Every October 29th, İzmir’s Republic Square transforms into a theater of civic faith. Students in red and white uniforms march past the statue of Atatürk, local officials salute his portrait, and the crowd waves miniature flags while chanting in unison, “Ne mutlu Türküm diyene!” (How happy is the one who says I am a Turk!) Among them stand members of the Afro-Turkish community, their jackets adorned with Atatürk portraits and Turkish flags as they sing the national anthem with visible pride.
In a civic ritual that celebrates a nation long imagined as ethnically homogenous, the sight of visibly Black citizens participating with such enthusiasm may unsettle familiar notions of Turkishness. Yet in İzmir, the self-proclaimed bastion of the Republican ideals, their presence rarely draws attention. Afro-Turks are not seen as outsiders, nor do they act as such. Their unambiguous display of loyalty blends seamlessly into the civic performance around them, embodying the very ideal of citizenship defined by the 1924 Constitution: attachment to the homeland rather than by ancestry or creed. Their presence gives tangible form to the “substantive” and “territorial” definition of Turkishness which refers to the entire “ahali Footnote 1 of Türkiye, without distinction of race and religion,” as Turks (Article 88). Indeed, few other minorities have embraced this republican ideal so openly and so eagerly or been so completely folded into its civic mythology. In that very absorption, however, lies an interesting paradox: a minority visibly different yet socially invisible, whose loyalty affirms the civic ideal while also exposing its limits. Their participation thus stands as both proof and critique of Turkish civic nationalism: proof of its integrative power, yet critique of its dependence on banal nationalism (Billig Reference Billig1995) that requires certain everyday acts of conformity, such as linguistic assimilation, emotional attachment to the nation, and deference to the dominant moral order.
This paradox has received little attention in studies of Turkish nationalism. Existing scholarship has largely concentrated on minorities whose identities have been politicized through conflict, securitization, or protracted struggles for recognition, most notably the Kurds, Armenians, Jews, and Greeks. Even in analyses that examine the civic nationalist idea(l) and the formation of a “hegemonic Turkish identity,” significance is often measured through acts of resistance (İçduygu and Kaygusuz Reference İçduygu and Kaygusuz2004). While yielding great insights, this literature produces a selective understanding of minority experience in Türkiye. Groups that do not articulate their difference through overt political claims, such as the Afro-Turks, have remained largely invisible in both state discourse and academic inquiry (Durugönül Reference Durugönül, Dönmez and Enneli2011; Kayagil Reference Kayagil2020).Footnote 2
Despite their relatively small population,Footnote 3 however, the Afro-Turkish community offers a crucial lens for understanding the boundaries and contradictions of Turkish nationalism. Their experience occupies an overlooked space between visibility and invisibility, visible enough for phenotypic difference to be noticed, yet historically unmarked within a national narrative that subsumed most internal diversity under the category of “Turk.” In many ways, their trajectory mirrors the broader story of Turkish nation-building (Cagaptay, Reference Cagaptay2006): countless communities (such as Muslim refugees from the Balkans) were absorbed into Turkishness through similar processes of resettlement, intermarriage, and everyday conformity. But because these groups bore no phenotypic markers that set them apart, their incorporation remained largely invisible. Afro-Turks stand out not because their path deviates from this pattern, but because their phenotype renders newly legible a common Anatolian experience that otherwise disappears into the seamless story of the nation.
Unlike Kurds, Alevis, and non-Muslim minorities, whose identities have been shaped largely in relation to the state’s recognition (or denial) of their difference, Afro-Turks have also enjoyed a rare degree of agency in articulating what being Turkish means to them and negotiating their Turkishness on their own terms, without responding to external labels or state-imposed narratives. Lacking a competing ethnic identity (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2009), kin states in Africa (Waterbury Reference Waterbury2020), or an ancestral homeland that could serve as a site of politicized difference (Kaiser Reference Kaiser and Daniele2003), they have experienced Turkishness not as something to be negotiated but as an ordinary, taken-for-granted fact of life. In contrast to other groups historically caught in what Kadıoğlu and Keyman (Reference Kadıoğlu and Keyman2011) describe as the Republic’s “symbiotic antagonisms,” Afro-Turks have remained outside these polarized struggles. Their marginal position within this ideological field has enabled a quieter mode of belonging, allowing the members of this community to enact Turkishness not as an ideological stance but as a lived and largely unreflective practice. In doing so, they have also exposed the unspoken norms that sustain the civic ideal: that national belonging is accessible to all, as long as it is expressed in familiar cultural terms and remains free of political demands.
