Capitalism and the Making of the Kenyan Working Class During the Colonial Period', a title that wears its theoretical and ideological influences loudly. Marxist influence grew with the triumph of radical liberation movements in southern Africa in the early 1970s, and the adoption of Marxism as a developmentalist ideology by several African states, and by western intellectuals who were dissatisfied with bourgeois liberalism and western imperialism in the Third World.

Despite some of the fine work the various approaches inspired there was one glaring omission: their coverage of gender and women's history was poor. From the turn of the 1970s feminists began to question the androcentric blinders of African historiography, a challenge impelled by the growth of the women's movement. From the 1980s there was an explosion of feminist-inspired studies, many of which sought to restore women to history, to record women's activities and experiences in the conventional themes of African history, and some to genderize African historiography as a whole. I joined the fray with a book on women in the Kenyan labor movement. This was my first published academic book. I never published my dissertation, although I cannibalized bits and pieces into journal articles or book chapters.

When I completed my dissertation, I felt stranded: I could not go back to Malawi and I did not want to stay in Canada. Instead I opted for the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. My engagement with the diaspora entered a new and productive phase. I was asked to teach the histories of West and Southern Africa, not Kenya, area of my expertise, and when I gave public lectures to various communities including schools, the audiences were interested in Africa in general, in broad African history, struggles, and achievements. This underscores the power of the diaspora space to imagine and write Africa in more holistic ways, the incredible potential of the diaspora imagination to conceive and critique Africa differently, to construct both a continental and a global Africa. In Jamaica, I became an African, over and above my national identity in Africa itself, and my racial identities in Canada and Britain.

I recall vividly one day I was invited to address high school students in Kingston and to my consternation their questions focused predominantly on the nature of African economies before European colonial rule: what did Africans produce, eat, wear, trade, what kinds of houses did they live in, what was the nature of gender and inter-generational relations, the dynamics and structures of power, why did they sell their people into slavery? In my own work I had focused on colonial capitalism to give satisfactory answers. I decided to study precolonial African economic history. This resulted, ten years later, in what I consider to be my most important book, A Modern Economic History of Africa. Vol.1: The Nineteenth Century, which provided a belated answer to those students. I hope some of them read the book in college.

Researching and teaching precolonial economic history proved daunting because of Africa's sheer size, whose vastness-more than a fifth of the world's landmass including Antarctica-is diminished by the Eurocentric cartographic conceit of the Mercator projection that inflates the size of the northern continents (Africa is bigger than Europe, the USA, and China combined, or about 75% of North and South America combined), and the extraordinary complexity and diversity of the continent's economies and societies often shrouded in the fogs of facile generalizations, myths, stereotypes, theories and models. My book sought to tell a large story encompassing environmental and demographic change, the development of agricultural production, mining and manufacturing industries, domestic and regional trade, and international trade and imperialism. Trying to figure out the contents and components of such a history, its spatial and temporal scales, themes and theories, narrative structure and rhetoric, and drawing intra- and extra-continental comparisons and connections, turned me into a convert to the delights of intellectual eclecticism. And so I borrowed insights from neo-classical, institutional, Marxist, dependency, feminist, and environmental economic historiographies, inspired by the injunction from Wole Soyinka that we must "escape the abstract tyranny of grand theory, so leaving real people now dead some room to dance." Years later it was gratifying to read a similar admonition by our own Deidre McCloskey that assuming our ancestors to have been economically monotheistic or irrational "does not treat the dead with due respect."

The years I spent in Kenya constituted a period of enormous personal and intellectual growth for me. I met many people who have since become lifelong friends, most importantly Professor B.A. Ogot, one of the founders of nationalist historiography and editors of the eight volume UNESCO General History of Africa, the supreme compendium of historical knowledge produced by his generation, who became my mentor and from whom I learned much about the development of African history, the need to vigorously challenge conventional interpretations and hegemonies over African studies, and the power and perils of public intellectualism.

The 1980s were difficult years for African universities because of the misguided policies of structural adjustment imposed with free market fundamentalist zeal on conniving African governments by the international financial institutions-the IMF and World Bank-and western states. Many of us found salvation in the bourgeoning regional research networks such as the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. In 1990, I attended my first CODESRIA conference; it was on academic freedom and the social responsibility of intellectuals. It was an indescribable experience meeting the luminaries of African social science and social thought whose publications I had devoured with such relish-Samir Amin, Archie Mafeje, Wangari Maathai, Amina Mama, Mahmood Mamdani, Thandika Mkandawire, Zene Tadesse, etc. Zene became my invaluable editor at CODESRIA.

Since then I have deliberately published some of my most important books with CODESRIA, including A Modern Economic History of Africa, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises, the co-edited two-volume collection, African Universities in the Twenty-First Century, and the recently published The Study of Africa also in two volumes. As we all know too well, publishing is the lifeblood of the academic enterprise, the medium through which scholarly ideas and collective identities are created, codified, circulated, and consumed, through which informed conversations between civilizations, cultures, countries, and communities are conducted across generations. For me, publishing with CODESRIA is my way of being part of a Pan-African intellectual conversation; perhaps it also represents the repatriation of academic capital, a form of intellectual remittances.

