by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
‘My father always told me our mother country wasn’t the Genoa of today but the Genoa of all time.’21
This seems to be the inverse of Mr Beard’s attachment to Istanbul as his Levantine home and destiny combined. As a Lebanese native living in Paris, perhaps Maalouf attaches more importance to the self-identified exile than to the native in the split personality of Balthasar, who finally decides to remain in Genoa rather than return to Gibelet on the grounds that ‘Genoa, where I’d never lived before, has recognized me, embraced me, taken me to its bosom like the Prodigal Son. I walk head held high along its narrow streets, say my Italian name aloud, smile at the women and am not afraid of the janissaries. One of the Embriaci’s ancestors may have been accused of drinking too much, but they have a tower named after them too. Every family ought to have a tower named after them somewhere.’
The idea of an everlasting ancestral tower shows the human need for legacy. Oral history and family histories handed down through the generations are important, but deep down, people need something fixed to reassure themselves of their place in the world, their past, the presence of ancestors. Family heirlooms are not just valuable in worldly terms but in what they represent to living members of a past legacy. The irony of the Embriaci is that they were the most comfortably established family in Gibelet, enjoying local respect and wanting for nothing material – Genoa was a mental itch, an artificial longing that, when it materialized, was too powerful to resist.
We are all Levantines now.’ I took Mansel’s words to mean that we are all part of a diaspora in some shape or form in the age of globalization. Yet, to paraphrase George Orwell, some diasporas are more equal than others. Mansel was addressing an audience of relatively wealthy Europeans and ‘White Turks’ – academics, diplomats and historical dilettantes, sure of our place in the world. We could perhaps claim the status of modern Levantines but most minorities in Turkey certainly cannot, not even in the old Levantine hub of Smyrna/Izmir.
In the excruciatingly hot June of 2016, a month before the infamous coup attempt, I flew with my friend, the photographer Bradley Secker, from Istanbul to Izmir, the most secular metropolis in Turkey – far more so than Istanbul, which has a high proportion of conservative rural migrants. Locals still consistently vote for the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the party established by Atatiirk himself on principles of secularism, despite its forty-year losing streak in general elections. During the 2013 anti-government protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul, crowds thronged the streets of Izmir in solidarity, calling for Erdoğan to resign.
Although the city has existed in various guises for 4,000 years, its current aesthetic is very much ‘20th-century sprawl’, because at the end of Turkey’s War of Independence in 1922 the city was burned to the ground – by incoming Turkish troops, according to the Greeks, and by retreating Greek troops, according to the Turks. Yet it retains something of the cosmopolitan vibrancy and fun it was once famous for, its streets full of tables spilling out of restaurants, crowded with people drinking beer and raki (rather than ayran, or watered yoghurt, the recommended national drink of President Erdoğan), and international film and music festivals. Bradley and I arrived just before the Gay Pride march on 4 June 2016, which went ahead despite its cancellation by the governor the day before. A crowd composed mainly of teenagers marched and danced boldly down the corniche, swaddled in rainbow flags and yelling, We are here, darlings!’ Meanwhile, riot police stationed themselves on street corners, as though for a terrorist attack (which was, incidentally, the excuse given for the cancellation of the march). In the same year, Pride was also cancelled in Istanbul, and police made sure no one marched by dispensing tear gas and rubber bullets into the gathering crowds.
But, like many places in Turkey, a relatively liberal attitude and thriving cultural scene does not mean that locals in Izmir are always tolerant, particularly towards people who look different. Bradley and I had come to Izmir to meet the self-described Afro Turks: black Turks who are simultaneously the most noticeably different and the most overlooked of Ottoman minority descendants – in the words of the black Turkish Cypriot artist Serap Kanay, ‘the most visible invisibles’.
