BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY Turkish descendants of African slaves begin to discover their identity

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.

Azerturk and Tomris didn't live long enough to see their children grow up, says Muge, the couple's daughter, retelling the story half a century later.

Orphaned, Muge and her brother went to live with Azerturk's white parents in Istanbul. Theirs wasn't an easy childhood. "They wouldn't allow us to play in the street," Muge, now 49, says of her grandparents. "Because we were dark-skinned, they were afraid we'd have problems with the other kids."

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.

•••

According to Hakan Erdem, a Turkish historian, for the better part of the 19th century an average of 10,000 black slaves arrived in the Ottoman Empire every year, including 1,000 in what is now Turkey. Most were used as domestic workers, cooks or nannies, and although some worked on farms very few - if any - were forced into American-style gang labour.

Slavery did not disappear from Ottoman lands overnight. While an 1857 decree, issued by Sultan Abdulmecid I under pressure from the European powers, abolished the slave trade, it did not delegalise slavery as such. As a result some households, particularly in Istanbul and near the Aegean coast, were to retain black slaves until as late as the early 1900s.

The exact number of their descendants - sometimes called Afro-Turks - is anyone's guess. Erdem floats a figure of 10,000-20,000 but admits that the real number might be much higher. While emancipated slaves in villages near the Aegean and Mediterranean coast usually married within the community, he explains, their counterparts in cities like Istanbul often did not. Several generations and many mixed marriages down the line, many Turks descended from black slaves may not even realise they have African blood in their veins. This is known to have produced a few surprises. "Sometimes, all of a sudden, you have a black baby born into a Turkish family," says Erdem. "And only after intense questioning of the elders do they remember that a grandmother could have been black."

It goes to show, says Erdem, that dark-skinned Afro-Turks might be just "the tip of the iceberg". A few years ago Erdem made the same point during a conference on the subject - and immediately caught flak from a few Turkish nationalists in the audience. "And then this guy gets up," he recalls, "with curly blond hair and blue eyes and points to a [nearby] photograph of a black man, pitch-black, and says: 'That's my uncle.' I thought: 'Well, I rest my case.'"