In this sense, this seeming effortlessness of Afro-Turks’ inclusion reveals the conditions under which successful integration becomes possible. It demonstrates that Turkishness need not be anchored in ethnicity or religion; instead, it is sustained through banal forms of nationalism, everyday gestures, routine affirmations of belonging, and public observance of dominant civic codes (Billig Reference Billig1995; Fox and Miller-Idriss Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008). Full membership, in this framework, is granted to those who embody these dominant norms without challenging the boundaries of the national community or asserting alternative, politicized affiliations. Afro-Turks’ long-standing incorporation shows that the republican promise of civic equality can indeed be realized, but only under particular demographic and cultural conditions – that is, when difference remains numerically small, socially unobtrusive, and symbolically compatible with the nation’s self-understanding.
Nevertheless, the reconfiguration of Turkishness in the past couple of decades, alongside shifting identity politics and new migration dynamics, has complicated this earlier mode of quiet inclusion. As debates about citizenship, ethnicity, religiosity, and national belonging intensified under the AKP, Black citizens of the Republic found that their once-unquestioned place in the nation no longer mapped neatly onto emerging identity regimes. Many began to identify not only as Turks but as Afro-Turks, to assert their rootedness in the nation while distinguishing themselves from recent arrivals; to claim visibility without relinquishing their long-standing sense of belonging; and to redefine the “Turkishness” in ways that reflected both their heritage and their history as citizens.
Using Harris Mylonas’ theoretical framework that distinguishes the onset, process, and outcome of the nation-building efforts (2021),Footnote 4 this article first situates the Afro-Turkish experience within the broader trajectory of the Turkish Republic’s efforts to construct an imagined community of citizens unified by civic, rather than ethnic, bonds. It then examines the processes through which this identity was reinforced, focusing on the “intentional policies aiming at the national integration of a state along the lines of a specific constitutive story” (Mylonas Reference Mylonas2021, 4). The analysis shows how these policies, when enacted through the ordinary practices of everyday life, produce forms of inclusion that seem effortless yet remain contingent on conformity to unspoken cultural expectations. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in İzmir, Türkiye, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Afro-Turkish community leaders, the outcome section examines how the civic ideal that once enabled Afro-Turks’ seamless inclusion has become increasingly unstable under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, henceforth AKP).
Against this backdrop, this article contributes to the existing literature in three distinct ways. First, it offers an alternative to the predominant view in the literature, which sees Turkish nation-building as nothing but “a cultural collusion and painful process of various peoples with different histories forced to come together” (Proctor Reference Proctor, Edozie, Chambers and Hamilton-Wray2018, 106). Instead, it emphasizes the mechanisms through which Turkish national identity has been constructed (and reconstructed) and draws attention to the role of “everyday nationalism” in sustaining the republic’s civic project. Second, it reframes literature on “race” in Turkish politics, which often collapses racial and ethnocultural categories by interpreting hierarchies among Turks, Kurds, Alevis, Arabs, and non-Muslim citizens through a Black–White template imported from Atlantic contexts (Zeleza Reference Zeleza2005). The Afro-Turkish experience challenges this assumption, as their visible difference coexists with civic inclusion, everyday participation, and upward mobility without a parallel apparatus of racial segregation. The case of Afro-Turks, therefore, demonstrates that belonging in Türkiye can indeed transcend ancestry and creed, yet remains conditioned by moral, cultural, and demographic boundaries that define who can belong without question. Finally, by situating these dynamics within their historical, institutional, and cultural contexts, it argues that national identity in Türkiye, like elsewhere, is never static or monolithic. As the more recent experiences of the Afro-Turkish community illustrate, cultural and political identities are “multiple, shifting, and at times overlapping, but they are also relational” (Willis Reference Willis2016, 47), continually remade through the very practices that claim to define them.