The Afro Turks
Like all empires, the Ottoman Empire was built by slaves of varying legality. Many of them were taken as children from their families in Africa, Eastern Europe or the Caucasus, and their descendants grew up with no knowledge of their family’s history bar a vague notion of geography. The huge demand for concubines meant that the Ottoman noblesse continued to buy female slaves long after the sultans of the late 19th century issued firmans (decrees) against the trade, in much the same way that illegal human trafficking is still alive and well in the 21st century. In fact, most of the sultans of the empire were the sons of Christian slave women who ended up in the harem. The most famous of these women was Roxelana (later Sultan Hurrem), an ethnic Ukrainian captured from the Kingdom of Poland at the age of fifteen at some point in the 1520s, and taken to the haremlik of Suleiman the Magnificent, where she became his favourite concubine, converted to Islam and contrived to make herself the first legal queen of the Ottoman Empire, spectacularly breaking the infidel glass ceiling.
Slavery was never banned in the empire, although in 1857 the British government managed to pressure the sultan into stopping the trade. Existing slaves were only freed in 1924 when the Republic’s new constitution granted equal rights to all citizens. For centuries, Christian boys were taken from their families in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in a kind of ‘blood tax’ called the devşirme, converted to Islam and trained up to serve the state. Some of them ended up as köçekler, effeminate belly dancers who performed in social contexts where women were not allowed. Others received sizeable salaries as janissaries (γeniçeri, ‘new troops’, in Turkish), soldiers of the sultan. Since slaves were not technically allowed to serve in the Ottoman armed forces, in 1860 male Circassian slaves from the region just north of Georgia were bought from their owners by the Ottoman government and freed so that they could be recruited, a measure which was also partly designed to stop a nationalist-inspired slave revolt in the turbulent years of the late 19th century when Russia and Turkey were at war.
Until the late 19th century, around 16,000-18,000 African slaves were taken every year by Ottoman traders from Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt. They were put on to boats and often ‘sorted’ in the holding port of Alexandria on Egypt’s northern coast before being shipped to Istanbul, Izmir, the Aegean islands and Cyprus. Black eunuchs wielded great power in the sultan’s haremlik, especially from the 18th century onwards, and black slave children were occasionally presented as imperial gifts. The Russian writer Alexander Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was kidnapped as a child from the shores of Lake Chad and taken to serve in the court of Sultan Ahmet III. In 1704, aged just six, he was sent to St Petersburg as a gift for Peter the Great, who brought him up as his godson and propelled him to great fame as a military engineer. The vast, anonymous majority of African slaves, however, had no such illustrious royal transfer or career. They worked menial tasks and have disappeared almost without trace from the history books.
In the 1880s, the Ottoman government chose the Aegean region near Izmir to relocate African slaves taken off ships in Istanbul in an effort to stop the slave trade; there were already many of them in the area because it was the nexus of multiple trade routes. The present-day Afro Turk community are the descendants of these slaves, and remain relatively unknown outside of the Aegean area. Even here, they are only accepted as part of the community in the villages where they live, but attract immediate attention in big cities, where they are mistaken for Eritrean or Somalian refugees trying to cross to Greece, or street hawkers. Many of them still struggle in the poorest bracket of society, working in tough agricultural jobs and subject to severe discrimination – One of my interviewees told me that in 2006, another young woman from the Afro Turk community in Mugla was refused a kindergarten teaching position because ‘sh
e might scare the children’ (she later went to court, won her case, and qualified as a teacher).
My mother’s great-grandfather was born in Egypt; we know very little about him, except that he was a black doctor brought over to Cyprus in the late 19th century to help with an outbreak of malaria. I have always harboured private doubts about whether it was possible for black men in Egypt to become doctors in the 19th century, although it is certainly the case that they could achieve prominence: for example, the historian Eve Troutt Powell describes the story of a certain Anbar Effendi in 19th-century Egypt, a freed slave who became a high-ranking commissioner. Either way, my mother’s mysterious great-grandfather shaped her life. She was noticeably different from her friends – much darker, with Afro hair and a strikingly Egyptian profile, and she was bullied accordingly. When I met the Aegean Afro Turks and enthused that I, too, was part Afro Turk, they looked understandably sceptical until I showed them photos of my mother on my phone. Suddenly, there was a link, a reason to trust me, improbable though it seemed from my freckly face.
