This chapter intends to complicate the motivations for writing about the African diaspora in order to suggest ways to integrate African and African diasporic histories and communities. Two bodies of knowledge that are treated as distinct and separate will be connected on the basis of themes around the notion of a diaspora connected with Africa. Some scholars regard the study of the African diaspora as a political project, an attempt to use knowledge for the purpose of uniting Africa with the black people scattered in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. From this perspective, the dominant issues relate to the marginalization of black people and the need to overcome it; Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah fall into this category. To these two and others, Africa has a relevance to the African diaspora, and the African diaspora has a relevance to Africa. They are twins, and knowledge about them can be integrated to achieve political purposes such as dismantling the colonial powers in Africa and attaining racial equality in the Americas.

Some intellectuals look at this subject strictly from an academic point of view. To this category of scholars, teaching diaspora history is similar to teaching world history, with the underlying assumption that Western civilization should not be the only or dominant point of interest. Among this second category are those who believe that an insertion of Africa and the slave trade into the long narrative of world history is enough, a sort of intellectual tokenism.