Mixed Race Studies

The Afro-Turks: Turkey’s Little-known Black Minority Reclaims Its Past

Haaretz
2017-10-26

Davide Lerner and Esra Whitehouse

An Afro-Turk farmer, Gungor Delibas, whose family is originally from Sudan, with a picture of her and her Turkish husband, in Haskoy, Turkey, October 2017. Davide Lerner

IZMIR, Turkey – Dotted along Turkey’s Aegean coastline are a smattering of villages that the country’s Afro-Turks call home.

“The first generation suffers, the second generation denies and the third generation questions,” reads the opening line of Mustafa Olpak’s book, the first and the last autobiographical and introspective study of Turkey’s dwindling black minority. Olpak coined the term Afro-Turk and founded the movement to help resurrect their identity, but the history of the estimated 1.3 million people who were forced into slavery and shipped from Africa to the territories controlled by the Ottoman Empire remains little more than a footnote of Turkish history.

While “the library of the Congress of the United States of America has over 600 personal accounts of African-American slaves, none could be found in Ottoman archives,” notes Turkish historian Hakan Erdem in his commentary to Olpak’s book. Before his death last year, Olpak had dreamed of delivering a copy of his book to former U.S. President Barack Obama, and had even traveled to Istanbul’s airport in a hopeless attempt to meet him as he landed for a state visit.

Today the number of Afro-Turks is estimated at only a few tens of thousands. Many still live in the villages of Haskoy, Yenicifler and Yenikoy, near Izmir, while some reside in rural areas around Ayvalik, Antalya and Adana, as well as in Istanbul. Most were first brought to Turkey to work as domestic servants or in the tobacco and cotton fields along the Aegean Sea; they settled near Izmir once they were freed. Although the slave trade was officially made illegal in 1857 following pressure from Britain and other European powers, it took until the beginning of the 20th century to eliminate the practice altogether and to liberate those who were owned by Ottoman families since before the slave trade was outlawed.

In Izmir, the state provided safe houses for former slaves as well as assistance to integrate them into the labor market; whole villages and neighborhoods inhabited by the Afro-Turks were dubbed “Arap” areas – the Turkish word for Arab, which is still used as slang to refer to black people…

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Turkish descendants of African slaves begin to discover their identity

The National
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
2012-09-01

Piotr Zalewski

No one knows how many Afro-Turks there are but, in a country that’s beginning to acknowledge its great diversity, they’re beginning to unearth their forgotten history.

In 1961, Ertekin Azerturk, a Turkish businessman from Istanbul, placed a long-distance call. The voice of the switchboard operator who answered—a woman’s voice, sweet and crisp, like a singer’s—must have made his head spin. Must have, because from that day on, Azerturk insisted on speaking to the same operator each time he picked up the phone. During one call he found the gumption to ask his mystery girl out on a date. Her reply was as surprising to him as his request was to her. “No way,” Tomris, the operator, told Azerturk. “You won’t like me,” she explained, “because I’m dark.”

But Azerturk didn’t back down and Tomris eventually gave in. When they met, he was dumbstruck. He had understood Tomris was dark, but had never figured she would be black. (He had never previously met or even heard of a Turk who was.) Tomris was, like her voice, striking, and Azerturk was smitten. Over the Azerturk family’s objections, the pair married.

…As a child, Muge could not fully grasp why her skin was the colour it was—or why it should matter. She finally learnt, and understood, the truth in her teens. She and her brother were descendants, three generations removed, of black slaves…

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The Fate of the Afro-Turks: Nothing Left But the Colour

Qantara.de
Bonn, Germany
2012-08-27

Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere (Translated from the German by Michael Lawton)

The Afro-Turks, whose ancestors came to the Ottoman Empire as slaves in the nineteenth century, are still struggling for recognition. Now, though, their desire to assimilate into the wider society has become greater than their desire to maintain their own identity.

A banner with the text “Sixth Spring Festival” hangs across the street near the park in Cirpi, a small village about 20 kilometres away from Bayindir, a regional centre south-east of Izmir. Such festivals have become common in Anatolia, with hundreds of them occurring between March and May every year.

But in Cirpi, it’s something special. The Sixth Spring Festival is really the Sixth Festival of the Calf, the traditional celebration of the Afro-Turks, which they’ve been celebrating since the nineteenth century in and around Izmir, formerly known as Smyrna.
 
In 1924, the Turkish republic banned the celebration, and it was not until 2007 that the event could be re-established by the Association of Afro-Turks. The first five annual festivals were modest affairs, but the sixth turned into a big event with 400 participants. They’ve not yet slaughtered a calf though…

…Alev Karakartal, is an Afro-Turk woman who now lives in Istanbul. Speaking at a conference there in early June 2012, she described the strategy with which many Afro-Turks confront discrimination. “By entering into mixed marriages,” she said, “Afro-Turks try to have lighter-skinned children, so that eventually their colour will disappear altogether.” But Olpak responds, “We have nothing else left aside from the colour. There’s nothing left culturally any more.”
 
When Karakartal, who is herself of mixed descent, asked her parents about her origins, the answer was always, “We are Turks and Muslims,” and that roots weren’t important…

Read the entire article here.