Afro-Turks: The Demographic and Historical Context
Contemporary Afro-Turks trace their ancestry to Black subjects of the Ottoman Empire as well as to enslaved Africans brought to Ottoman territories (Toledano Reference Toledano1993),Footnote 5 the majority of whom served in both elite and non-elite households (Zilfi Reference Zilfi2010; Ferguson Reference Ferguson, Campbell and Stanziani2019, 211). Yet, this historical trajectory did not generate the kind of racialized subject formation associated with slavery/Blackness/emancipation narratives, which shaped the modern nations in the Atlantic world. Slavery in the Islamic world differed from chattel slavery because the path from freedom to slavery and back again “was slippery, uncertain, and even reversible” (Sears Reference Sears2018, 159). Captives and prisoners of war could buy, negotiate, win, or trade their liberty, or be enslaved if nobody paid a ransom to rescue them (Fodor Reference Fodor2007). At the same time, Islamic jurisprudence regulated the institution of slavery and imposed a legal understanding of slave rights across the country. The law urged masters to “treat their slaves kindly” and allowed enslaved people to “change their masters when necessary” (Sears Reference Sears2018, 174). Since the Quran described the freeing of slaves as “an act of piety and atonement” (e.g., Quran 2:177, 90:13, 5:89), most jurists also legally obliged enslavers to end the forced labor after a certain period (usually 7–10 years) and provide opportunities for their upward mobility after manumission (Erdem Reference Erdem1996).Footnote 6
Still, as ideas of security, honor, and human dignity increasingly permeated Ottoman political thought during the Tanzimat (lit. Reformation) period, the recognition of “equality among all subjects, including the non-Muslim ones, and notions of nationalism, liberty, political rights, and constitutionalism” paved the way for the gradual abolition of slavery and the official prohibition of the slave trade in 1857 (Toledano Reference Toledano1993, 478). Ottoman reformers also created policies to support formerly enslaved people during the transition, by establishing guesthouses in İzmir and İstanbul and creating farms for those who wanted to stay in Anatolia and cultivate the land. Emancipated populations were encouraged to intermingle with the locals and become part of their community, primarily through conversion and marriage. Over time, this process resulted in many racially mixed villages in Aydın and İzmirFootnote 7 and allowed the African community to integrate into the local culture while retaining some rituals and traditions of their home culture and identity (Ferguson Reference Ferguson, Walz and Cuno2010).
Because there was no system of racial segregation and because formerly enslaved people often gained familiarity with Ottoman customs and practices throughout their years of servitude, emancipated Africans adapted readily to the new reality and forged relationships with the local communities with relative ease.Footnote 8 However, this easy integration also limited the development of a Black or African consciousness. Even in settings where they lived alongside Black Ottoman families who had arrived as merchants or officials from the empire’s African provinces, the absence of a shared language, historical experience, or collective narrative prevented the emergence of a unified African identity. Instead, through linguistic, cultural, and religious assimilation, they became part of the broader social fabric and oriented their lives around the same moral and communal frameworks as their neighbors. Their quiet incorporation into Ottoman society exemplified a form of belonging that required no ethnic articulation, which stood as an early manifestation of the depoliticized inclusion that would later characterize the idea(l) of Turkishness.
The Onset of Nation-Building: Transformation of Communal Identities
Designed to contain the centrifugal pressures of nationalist movements supported by European powers, Ottomanism represented the empire’s first systematic attempt at civic nation-building. It aimed to unite all citizens, regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliation, through an overarching political identity and allegiance to the Ottoman state (Grigoriadis Reference Grigoriadis2007). The imperial edicts of 1839 (Gülhane Hatt-ı Hümayunu) and 1856 (Islahat Fermanı) formally recognized the equality of all subjects, while the Constitution of 1876 institutionalized this principle by extending citizenship to all residents. However, the Ottomanist project failed to generate the emotional and political attachment its proponents envisioned (Berkes Reference Berkes2013). Non-Muslim minorities, in particular, continued to pursue their own national aspirations, often with external support, and “an overarching identity for all Ottomans” (Al Reference Al2019) as a nation-building project eventually failed.
As secessionist movements succeeded and the empire’s borders contracted, Ottoman elites turned to new nationalist frameworks, motivated in part by the influx of Muslim refugees and exiles from the Balkans, the Caucasus, and North Africa, and by the loss of areas with large non-Muslim populations, both of which transformed the demographic and ideological landscape of the empire in the 19th century. Pan-Islamism briefly offered a unifying framework through the sultan’s claim to the caliphate, but when this project drew the ire of Western powers (Aydin Reference Aydin2017), it gave way to pan-Turkism, especially after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, as a final ideological response to imperial disintegration.
