The interchange of ideas and experiences among African-descended people around the world has fostered a “Pan African Diasporic Consciousness” that advances all Black struggles, said Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, a senior research scholar at the Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference (GRID) at Duke University. Historically, “the encounters and exchanges that Africans had in the diaspora facilitated their political activism when they went back home,” said Ifekwunigwe. For example, famed Nigerian musician Fela Kuti’s songs “became politicized” after a Black American girlfriend gave him a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”