Caribbean
Antigua & Barbuda
St John's
Three hundred and sixty-five beaches, a restored Georgian dockyard, and calypso that still carries the memory of the sugar estates.
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Beyond the continent
The African diaspora
Africa did not stay in Africa. This section covers the places outside the continent where people of African descent are the majority, and the communities inside larger countries where they are not — 34 nations and territories across the Caribbean and Atlantic, and 28 communities across the Americas, Europe and Asia.
How this section works
Two different kinds of entry
Nations and territories. Places where people of African descent are the majority or the largest group — most of the Caribbean, from Haiti and Jamaica to Curaçao and Bermuda. These get the same treatment as any country on the site: capital, currency, languages, national days.
Communities. African Americans, Black British, Afro-Brazilians, the Siddi of India. These are peoples inside larger countries, not countries in themselves, so they are described as communities — with their centres, their languages, and the dates they keep.
One thing this section is not: a list of everywhere with dark-skinned people. Melanesians, Aboriginal Australians, Papuans and the Negrito peoples of Southeast Asia are not part of the African diaspora, and are not included. Descent, not complexion.
34
Caribbean & Atlantic nations and territories
13
communities across the Americas
10
communities across Europe
5
African-descended communities settled in Asia
62 entries
Search the diaspora
Type a name, a city, a region — or just "Caribbean", "Europe", "Americas", "Asia".
Caribbean
Bahamas
Nassau
Seven hundred islands, Junkanoo drums before dawn, and a nation shaped by Loyalist planters, their enslaved, and the sloops that outran everyone.
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Caribbean
Barbados
Bridgetown
The island that removed the British monarch and became a republic in 2021 — Crop Over, flying fish, and Bussa with his chains broken above the highway.
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Caribbean
Belize
Belmopan
Central America's only English-speaking country — Kriol along the coast, Garifuna drumming in the south, and the second-longest barrier reef on earth.
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Caribbean
Cuba
Havana
Rumba, son and Santería carry Yoruba and Kongo roots — a country whose African inheritance shaped its music, its faith and its revolution.
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Caribbean
Dominica
Roseau
The Nature Isle — a boiling lake, the last Kalinago territory in the Caribbean, and Maroon history written into mountains no army could hold.
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Caribbean
Dominican Republic
Santo Domingo
Merengue and bachata, the oldest European city in the Americas, and an Afro-descendant majority whose identity is still argued over at home.
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Caribbean
Grenada
St George's
The Spice Isle — nutmeg on every corner, Jab Jab devils covered in oil and molasses, and the ruins of a revolution the world would rather forget.
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Caribbean
Guyana
Georgetown
South America's only English-speaking country — Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese side by side on the coast, and Kaieteur falling into rainforest inland.
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Caribbean
Haiti
Port-au-Prince
The first Black republic — the only nation on earth born of a successful revolution by the enslaved, and the one the world spent two centuries punishing for it.
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Caribbean
Jamaica
Kingston
Reggae, Rastafari, and Maroon towns that never surrendered — the island that gave Pan-Africanism Marcus Garvey and gave the world a soundtrack.
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Caribbean
Saint Kitts & Nevis
Basseterre
The smallest sovereign state in the Americas — Brimstone Hill fortress standing over old sugar land, and Sugar Mas running through Christmas.
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Caribbean
Saint Lucia
Castries
The Pitons rising straight out of the sea, Kwéyòl spoken at home, and two Nobel laureates from a population under two hundred thousand.
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Caribbean
Saint Vincent & the Grenadines
Kingstown
Homeland of the Garifuna — the Black Caribs who fought the British for decades before exile, and whose descendants now live along the Central American coast.
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Caribbean
Suriname
Paramaribo
Maroon nations — Saramaka, Ndyuka, Aluku, Paamaka — who forced treaties out of the Dutch in the 1760s and still govern their own interior.