As Grigoriadis (Reference Grigoriadis2007, 423) notes, however, “Turkish nationalism was a latecomer to the Ottoman lands,” and it was mostly “defensive in nature.” Developed as a last-ditch effort to preserve the empire’s remaining territories, it initially functioned as an empty signifier, more of a rhetorical tool than a mobilizing ideology. The idea of nationalism, in general, did not mean much to the rural, impoverished, and war-weary populations of Anatolia (Keyder Reference Keyder, Dragonas and Birtek2004). Even among educated city-dwellers, the Young Turk pashas’ zealous pan-Turkism, especially in the context of Enver Pasha’s irredentist pursuit of a “Great Turan”, ultimately alienated the few supporters this nationalism had initially attracted (Ergil Reference Ergil1975). In the empire’s final years, Sultan Mehmet VI (Vahdettin) attempted to deploy nationalism to unite the population against “common enemies and invaders,” yet the turmoil of World War I made it almost impossible for the fragile Ottoman state to establish or police ethnic boundaries or emphasize “other, non-ethnic forms of belonging” (Wimmer Reference Wimmer2008, 1025) before its demise in 1922.
The Process: Turkish National Identity Formation
While this quick transformation and violent dissolution of the empire forced the Black communities to relinquish and acquire multiple identities and lifestyles in rapid succession (from enslaved people to Ottoman subjects, then citizens, and finally members of a war-torn society), the foundation of the new Republic posed yet another challenge, requiring them to “contend with the added imperative of the modern nation-state” (Zeleza Reference Zeleza2005, 55). In a world reshaped by the principle of self-determination and the postwar ideal of nationally bounded sovereignty, the founders of the Turkish Republic sought to build a modern polity that conferred both rights and duties upon its citizens. Rejecting the imperial and Islamic modes of affiliation (Morin Reference Morin2022) that had structured Ottoman society but inheriting a heterogeneous population and a deeply plural society from the empire,Footnote 9 they turned to the transformative power of the modern nation state, particularly its ability to “imagine communities” (Anderson 1983) through education, law, and invented traditions (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger1983)Footnote 10. In doing so, they replaced primordial affiliations with what Akman (Reference Akman2004, 106) calls “the state elite’s formulation of the cultural model of modern society,” marking the beginning of a new civic order that promised equality in principle but demanded cultural conformity in practice.
This redefinition of belonging was soon codified in the new Republic’s legal framework through the “constitutional citizenship” model (Içduygu, Colak, and Soyarik Reference Içduygu, Colak and Soyarik1999), which intended to promote a communal identity for everyone in the country on the basis of unity in political ideals. Within this framework, both “Turk” and “Turkish” became legal terms assigned to all citizens of Türkiye, who were bound to the nation through territorial and civic, rather than ethnic, ties.Footnote 11 The 1924 Constitution used the word ahali to acknowledge a diverse society united by citizenship ties to the polity. Although this term was later removed, subsequent constitutions retained the principle: the 1961 Constitution defined the Turkish community in contractual terms (Brubaker Reference Brubaker1990), and Article 66 of the 1982 Constitution continued to declare everyone bound “to the Turkish State through citizenship ties is a Turk.”
While these citizenship policies reflected a modernist vision that prioritized political equality and subordinated cultural plurality (Akman Reference Akman2004), the Republican elites also recognized that the mere concept of citizenship could not create a community bound by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, or emotional attachment to the new nation (Yeğen Reference Yeğen2004; Keyman Reference Keyman2012; Berkes Reference Berkes2013). If the constitutional framework articulated an aspirational vision of civic equality, the actual nation-building process demanded intensive symbolic labor: inventing new traditions; institutionalizing shared rituals such as the one described at the opening; and crafting a narrative of Turkishness based on a selective reconstruction of historical events so as to secure the long-term loyalty of diverse cultural groups (Smith Reference Smith and Hall1986; Tilly Reference Tilly1994; Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger1983).Footnote 12
Drawing on Ziya Gökalp’s (Reference Gökalp1959) understanding of cultural nationalism,Footnote 13 which defined “the nation” as “a group composed of men and women who have gone through the same education, who have received the same acquisitions in language, religion, morality, and aesthetics,” state leaders sought to fuse civic ideal with a shared moral and aesthetic order, grounded in the territory of Anatolia. Through the Ministry of Education, they constructed a national curriculum and designed an education system that would forge this new identity and teach it across generations. Through the Ministry of Culture, they set “well-defined modes of behavior that serve to change the citizens’ self-identification and represent the collective personality and loyalty to the state” (Içduygu, Toktaş, and Soner Reference Içduygu, Toktaş and Soner2008), even though this practice often came at the expense of local customs and traditions. Through institutions like the Turkish History Institute (TTK) and Turkish Language Institute (TDK), state-sponsored scholars anchored the new Republic within a mythic civilizational continuum that predated both Islam and the Turkic migrations. Among their most audacious claims was that the ancient Sumerians were proto-Turks:Footnote 14 a narrative designed to endow the Republic with an ancestry older than those in Europe, to legitimize its territorial sovereignty, and to preempt rival or secessionist claims that could undermine national unity. Language, too, became a central instrument of national homogenization in this process. Believing that a common language was necessary to make people think and feel alike, the state launched its controversial “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” campaign (Aslan Reference Aslan2007), which both symbolized and enforced the linguistic boundaries of belonging. Together, all these cultural, educational, and linguistic reforms constituted the backbone of a nation-building project and produced a shared repertoire of symbols, narratives, and everyday practices through which citizens came to experience themselves as “Turks,” regardless of their local identities, ethnic backgrounds, and racial differences.