My experiences in Kenya and with CODESRIA engendered a growing interest with the role of intellectuals and institutions of higher education in socioeconomic development and transformation out of which emerged the book, African Universities in the Twenty-First Century, and papers I have published on higher education in Africa and other regions including the United States. There is little doubt in my mind that universities are not a developmental luxury, but fundamental to the well-being and competitiveness of Africa and African diasporas in a world increasingly characterized by knowledge intensive economic and social activities.

Over the years my interest in the history of institutions of higher learning was complemented by a growing interest in the history of knowledge production. This dual analytical agenda, the history of knowledge producing institutions and the history of ideas, was reinforced when I became director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995, one of the nation's leading African studies programs. My first encounter with the Africanist community at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association in November that year was not a particularly pleasant one: there was heated confrontation over Philip Curtin's controversial remarks, published in an op-ed piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, about the declining standards in the teaching of African history because of, in his view, the rising entry of black scholars into the discipline. It was my rude baptism into the highly racialized politics of African studies in particular and the American academy in general. As a new-born Africanist-elsewhere in my academic career I had been known by other labels-I felt it was essential to learn more about what I had gotten myself into. This resulted in the book, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises, and an abiding interest in excavating the intellectual and social composition of African studies in the United States and the global North generally.

At UIUC, I introduced a graduate seminar on the ‘Development of African Studies', which examined the intellectual, institutional, and ideological dynamics in the construction of Africanist knowledges in different disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and international contexts. One year with an NEH grant we brought scholars from around the world for intensive and stimulating discussions on new developments and the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical challenges in African studies within their respective fields and locations. This culminated in the collection, The Study of Africa, which examines how all the major social science and humanities disciplines-from anthropology to philosophy, economics to psychology-and interdisciplinary fields from women's and gender studies to development studies to cultural studies-have constructed knowledges of Africa in different world regions-Asia, Europe, and the Americas-since the late 19^th century when the academic and administrative architecture of the modern university was established.

The eight years I spent at UIUC constituted one of the most productive periods in my intellectual career. We organized numerous conferences and brought hundreds of scholars from around the world including Africa to discuss and debate issues of theoretical and great policy relevance. That is where my interdisciplinary inclinations turned into an intellectual conviction: that interdisciplinarity reflects the chaos, messiness, complexity, and indivisibility of real life, of social and physical phenomena better than the compartmentalized disciplines do; that while advances in knowledge occur in the traditional disciplines, they are even more likely in the intersections, the liminal spaces between the disciplines; in short, interdisciplinarity offers a creative, cognitive space between disciplines where new questions can be asked, new approaches developed, new understandings advanced, and new fields and even disciplines emerge.

Some of the results from the sumptuous interdisciplinary intellectual feasts of my time at UIUC can be seen in the various books I edited that sought to push the boundaries of African studies into new theoretically and empirically exciting directions. They include Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels which examined the constructions of space and spatiality in African studies and African societies; Science and Technology in Africa, which interrogated Africa's modernities and its scientific and technological literacy and production; Leisure in Urban Africa, a pioneering study on the ways in which leisure activities from football to films, music to mass tourism have been produced and consumed in African cities from the 19^th century to the present; Human Rights, the Rule of Law and Development in Africa, which sought to expand the debates on the relationship between human rights and development. I also became involved in large encyclopedic projects out of the conviction that it is crucial to inscribe Africanist scholarly voices in this popular medium of intellectual discourse: as the chief editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century African History, and as an associate editor for the six-volume New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, a comprehensive account of the main ideas and ideological and intellectual movements developed around the world from antiquity to the present.

I maintained my old interest in gender studies with the publication of Women in African Studies Scholarly Publishing. More recently, I veered into one of the afflictions of modern Africa and the contemporary world-war and conflict-and co-edited two books, The Roots of African Conflicts and Managing and Resolving African Conflicts. And thanks to the communication possibilities opened by the Internet, the ubiquitous public square of the 21^st century, I set up a website, The Zeleza Post, which seeks to provide "informed news and commentary on the Pan-African world." Out of my online essays will come my first trade book this fall, Blogging Africa: From Katrina to Kenya, via Paris and Beijing, by a British publisher. As a scholar, I believe it is important to respond as critically and creatively as possible to emerging intellectual and ideological trends, political and economic developments. By the 1990s, globalization and the ‘posts'-postmodernism and postcolonialism-had become a discursive craze. I tried to understand these new paradigms and interrogate their analytical implications for African studies by writing Rethinking Africa's Globalization. Vol.1: The Intellectual Challenges.

