‘Diaspora’ means dispersion and was first used, as a term, in reference to the Jews who were scattered in different parts of the world, outside Palestine, after they had been sent out of Babylon. Africans were ‘dispersed’ all over the earth after they had been plucked out of the continent and shipped across the Atlantic to the New World where they worked in various plantations as slaves. It is instructive that the ‘offspring’ of these slaves constitute the Africans in the Diaspora today.

Also instructive is the fact that these ‘offspring’ have continued to experience different forms of enslavement, which they have variously recollected in expression. Truly, Chidi Amuta’s position, that “every historical epoch writes its own poetry”, is apt here in the sense that the twin-historical epochs of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism will ever continue to write their literature(s) especially from the hands of writers in the Diaspora who are the offspring or recipients of the epochs.

It is noteworthy that the aborigines of the countries where the Africans found themselves had their defined ways of life, that is, their cosmology, before the forced immigration of slaves into the areas. The African slaves however arrived in these countries with their own cultures or ways of life. Against all odds, the slaves ensured that the African culture survived in the new environment, following their sense of communality. Corroborating, Roger Bastide asserts:

The slave-ships carried not only men, women and children, but also their gods, beliefs, and traditional folklore. They maintained a stubborn resistance against their white oppressors who were determined to tear them loose, by force if need be, from their own cultural patterns, and acclimatize them to those of the west. Such resistance was most successful in the towns, where the Negroes could meet at night and reorganise their primitive communities more easily than they could out in the countryside (23).