Ostensibly trans-ethnic, the new Turkish nation did not claim to rely on primordial bonds: its members were only supposed to accept the official state motto, “How happy is the one who says ‘I am a Turk,’” a phrase that epitomized the country’s adoption of “Ernest Renan’s civic view of the nation as a daily plebiscite” (Xypolia Reference Xypolia2016, 113). As Cagaptay (Reference Cagaptay2006) and Duruiz (Reference Duruiz2020) demonstrate in their respective works on state policies and minorities in Türkiye,Footnote 15 however, the early Republic’s civic ideal was never fully disentangled from the ethnocultural assumptions and defensive anxieties that shaped this nation-building process. Behind the formal rhetoric lay an enduring concern with proving the European modernity of the country and securing its integrity, an anxiety rooted in the “self-determination” principle that precipitated the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. This anxiety was not merely cultural, but existential, reflecting what Özkırımlı (Reference Özkırımlı2013) calls the Sèvres syndrome: the persistent fear of national dismemberment by foreign powers and their internal collaborators.
In this environment, civic belonging became both a political ideal and a defensive necessity (Geri Reference Geri2018). In a state preoccupied with survival, difference could be tolerated only when it was depoliticized, culturally neutralized, or rendered invisible. Conversely, each public expression of Turkishness, especially when uttered by those outside the ethnic core, functioned as a symbolic reassurance that the republican project was working. Footnote 16 Far from scrutinizing the authenticity of such claims, state elites and the broader public welcomed them with a mixture of emotional relief and pride, creating a civic compact sustained by reciprocal performance: the state longed to be affirmed as a unified whole, and people learned that professing Turkishness conferred both social acceptance and moral legitimacy. In the end, this dynamic produced not a nation, but a polity so determined to preserve its cohesion that it rarely questioned the sincerity of anyone willing to join its imagined community.
White Turks, Black Turks, and “the Real Negroes of This Country”
Nowhere was this logic more clearly embodied than in the Afro-Turkish community. Since Turkishness was defined legally (“anyone who is bound to the Turkish state by citizenship is a Turk”, the “insidious operation of racial differentiation” lost much of its meaning and specificity in the Turkish political context (Ergin Reference Ergin2008, 828). While the reforms discussed above created hierarchies through their Eurocentric aspirations (Keyder Reference Keyder and Madsen2016), privileged particular performances of “modern” Turkishness, and relied on coercive tools of homogenization (such as language policy, centralized schooling, curricular myth-making), these mechanisms did not constitute institutional racism in the American sense: there was no legal infrastructure segregating citizens by phenotype, nor a bureaucratic apparatus designed to treat Black citizens as a racial caste. The Turkish state did not pursue “an ethnocentric project of authenticity” comparable to European racial nationalisms (Akman Reference Akman2004, 110), and even the most zealous advocates of Turkification did not adopt a “white Turkish man’s burden” (Zeydanlıoğlu Reference Zeydanlıoğlu2008) vis-à-vis the country’s Black citizens, singling them out as the obvious targets of the state’s mission civilisatrice.
