Afro-Turks

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Afro-Turks, African Turks, or Turkish Africans are people of African descent in Turkey.

Several centuries ago, a number of sub-Saharan Africans, usually from some places in Kenya, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Somalia [1] were brought by Arab merchants during the Ottoman Empire to plantations around Ayvalık, Manavgat, Dalaman, Menderes and Gediz valleys, and Çukurova."Afro-Turk" is a neologism; they are colloquially named as Arap in Turkish.

Intermarriage of African men with non-African local women has been the principal trend at least in recent times. Some of their descendants can be met, mixed with the rest of the population, in these areas, though many migrated to larger cities. These factors make it difficult to guess the number of Turks of African ancestry. Mustafa Olpak, writer and a prominent Afro-Turk, gives an estimate of 2,000,000 for the people of African ancestry who live on the littoral between Antalya and İstanbul [2].

In 2006, Mustafa Olpak founded the first officially recognised organisation of Afro-Turks, the Africans' Culture and Solidarity Society (Afrikalılar Kültür ve Dayanışma Derneği) in Ayvalık. The opening ceremony was attended by Ali Moussa Iye, the Chief of UNESCO Slave Routes Project [3]. A principal aim of the association is to promote studies of oral history on Afro-Turks, a community history of whom was usually ignored by official historiography in Turkey.