In the sleepy village of Naime, an hour’s drive from Izmir, Bradley and I met an Afro Turk who claimed to be 106 years old. Dressed in baggy shalvar trousers, the ancient 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 as she tried to remember the founding of the Turkish Republic: ‘Yes, lots of drumming and trumpets,’ she creaked, finally. Hatice’s memories were understandably vague, but then something else occurred to her: ‘Yes, Atatürk freed my father. He was a free man after the Republic, and after he was freed, he found himself some cows and a patch of land. Then he was murdered by bandits. We somehow survived.’
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 brought from the East African coast to the Ottoman Empire. 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. In common with many rural women of her generation, Hatice never went to school, married at sixteen and had nine children. Although free, her life has been particularly hard as a black woman in a country defined by fierce nationalism and a racism derived from the long held belief that Turks are genetically superior to Arabs, and, by extension, anyone with dark skin.
Hatice’s son, Esat, very smartly dressed in a slightly oversized but carefully pressed shirt, persuaded his initially reluctant mother to agree to Bradley taking her photograph, and was surprisingly cheerful when it came to the subject of the integration of Afro Turks in Turkish society. Under the shade of the veranda, he spread out a photo album filled with photographs of himself as a young man, carrying out his military service in Northern Cyprus, and working in a hotel on the Mediterranean coast. Esat was the only black man in these photos.
‘I have many friends – yes, some call me “Arab”, they joke about me, but not in a nasty way. Everyone can live in Turkey, variety is beautiful,’ he insisted, perhaps sensing my scepticism. ‘If a garden doesn’t have lots of different flowers and trees, is it still beautiful? No! If people are racist, it just means they are ignorant. I don’t take any notice. I am a Turk, that is all.’
Esat, anxious to belong, downplayed the prejudice I had heard about from other members of the Afro Turk community, including from his own brother, Orhan, who feels his family’s difference keenly.
‘It’s a shame we have lost our African language, the language our great-grandparents spoke,’ he told me, sitting outside the village’s only café. ‘Every minority in Turkey has its language – the Kurds, the Zaza, even the Laz [a Black Sea community]. But we have only Turkish, and we don’t know anything about our ancestors. After years of suffering, you hide what makes you different. That is why our parents’ parents did not teach us their [African] language. They did not want to make us different, they wanted us to be only Turkish.’
As an assimilated ethnic minority without a minority religion to act as a unifying force, the Afro Turks have tried over the generations to integrate as much as possible, and intermarriage has meant that it is impossible to guess at their numbers. Recently, however, the self-identifying community of the Aegean region made an effort to reembrace their past, thanks in large part to the recently deceased Mustafa Olpak, a marble worker who in the late 1990s managed to trace his own heritage back to Kenya, via Ottoman Crete.
Olpak was inspired by his research to establish Izmir’s Afro Turk Foundation in 2006, to connect the disparate community, and in the same year, he also reestablished the Calf Festival (‘Dana Bayrami’), a spring tradition practised publicly in Ottoman times by the African slave community, and then in secret after Atatiirk’s ban on non-state-controlled religious institutions in 1925. The festival originally involved leading an elaborately decorated calf from village to village to collect money before sacrificing it to prevent droughts. In the 1960s the secret practice died out, only to be brought back by Olpak with a papier-mâché calf replacing the original sacrificial victim. Bradley and I met the sixty-one-year-old Olpak outside his shabby office in Izmir a couple of days before the festival – he was preoccupied and smoked incessantly, too busy buying plane tickets for far-flung members of the community to go to his chemotherapy session. Very sadly, he died from prostate cancer four months later, having at least lived to the see the ten-year anniversary of the Calf Festival he reintroduced.