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Caribbean
Trinidad & Tobago
Port of Spain
Birthplace of the steelpan, calypso and soca — and the first country in the world to make Emancipation Day a national holiday.
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Caribbean
Anguilla
The Valley
Sixteen miles of coral and sand, boat racing as the national sport, and a revolution fought for the right to stay British.
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Caribbean
Aruba
Oranjestad
Papiamento — a creole grown from African, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch — spoken by everyone here, in parliament as readily as in the kitchen.
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Caribbean
Bermuda
Hamilton
Not Caribbean but Atlantic — Gombey dancers in the street, Cup Match born of emancipation, and a Black majority inside a global finance centre.
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Caribbean
Bonaire
Kralendijk
Salt pans still edge the southern coast, and beside them the stone huts where the enslaved who worked them slept — left standing deliberately.
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Caribbean
British Virgin Islands
Road Town
The Emancipation Festival in August is the centre of the year — three days of parade, music and the August Monday tradition.
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Caribbean
Cayman Islands
George Town
A finance centre built on a seafaring past, where Caymanian Creole and turtle-boat heritage sit underneath the office towers.
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Caribbean
Curaçao
Willemstad
Tula's 1795 revolt is remembered every August — and Willemstad's famous painted waterfront was the Dutch slave-trading hub for the whole of the Americas.
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Caribbean
French Guiana
Cayenne
Maroon communities — Aluku, Saramaka, Ndyuka — along the Maroni river, and Europe's spaceport sitting in the rainforest upstream.
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Caribbean
Guadeloupe
Basse-Terre
Gwoka drumming, now UNESCO-listed, carries the memory of the plantations into every Guadeloupean protest and every Saturday night léwòz.
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Caribbean
Martinique
Fort-de-France
Birthplace of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon — the island that handed the world Négritude and *Black Skin, White Masks*.
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Caribbean
Montserrat
Brades
The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean — Irish-descended surnames, an African-descended people, and a volcano that buried the capital in 1997.
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Caribbean
Puerto Rico
San Juan
Bomba and plena drums out of Loíza, and an Afro-Puerto Rican identity long written out of the island's official story.
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Caribbean
Saba
The Bottom
Five square miles of volcano rising straight from the sea, and one of the smallest populations anywhere in the Caribbean.
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Caribbean
Saint Martin
Marigot
The northern half of an island shared with the Netherlands — one island, two flags, and no border post between them.
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Caribbean
Sint Eustatius
Oranjestad
Once the busiest free port in the Atlantic, and the first foreign power to salute the American flag.
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Caribbean
Sint Maarten
Philipsburg
The Dutch southern half of the island — Carnival through April and May, and a runway famous for landing over the heads of people on the beach.
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Caribbean
Turks & Caicos
Cockburn Town
Salt-raking islands turned resort economy, with a Belonger identity rooted in the Loyalist-era cotton and salt estates.
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Caribbean
US Virgin Islands
Charlotte Amalie
Where the enslaved of St Croix freed themselves in 1848 by marching on Frederiksted and refusing to leave until it was granted.
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Americas
African Americans
United States
The community whose music, language, faith and struggle reshaped the twentieth century — and whose fight for civil rights became the template for movements worldwide.
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Europe
Black British
United Kingdom
Windrush arrivals from the Caribbean, later waves from Nigeria, Ghana and Somalia — and Notting Hill, the largest street carnival in Europe.
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Americas
Afro-Canadians
Canada
From Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia to Haitian Montréal and Somali Toronto — and Caribana, the largest Caribbean festival in North America.
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Americas
Afro-Brazilians
Brazil
Salvador is the most African city in the Americas — Candomblé terreiros, capoeira rodas, samba de roda, and the memory of Palmares.
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Americas
Afro-Colombians
Colombia
San Basilio de Palenque, founded by escaped Africans around 1600, was the first free Black town in the Americas — and its language is still spoken.
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Americas
Afro-Venezuelans
Venezuela
The drums of San Juan roll through Barlovento every June — three days that are older than the republic itself.
