Customer Reviews

The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa

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Ronald Segal's book "The Black Diaspora" is an excellent historical and cultural account of African descendents living outside of Africa. This book is so smoothly written that it is impossible not to enjoy and learn a great deal from its pages. The format and flow are so well put together that Segal's many topics of discussion are beautifully linked with easy transitions. I loved this book and learned a huge amount about the black diaspora despite having read many, many other books on this same topic.

This book is a must for those who want an account of Black History in North America and the Caribbean. It really provides a foundation for you to view the Caribbean in different light and to understand why we are now where we are today. It is both informative and disturbing. This should be part of the National Curriculum in so many countries. The account Mr Segal gives on each Island is rewarding. I has a 'sense' of what I saw when I went to Martinique and the book provides firm facts which have enabled me to reflect on my journey and forthcoming journeys. If only more people from Europe and within the Islands read a book like this!!

This is quite an interesting book, and contains a great deal of good information about the Black communities outside Africa.

Having said that, I'm taken aback by the complete dearth of honesty about the origins of the slave trade within Africa, and the Islamic traditions concerning Slavery. The book does mention that some slaves taken to Brazil were converts to Islam, and led a slave rebellion.

Fine. But Segal completely omits the facts that Islam practiced slavery throughout the African continent, especially within the Sudan --- beginning centuries earlier than colonial slave trading over the Atlantic --- and that forced conversion was and remains part and parcel of that Islamic slave tradition.

Nor does Segal make any mention of the Arab Muslims' abhorrence of black African men. Indeed, in Arabic, the word abd, which means slave, is synonymous with black.

This is a surprising deficit, since Segal does quote from V.S. Naipaul, the great Trinidad writer who has expounded prolifically on the effects both of Islam Islam and Islamic conversion. Concerning Naipaul's expert points on that subject, Segal cites not a single word.

Rather, Segal erroneously portrays a more benevolent Islamic attitude towards slaves than found in Christianity, and insists that Islam considers freeing slaves a good deed. This is based on a single quotation. However, let us note that strict Islamic shari'a states are the only countries in the world where slavery remains not only legal, but is actively encouraged and enforced, to this day.

As I stated, this is a fine book in many respects, but blaming slavery entirely on the nations that colonized Africa and the Americas is completely and utterly ahistorical, as Naipaul and other scholars clearly prove. Slavery came as much if not more so from within Africa as it did from without.

---Alyssa A. Lappen