The five centuries of the Atlantic slave trade in Africans involved millions of people on all seven continents. There is no need for further confirmation of the racial, globalized and sacrificial aspect of this African or Black diaspora. The African slave trade affected all continents and peoples of the Atlantic, so diaspora communities were formed in every port of the triangular trade.

The everyday consumption habits of Europeans changed due to the new foods supplied by plantation communities in the new world. Sugar and coffee, among other commodities, returned to Europe from the globalization system created by the slave trade. The Europeans who participated in the slave trade-as slave traders, insurance investors, plantation owners, or peripheral workers-were marked by their experience in trading human lives. New communities were formed in the places where slaves were dumped. These communities engaged in a continuous process of reconstruction rather than a static transfer of values and behaviors from their point of origin. In Africa, many communities exhibited different behaviors due to the impact of the slave trade. The global spread of slavery affected people at the point of origin and at the point of resettlement.

Colonial regimes participated in this global trade in goods by moving soldiers, traders, and families around the world, as well as redistributing indigenous populations to other locations. This “imperial diaspora” of dispersed Europeans gave rise to new communities in all corners of the world. In the communities created by Europeans, new variants of slavery, treaties, and hierarchy emerged. These Europeans from the imperial diaspora were not “pure”; they created new patterns of behavior and identity while they remained on the islands, creating “creole” communities among the peoples and places they encountered. The process of identity formation generated by slavery is necessarily “creole”.

Creolization is generally understood as a linguistic phenomenon; however, the concept can be used to study identity formation. Creolization is something that emerges as a collision of languages; it is in the middle between two basic structures. For example, in the so-called creole languages of the Caribbean, you will find West African syntax and grammatical structure superimposed on European words. All languages are combinations of languages and can be considered creolized. Creole is the norm for linguistic patterns and can be useful when applied to the process of identity formation. The descendants of diaspora movements that emerged from slavery (both the imperial diaspora and the African diaspora) have developed their own unique cultures that preserve and often develop their original cultures. These new global diaspora communities may be imbued with some of the same cultural practices as the “original community” (rural communities on the African continent or members of European nation-states), but the original culture should not necessarily be seen as “pure”.