reversing sail a history of the african diaspora

This is paramount to initiating a discussion of African American health disparities. From our collective experiences, we offer selected resources to help students (1) understand race as a social construct and (2) understand that health disparities are not a consequence of inherent race-based biological differences.

As instructors with the responsibility of introducing undergraduate students to the concept of health disparities, we believe it is beneficial for students to examine health disparities within the historical context of race. This article is a reflection of the individual and collective experiences of university professors of color whose work addresses African American health disparities. To push back against Africa’s continued marginal position perforce requires returning to the original motivation of the Pan-African agenda and ideal: the unity of purpose and collective action of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora for radical liberation. Today, globalisation has fastened rather than loosened Africa’s position on the ladder of the global political economy. I argue that the highest point of the liberation agenda, the final defeat of apartheid in South Africa, ironically coincided with the deepening of Africa’s place on the lowest rungs of the global capitalist system. The article sketches out the genealogy and contours of the liberation agenda that looped the African diaspora to developments on the African continent, dating back to the antislavery struggles at the end of the eighteenth century through to the era of independent Africa. This article revisits this agenda for liberation, placing it in the current crisis of globalisation and examining the continued marginal place of Africa in the global capitalist political economy. The original Pan-African ideal had, as its programmatic agenda, the struggle to free Africans in the diaspora from slave bondage and to liberate the African continent from the despicable occupation by European imperial powers.

Reversing sail a history of the african diaspora