Living long in the global North, eventually forces one to confront the question of the diapora. African immigrants find themselves and especially their offspring identified with Africa's historic diasporas in their new communities and countries of residence, a condition I have not escaped. Diaspora studies have offered me a way back to the future, to explore more systematically the inchoate curiosities of my youth. I often tell people who ask why I got into diaspora studies, half-jokingly, that I want to better understand my wife as an African American, my daughter as an American African, as the renowned Kenyan scholar, Ali Mazrui, calls the children of the new African migrants-the Barack Obamas-who have direct family connections with Africa that the historic diasporas lack, and my own condition as a member of the new diaspora. To put it in a more scholarly manner, the current popularity of diaspora studies can be attributed to intellectual, ideological, and sociopolitical dynamics: the first includes the rise of globalization and transnational studies, the growth of cultural studies, the paradigms of the "posts," and interest in world history; the second is inspired by the enduring seductions and revival of Pan-Africanism and black internationalism; the third, is spawned by the rising tide of transnational migrations and movements, globalization processes and the reconfiguration of nation states.

My current project, ‘Africa and Its Diasporas: Linkages and Dispersals,' seeks to examine the global dispersal of African peoples over the last millennium to Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the diverse processes of diaspora formation in and within the various regions, and the linkages-demographic, cultural, economic, political, ideological, and iconographic-that the various diasporas have maintained with Africa. The histories of African diasporas in Asia and Europe antedate those of the Americas, yet the field is largely framed by the Atlantic model. At one level, then, the project is inspired by theoretical considerations, to reconceptualize the African diaspora beyond Paul Gilroy's famous Black Atlantic. It also seeks to bring together in a single narrative, the history of African diasporas in all their splendid diversities, much as I tried to do with A Modern Economic History of Africa.

I am only too aware that writing syntheses is an exercise fraught with pitfalls, more so in an era like ours which puts scholarly premium on narrow specialization. Syntheses are suspect as indulgences of naïve or retiring scholars, purveyors of simplistic models or grand theories. Notwithstanding these problems, the importance of syntheses cannot be overemphasized. They are a means of taking stock of the academic capital accumulated at various moments in the development of scholarship. Ideally, they provide signposts of where a subject is, and directions for future research. A synthesis is like a forest that gives shape to the distinctive trees of knowledge. It is not a substitute, but an indispensable complement, of micro-research.

Diaspora studies are crucial, in my view, to inscribing Africa's global historical presence; such a rewriting of history helps to provincialize Europe that has monopolized universality and to universalize Africa beyond its Eurocentric provincialization. The sheer volume of literature on the subject has been a source of inestimable intellectual pleasure and some trepidation for me. Thanks to a generous Ford Foundation grant, I spent the summer of 2006 on my first field visits to Venezuela and Brazil and the summer of 2007 in Haiti. In the next few years I will be visiting other important African diaspora centers in the Americas and in Europe, Asia, and the major diaspora trans-shipment zones in northern, western, and eastern Africa.

A project such as this has immense intellectual and policy relevance: It can help deepen our understanding of the complex histories and constructions of African diasporas and their equally complex and sometimes contradictory and always changing engagements with Africa, which is especially critical at this juncture as the African Union and national governments seek to build more productive relationships between themselves and their diasporas. Already, Africa's new diasporas remit about $50 billion, more than all so-called foreign ‘aid'-read loans and investment-to Africa combined, notwithstanding the glib claims of the mercy industrial complex fronted by celebrities like Bono and Madonna and others who seek moral and public gravitas from African commiseration. Also, as global African migrations increase the challenges of integrating the new African diasporas in the host countries grow as has been seen in France with its recurrent urban uprisings, or assimilating them into long-established African diaspora communities as is evident in the United States, a country characterized by what Earl Lewis calls ‘overlapping diasporas'.

Thus, diaspora studies enable us to insert Africa into global history and rewrite the histories of the various regions to which Africans were dispersed whether voluntarily or by force. The Africans who conquered the Iberian Peninsula and established what the Moroccan scholar Anouar Majid calls an "African kingdom in Europe" and ruled parts of Spain between 711 and 1492 did so voluntarily, while those who were shipped to the Americas during the era of the Atlantic slave trade were coerced. Both left an indelible mark on the history of Europe, Africa, and the Americas whose effects are still with us and are central to understanding the history of the Atlantic world. The same is true of the Indian Ocean world whose history cannot be fully grasped without the imprint of African activities, migrations and diasporas.

Thus far, my personal and professional journeys from Malawi in Southern Africa to the global North and the diaspora have been truly fascinating and enriching. To be sure, there are moments of nostalgia, of wonder what might have been had I stayed in one place, in my native homeland, but I also realize the immense possibilities that a life of rooted cosmopolitanism, guided by the abiding principles of a global Pan-Africanism, has afforded me as an African intellectual who came of age in the late twentieth century. Thank you for your kind indulgence and sharing this precious moment with me.