Africans living in the diaspora have a unique position as potential agents of change in helping to address Africa’s political and socioeconomic challenges. In addition to sending financial remittances, their multiple, hybrid identities in and out of geographical and psychocultural spaces allow them to play a role as cultural and political ambassadors to foster social change and sustainable development back in their African homelands. However, this hybrid position is not without challenges, and this book reflects some of the conundrums faced by members of the diaspora as they negotiate their relationships with their home countries. The author uses her lived experiences and empirical research to ask: are members of the diaspora conduits of Western cultural hegemony at the cost of their traditional preservation and meaningful development in Africa? How does the Western media’s portrayal of Africa as the "Dark Continent" in the 21st century influence their decision-making process to invest back home? How could African nations’ governments manage their relationships with citizens abroad to motivate them to invest in their home countries? How do some citizen-residents in Africa and African Diaspora communities perceive each other in the context of Africa’s development? How could the African Diaspora collaborate with citizen-residents across growth sectors to impact Africa’s development? The book hopes to inspire agents of change within the diaspora and features diverse African entrepreneurs’ success stories and their experiences of tackling these challenges. The book will be of interest to aspiring entrepreneurs, researchers across African studies, and the expanding and vibrant field of diaspora research.

The diaspora of developing countries can be a potent force for development, through remittances, but more importantly, through promotion of trade, investment, knowledge and technology transfers. The book aims to consolidate research and evidence on these issues with a view to formulating policies in both sending and receiving countries.

The African diaspora is arguably the most important event in modern African history. From the fifteenth century to the present, millions of Africans have been dispersed -- many of them forcibly, others driven by economic need or political persecution--to other continents, creating large communities with African origins living outside their native lands. The majority of these communities are in North America. This historic displacement has meant that Africans are irrevocably connected to economic and political developments in the West and globally. Among the known legacies of the diaspora are slavery, colonialism, racism, poverty, and underdevelopment, yet the ways in which these same factors worked to spur the scattering of Africans are not fully understood -- by those who were part of this migration or by scholars, historians, and policymakers. In this definitive study of the diaspora in North America, Toyin Falola offers a causal history of the western dispersion of Africans and its effects on the modern world. Reengaging old and familiar debates and framing new ones that enrich the discourse surrounding Africa, Falola isolates the thread, running nearly six centuries, that connects the history of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and current migrations. A boon to scholars and policymakers and accessible to the general reader, the book explores diverse narratives of migration and shows that the cultures that migrated from Africa to the Americas have the capacity to unite and create a new pan-Africanist movement within the globalized world. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the 2011 recipient of the Distinguished Africanist Award from the African Studies Association and serves as the vice president of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. His previous books published by the University of Rochester Press include The Power of African Cultures and Nationalism and African Intellectuals.

Patrick Manning follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In joining these stories, he shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shaping across the globe. Manning begins in 1400 and traces the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community. He tracks discourses on race, changes in economic circumstance, the evolving character of family life, and the growth of popular culture. He underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history and demonstrates the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity. Inclusive and far-reaching, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be fully understood without taking the African peoples and the African continent into account.

Examining the experiences of Africans setting up businesses back home, the main focus of this book is to establish the economic, social and psychological reasons for such ‘home direct investment’. Despite the personal sacrifices that are often needed in order to set up new ventures, the diaspora invests relentless effort and motivations in the pursuit of home ventures. The authors explore critical areas such as the social and psychological pressures that African Diasporas experience when investing in their home countries, as well as the management of diaspora businesses and the impact of such investment to local economies.

The book presents a thorough study of the changing landscape of state-diaspora relations in Africa, as well as a robust analysis of diaspora engagement policies being pursued across the continent. As the Africa diaspora strengthens its socio-economic and political clout, countries of origin in Africa have sought to engage their citizens living abroad. Over the past decade, the role of diaspora in the homeland development has become a core tenet of national strategies and policies. Against the backdrop of expanding globalization and deepening regional integration, the book presents a thorough study of the changing landscape of state-diaspora relations in Africa, as well as a robust analysis of diaspora engagement policies being pursued across the continent as states seek to extend rights to and extract obligations from their global citizens.

Re-engaging the African Diasporas: Pan-Africanism in the Age of Globalization is the second volume in the Kwame Nkrumah International Conference series, and brings together twenty selected papers presented at the Third Kwame Nkrumah International Conference held at Kwantlen Polytechnic University on August 19-21, 2014. Two premises inform this volume: (1) If the history of slavery and its vestiges divided and continue to divide the continent and its Diasporas, modern technology should be harnessed to bridge that divide, and (2) the continent’s development is a boon to the development of what the African Union has dubbed Africa’s “Sixth Region”. The book threads together papers that seek to give academic and intellectual impetus to tie the continent’s development to that of the African Diaspora. The goal is to end the inertia and inward-looking on the part of scholars and academics in both Africa and “African International” or “Global Africa,” and re-engage one another in more productive ways. By harnessing the enormous resources available in our internet age and riding the cresting wave of globalization, the task of re-engagement will be vastly enhanced, and the debates and discussions in this volume will serve to facilitate this re-engagement. A main highlight of the conference was a special tribute to Nelson Mandela to honour his death in December, 2013 and celebrate 20 years of South African independence. In these papers, scholars examine Mandela’s role in the transition of South Africa from a racist state to a democratic nation. They critically examine how the ANC’s policies have impacted post-Apartheid South Africa and question what alternatives remain for the future.