Afto-Turks - The Islamic African Slave Trade

African Caucasian photographed in 1870. 
Then ruled by the Muslim Ottoman Empire slaves were bought to work on the citrus plantations. More . . .

Islamic Black Slavery

• The stupid among us (a very large percentage) think slavery was American and we are evil. Other cultures and nations are pure and wonderful with no sin. 
• Don't try and confuse insane Leftists with historical facts. It only makes them angry.

Afro-Turks are people of Zanj (Bantu) descent in Turkey. Like the Afro-Abkhazians, they trace their origin to the Ottoman slave trade.

(Haaretz)  -  Upon arrival, slaves were immediately converted to Islam, their names were changed and they were forced to put all aspects of their free life in Africa behind them. 

With a version of Islamic law ruling over the Ottoman Empire, treatment of slaves was different from America. Children of slaves were born free citizens, intermarriage was legal and after a period of seven to 10 years, Islamic law encouraged owners to release their slaves.

Beyond this, a large number of Afro-Turks were among the half-a-million Muslims from Greece who were forcibly exchanged for a million Christians from Turkey in the population swap that came after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. 

For the Afro-Turks, the transfer represents “a second trauma” and a “second displacement,” explains Lulufer Korukmez, a Turkish academic who studied the group, at Ege University in Izmir. Ironically, one of the main promoters of the plan was League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Fridtjof Nansen, who believed that creating more ethnically homogeneous states would diminish forced displacement and war in the long run.

Members of the Afro-Turk community.

Afro-Turks also went through “a powerful Turkification” with the founding of the Turkish Republic, which set in motion a process of “nation-building that subsumed and suppressed other consciousnesses,” explains Ehud Toledano, an expert on slavery in the Ottoman Empire at Tel Aviv University. “At the end of it all, of their old identity very little is left,” he remarks.

Beyond the hardships of working-class life in rural Turkey, the Afro-Turks have to deal with the second hurdle of racism, according to Korukmez. “Being equal is not enough,” she says, “just because there is no structural racism does not mean that there isn’t in reality.” Back in the village, when Cihan, Deniz’s 11-year-old daughter, tells us she wants to be a doctor, there is a chorus of “inshallah” from her illiterate female cousins.

A few family members recognize that their life has not been easy. In villages, some Turks put their hands over their children’s eyes when Afro-Turks walk by, believing that they are bad luck. 

“The annual Calf Festival [known in Turkish as Dana Bayram] is the only tradition that they managed to resurrect, the rest having been long forgotten,” says Korukmez. The traditional dishes, languages and customs have long since been condemned to history with the passing of generations. “All that is left is the color of our skin,” admits Sakir himself. “I say to my grandchildren: Look at the color of my skin, because soon you won’t see it around here anymore. We risk losing the last visible proof that we are descendants of slaves of the Ottoman Empire.”

At the peak of the slave trade to the Ottoman Empire, as many as 15,000 to 18,000 Africans were brought over every year.

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Afro-Turks . . . .

The East African Slave Trade funneled Blacks into the Muslim Ottoman and Persian Empires.

Black slaves who worked for the
 Ottoman Sultan were castrated.

The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) imported Black slaves into North Africa and the Middle East.