Turkey’s little-known Africans

While Turkey is home to many ethnic minorities, this community often attracts immediate attention, particularly in the wake of the recent refugee crisis.

By Alev Scott

BBC - 8 September 2016

In the sleepy village of Naime, 60km southeast of the Aegean port of Izmir, a woman who claims to be 106 years old was trying to remember the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923.  Dressed in baggy shalvar trousers, Hatice was huddled on a bench under the vine-covered veranda of her tiny house, her movements slow in the intense June heat. She squinted into the middle distance: “Yes, lots of drumming and trumpets.”  Hatice’s 93-year-old memories were understandably vague, but then, something else occurred to her.  “Atatürk freed my father. He was a free man after the Republic.” Hatice is the proud possessor of a Turkish ID card, but her parents were not. She knows very little about her family’s roots, only that her ancestors were among the hundreds of thousands of slaves brought from the East African coast to the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s. Little knowledge of this African heritage remains; Hatice speaks only Turkish, and seemed irritated by my questions about her family history, most of which she could not answer. She could tell me that her parents were only freed in 1924 after the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, established laws of equal citizenship in the new republic’s constitution.

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