Word.ws English Dictionary

Maafa

Maafa noun: the history of slavery and anti-black racism and discrimination in the United States; the historical enslavement of Africans and associated atrocities, under the interpretation of these as a genocide against them.

Noun

Maafa (uncountable)

  1. The history of slavery and anti-black racism and discrimination in the United States; the historical enslavement of Africans and associated atrocities, under the interpretation of these as a genocide against them.
    • The Maafa concept explains the conditions of disorganization, disunity, self-hatred, and alienation affecting African people to varying degrees.2003, Out of the revolution: the development of Africana studies (edited by Aldridge and Young; published by Lexington Books), page 250

Origin of Maafa

From Swahili maafa (“disaster, catastrophe”). Coined in 1994 by Marimba Ani (in Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora) on the model of the Hebrew-derived designation Shoah of the Jewish Holocaust.

Questions about Maafa

What does Maafa mean?
Maafa means the history of slavery and anti-black racism and discrimination in the United States; the historical enslavement of Africans and associated atrocities, under the interpretation of these as a genocide against them.
What part of speech is Maafa?
Maafa is a noun.

Words near Maafa in the dictionary

  1. Maack
  2. maackiain
  3. Maacks
  4. Maadiah
  5. maaed
  6. Maafa
  7. Maagha
  8. Maahs
  9. Maahses
  10. maaing
  11. Maalaea

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Maafa (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Maafa.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/maafa. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.