On the morning of the festival, Izmir locals sat listlessly outside restaurants in the heat on the main boulevard. Waiters dozed, and all was quiet. Suddenly, the thump of drums broke the peace, and a troupe of straw-clad figures materialized at the end of the street. Bradly and I, and the astonished café patrons, watched as the troupe expanded into a procession of nearly a hundred people, some wearing elaborate Benin-style masks, others garlands and bright prints, while children formed the legs of the velveteen-covered calf decorated with ribbons and amulets, shuffling slowly along at the center of the action. Locals gaped as the crowd careered down the boulevard.
‘Who are these people?’ I overheard one elderly lady muttering to her neighbour.
‘Africans, obviously,’ the other replied.
‘But I heard some of them speaking Turkish,’ said a young man at the adjoining table.
‘Black Turks? Certainly not.’ The second elderly lady’s tone was firm. ‘These are Africans.’
Overhearing this conversation, my suspicions were confirmed: most locals have no idea of the existence of the community, even though there have been several prominent Afro Turks in the history of the Republic – Esmeray, for example, a singer and actress in 1970s Istanbul (‘Dusky Moon’), the modern sculptor Kuzgan Acar or the pilot Ahmet Ali Çelikten, (‘Arab Ahmet Ali’), who fought for the Ottomans in the First World War as one of the first black fighter pilots in the world. During Turkey’s War of Independence, there were many Afro Turks in the rogue zeybek militias who fought the Greek invading forces in the mountains in the Aegean region before joining Atatürk’s regular army. Yet, as a community, the Afro Turks are largely missing from the pages of Turkey’s history.
Later, I noticed onlookers of the Dana Bayrami trying to speak to the participants in pidgin English; others mimicked the dances, laughing openly Later, Bradley and I met the creator of the Beninstyle masks: a cheerful local woman unconnected to the Afro community, but keen to help out, who told me she had copied the designs from the internet after googling ‘African masks’. Once the parade had finished and costumes were removed, the straw-clad dancers were revealed to be African students at Izmir University, who had been invited to perform dances from their home countries of Burundi and Mali. No one was bothered by the fact that Burundian dances are only tangentially related to Afro Turk culture, which is what the historian Dr Michael Ferguson describes as ‘a hybridized culture based on East and West African cultural practices’ – essentially, a culture
whose geographic roots are lost in the mists of time. This parade was a celebration not of specific roots but of a shared heritage largely lost in a history of oppression. It was a powerful statement of existence.
Ahmet Doğu, a retired worker in the former state-owned tobacco factory in Izmir and an enthusiastic founding member of the Afro Turk Foundation, is a large, straight-backed man. He looked younger than his sixty-five years, sporting a baseball cap and a white polo shirt tucked into chinos, not dissimilar to an American pensioner. Doğu’s parents came to Turkey during the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange, when the two countries swapped their respective Muslim and Christian minorities to create homogenous nation states, taking a boat from Salonika to Samsun. As a child, Doğu remembers his father cursing in Greek when he was angry. Like most Afro Turks, when asked about his heritage he hazards a guess at Sudan, although in reality Sudan in this case was a generic Arabic term for Black Africa. Doğu did his military service in Izmir and stayed on. He was entirely frank about the discrimination he has faced as a black man in Turkey.
‘Whether you like it or not, it does get to you,’ he said soberly, sitting outside the Afro Turk Foundation’s shabby one-roomed office. He told me about mothers on the street who mutter superstitious phrases as they pass him with their children. They pray that their children will not turn out so black,’ he says, grimacing slightly. They touch wood and look away from me. But sometimes, they ask me to kiss their baby on the lips to stop it drooling, that is how the superstition goes.’ More insidious, however, is the way Afro Turks are referred to in friendly social circles as ‘Arab’, a term which has been traditionally used in Turkey for anyone dark enough to be either Arab or African.
‘We call ourselves Arab, too,’ said Ahmet. ‘It is better than “African”, which has such bad connotations – when people think of Africans they think of cannibalism and backwardness. We do not want to be associated with that. These days, we also call ourselves Sudanese or Libyan or whatever, even though we don’t know exactly where our families were from. Luckily, it is better these days. It was worse when people really had no idea about black people – at least now we are more on television, on the internet, because of American culture.’