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Americas
Afro-Ecuadorians
Ecuador
Esmeraldas began as a maroon republic after a shipwreck in 1553 — and its marimba music is on the UNESCO list.
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Americas
Afro-Peruvians
Peru
Festejo and landó, and the cajón — a drum invented out of a shipping crate when the real ones were banned.
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Americas
Afro-Panamanians
Panama
Two Black Panamas — the colonial-era Congos of the Caribbean coast, and the West Indians who dug the canal and stayed.
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Americas
Afro-Mexicans
Mexico
The Costa Chica communities that Mexico spent two centuries forgetting, and only wrote into its constitution in 2019.
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Americas
Afro-Uruguayans
Uruguay
Candombe drums — chico, repique and piano — roll through Montevideo every Carnival, straight out of Kongo.
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Americas
Afro-Costa Ricans
Costa Rica
Limón's English-speaking Creole community came from Jamaica to build the railway, then stayed to grow bananas.
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Americas
Garifuna
Honduras · Belize · Guatemala · Nicaragua
Descendants of Africans and Kalinago exiled from Saint Vincent in 1797 — their language, dance and music are on the UNESCO list.
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Americas
Afro-Argentines
Argentina
Argentina wrote its Black population out of the national story — but tango's name, its drums and its first dancers were Afro-Porteño.
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Europe
Afro-French
France
Paris was the crucible of Négritude — Césaire, Senghor and Damas met here as students — and it remains a centre of African music, film and publishing.
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Europe
Afro-Dutch
Netherlands
Keti Koti — 'the chain is broken' — is marked every July in Amsterdam's Oosterpark, at the national slavery monument.
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Europe
Afro-Portuguese
Portugal
Lisbon's kizomba, kuduro and batuque scenes come straight from Luanda, Praia and Bissau — and Cova da Moura is their heart.
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Europe
Afro-Germans
Germany
The word *Afrodeutsche* was claimed in the 1980s by May Ayim and Audre Lorde's Berlin circle — a community that named itself.
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Europe
Afro-Belgians
Belgium
Matongé in Brussels, named after a quarter of Kinshasa, is the centre of Congolese life in Europe.
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Europe
Afro-Italians
Italy
A generation born in Italy to Nigerian, Ghanaian, Senegalese and Eritrean parents — still arguing with a citizenship law based on blood rather than birth.
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Europe
Afro-Spanish
Spain
Equatorial Guinea is the only African country whose official language is Spanish — and its diaspora has been in Madrid for generations.
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Europe
Afro-Swedes
Sweden
Rinkeby and Rosengård — Somali and Eritrean communities that reshaped Swedish music, football and slang.
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Europe
Afro-Irish
Ireland
Largely arrived since the 1990s, and now visible across Irish sport, politics, poetry and rap.
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Asia
Siddi
India
African-descended communities in India for more than seven hundred years — traders, sailors and soldiers as often as the enslaved.
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Asia
Sheedi
Pakistan
Sindh and the Makran coast have carried an African-descended community for centuries — and Lyari made Pakistan a football town.
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Asia
Afro-Turks
Türkiye
Descendants of Ottoman-era Africans around İzmir, who revived their Dana Bayramı festival in 2007 after a century of silence.
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Asia
Ethiopian Israelis
Israel
Beta Israel — airlifted from Ethiopia in Operations Moses and Solomon — whose Sigd festival is now a national holiday.
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Asia
Afro-Iraqis
Iraq
The Zanj of Basra, whose ninth-century revolt shook the Abbasid caliphate — their descendants still live along the Shatt al-Arab.
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Where it started
The continent itself
All 54 African nations and 4 territories, each with its own page — capitals, languages, national days, and where its people have settled across Asia.
Every African country →Where we are now
Africans in Asia
The reason this site exists. All 50 Asian countries, a free community in each, and a Hub channel for every one.
Every Asian country →