As Africa leaders reach out, they are reaching out across years of history and the stories of heroism and hardship, triumph and tragedy, liberation and loss… and the spread of African people and ideas to regions and countries of the world.

From the time in the ancient Mediterranean from 250 BC to 300 AD when peoples of North Africa traveled and traded throughout the ancient Mediterranean, to the time when Ethiopian Christians began regular pilgrimages to Jerusalem from 400 AD to 1300 AD; from the time when, in 1324, the Malian leader Mansa Musa made pilgrimage to Mecca and returned with a Spanish architect who designed the mosque in Timbuctu; from the time when Africans living in the western, central, and southern parts of the continent were enslaved and taken to the Americas from 1500 to the 1800s; from the time of the Atlantic slave trade of the 1800s; and since the early 1960s, when millions of Africans immigrated to the Americas, Asia, and Europe, the African Diaspora has been created. Attempts to repair the broken linkages between Africa and its Diaspora  began in earnest during the Pan Africa movement.