Afro-Turks

A few years ago while teaching in a language school in Istanbul, Turkey I had a student named Omer in my beginners English class. He was tall, lanky, handsome, and dark. He closely resembled Adolfo Quinones (below) who was in the 1980s movie Breakin’ and who was also a regular on Soul Train before then. I asked Omer one day which of his parents were dark, he said, “My mother black. My father yellow.” Ole Omer (he was only 19) was a very good student. One of my colleagues told me that he meant that his mother was black and his father was blonde.

The subject of Afro-Turks or Turks of African ancestry is not an easy topic to get information about in Turkey. There are three apparent reasons for this. Most Turks are fairly colorblind. As a friend once said to me, “There are no black or white Turks here. There are only Turks.” Also in Turkey, every citizen is classified under the appellation of “Turk” whether they are truly that ethnically or not. The final reason is that many Turks have little or no knowledge of Afro-Turks.

The Ottoman Empire which lasted from 1453 to 1923 brought in a lot of slaves. Ottoman slavery also included not only Africans but Europeans and others as well. Slaves could sometimes rise above their station in the Ottoman hierarchy. The Chief Black Eunuch was the third most powerful man in the empire. His position was basically a repeat of the role of a number of eunuchs who held positions of power in the Byzantine imperial government.

Black slaves in Turkey often were domestic servants, though some had trades such as being metal workers or field hands. As a former employer told me, “Many black people lived in the palace (Topkapi Palace), and many were soldiers in the Ottoman army.” Here is a painting by French painter Jean-Leon Gerome of a black bashi-bazouk.

Some wealthy Ottoman Turks even adopted some African children into their families. Ayse Bircan is an Afro-Turk. She is also on my Facebook friends list. Ms. Bircan authored a short autobiographical essay about the history of her family and her life which was included in an international anthology called Daughters of Africa. She told how she never encountered racism while growing up in Istanbul, but how her father educated her and her siblings about the disease by telling them what he had learned about the struggles of blacks in America. Her great grandfather on her father’s side was from some unknown African country. He was adopted as a child by a wealthy Turkish man who spotted him while on the Haj, the pilgrimage to the Arabian city of Mecca which devout Muslims take. The Turk took her great grandfather with him to Turkey and raised him as his son.

A few years ago in Istanbul I met a big, robust woman who was rather tall with a thick mane of dark brown hair and thick Angelina Jolie lips while visiting a neighbor. After telling me that her English was not too good, she told me a little about her background. She was the child of a Turkish father and a Greek mother. I was amazed that such a young person would still exist in Turkey considering that most of what was left of the large and ancient Greek community of Turkey emigrated during the early 60s with only a few old Greeks staying behind. She looked like she might be in her 30s. She told me something else that was interesting. Noticing my short, curly Afro she remarked, “My grandfather had hair just like yours. He came from Crete. Do you know Crete? I think we probably have some African blood.” I have learned that just at the advent of the Turkish republic, blacks came to Turkey from the island of Crete. Some Afro-Turks say that some of their grandparents who came from there spoke Greek.

Blatant and mean spirited racism is rare against Afro-Turks. The closest to out right racism that some of them experience is that some Turks dislike them because they think they are Arabs. Otherwise, Turks who do see Afro-Turks view them with amazement, curiosity, and a drop of superstition with a positive twist including some slight ignorance without mean spiritedness. This is an excerpt from an article published in the Turkish newspaper Zaman, May 11, 2008.

Ayşe Sözer, a young Afro-Turk, says that Turkish society does not have a racist approach, but that sometimes the Afro-Turk community does experience “exaggerated interest” and social discrimination from society.

“I am asked many odd questions; for example, some ask if I get whiter by taking baths. Sometimes people stare at me and end up tripping or bumping into a pole. I have learned to not get angry at people, but when I was at the university, my roommate left our dorm room because she said she was afraid to live with someone that is black,” Sözer says.

Sometimes people have a hard time believing that Afro-Turks are Turks. On one occasion, Sözer was shopping in Denizli and the shopkeeper, mistaking her for a tourist speaking in perfect Turkish, tried to complement her by saying she speaks Turkish better than him, a native Turk.

Locals in the Aegean region also have some superstitious beliefs about “black people.” Some believe that if they see a black person and pinch the person next to them, their wishes will come true. Sözer recalled one case in which two ladies pinched each other upon seeing her. She was understandably upset. “I told the ladies that if they really wanted their wishes to come true, I also had to pinch both of them! They accepted and I pinched them very hard,” she says, laughing.

Another superstition some hold is that the kiss of a black person can bring luck. “When I was small, I was asked to kiss many girls because there was this superstition that if a girl does not get kissed by a small African child, she would not find a husband.”

Afro-Turks were extremely excited about the election of Barack Obama as president. They felt that one of their own had been elected since Obama’s father was an African. Here are some celebrating his inauguration. The banner says that they love the president very much.

It is not known exactly how many Afro-Turks live in Turkey. Some estimates go as high as 3,000,000 to as low as 800,000. Some of them have been absorbed into the population so much by intermarriage that some Turks that do not appear to be of African ancestry are actually part Afro-Turk. The majority of Afro-Turks live in the Aegean provinces of Mugla, Izmir, and Aydin. Some also live in the Mediterranean region of Antalya and east in Adana. One of my former students from the city of Adana told me that he was surprised one day when he saw some black people in his city. He asked about them and were told that they were Turks whose ancestors had been brought there about two centuries before from Ethiopia.

Though Turkey lost a lot of its ethnic vibrancy because of the population exchanges of the early part of the last century, the Turks themselves are a diverse people who are extremely mixed ethnically and racially. I can see this in their diverse appearances. Though many would probably not admit it, some have told me that “We are a mixed race of people. The Turks here now are nothing like the original Turks.” I am happy that people from Africa were added to the mix.

Links:

Afro-Turks Meet to Celebrate Obama Inauguration

Turks With African Ancestors Want Their Existence to be Felt

Afro-Turk Association (in Turkish)

Research Project on Afro-Turks (in Turkish)

Meet the Afro Turks