In his analysis, Ergin (Reference Ergin2008) poses the provocative question of whether the racial assumptions embedded within Turkish identity may, in some respects, burden Afro-Turks more than the overtly racialized identities of the West burden Black populations, since the former denies the existence of formal or systematic prejudice while the latter at least acknowledges it. Orhan Çetinbilek, author and legal counsel for the Africans’ Culture and Solidarity Association, recognizes this possibility but argues that central political cleavages are not fundamentally race-based in the Turkish context. More than anything else, social class – rather than skin color or cultural qualities – determines Afro-Turks’ place (literally and figuratively) in society. “Because Black citizens gained the same civil, social, and political rights as other subjects of the former empire,” he explains, “institutional racism or blanket discrimination against those of African heritage never materialized at the state level in Türkiye” (personal communication, July 19, 2019). His own family history illustrates this point: his grandfather, who was originally from Sudan, served as a kadı (judge) and relocated to Anatolia through an official Ottoman appointment – an early example of professional trust extended to Afro-descendants within the imperial bureaucracy. Çetinbilek’s own path, from studying biology to publishing poetry to ultimately becoming a lawyer, continued this lineage of institutional inclusion, underscoring that neither the late Ottoman nor early Republican state treated African origin as a barrier to public authority. Nor was this pattern just limited to the legal sphere. Decades before the Tuskegee Airmen took flight in World War II, for instance, Ahmet Ali Çelikten, another Afro-Turk, earned his wings and became one of the first fighter pilots in world aviation history, showing that Black citizens could enter even the most elite and symbolically charged branches of state service.
Seen through this lens, what the contemporary literature labels as whiteness in Türkiye (Zeydanlıoğlu Reference Zeydanlıoğlu2008; Xypolia Reference Xypolia2016; Duruiz Reference Duruiz2020) requires a more context-sensitive reading. These scholars rightly underscore the state’s coercive responses to Kurdish political mobilization and expose the exclusionary policies followed particularly since 1980s (see Tezcür Reference Tezcür2009 for a review), but in framing these dynamics as racial, they conflate ethnicity with race and inadvertently import a conceptual vocabulary rooted in Atlantic histories of racialization. In the Turkish case, “whiteness” functions less as a biological category than as an idiom of civility and Europeanized modernity, as exemplified in President Erdoğan’s provocative observation that, in the eyes of “white Turks,” he and his supporters are “uneducated, ignorant…a group of negroes.”Footnote 17 In this context, zenci (“negro”) do not signal anti-Black racism but point to classed and moralized hierarchies of cultural capital: “white” marking Westernized elites, “black” denoting provincial, religious, or lower-class publics. Afro-Turks, long integrated into the civic fabric of the Republic, read these terms in the same way: not as racial labels applied to themselves (Beyhan Türkkollu, personal communication, May 23, 2023), but as sociopolitical shorthand for Turkey’s internal distinctions of lifestyle, modernity, and respectability.
The Outcome: Africans, Turks, or Something Else?
As discussed above, the newly created Turkish identity “implied not necessarily exclusion or negation of the Afro-descendants’ existence, but rather a complex set of maneuvers” that eventually enabled them to become essential members of the Turkish community (Peñaloza Reference Peñaloza2007, 229). According to Mustafa Olpak, perhaps the most well-known chronicler of Afro-Turkish memory, Anatolia before the Republic was home to many different communities whose origins could often be obscured through language, religion, or assimilation. The only group that could not fully conceal their ancestry, however, were Turks of African descent. In his words, it was only “with the Republic [that] they were recognized as human” (2008), as the new civic rights and liberties extended to everyone, including those whose visible difference had long marked them as outside the social norm. Many members of the community say that this is the real reason why they expressed an unequivocal commitment to Turkishness and the civic ideals of the Republic. Their enthusiastic participation in national rituals, linguistic assimilation, and affective displays of pride positioned them as exemplary citizens in the eyes of both state elites and ordinary Turks. At the same time, their small population, lack of a kin state, and the absence of any separatist demands rendered them politically non-threatening (Mylonas Reference Mylonas2013). Their integration required no institutional accommodation, no renegotiation of borders, and no challenge to the dominant historical narrative. For state elites and ordinary citizens alike, this unambiguous embrace of national identity represented a “quiet” success, which functioned as a symbolic reassurance that the republican project could, in fact, transcend descent and creed.
These dynamics, however, also raise important analytical questions. After all, one could interpret Afro-Turks’ downplaying of a distinct Black identity as a predictable outcome of assimilationist pressures or of the homogenizing logics of secular nationalism. Likewise, one might argue that the community’s small population, rather than its agency, explains the predominance of Turkishness in their self-understanding and sense of belonging. The following sections therefore explore the development of a complex sense of cultural identity among the members of this community. Both field research for this project and the questions for the semi-structured interviews tested this forced assimilation hypothesis and examined (1) to what extent the members of this community felt forced to accept the identity the state dictated for them, and (2) to what extent their liminal status in the country, combined with the material and symbolic promises of the new Turkish citizenship, made this identity genuinely appealing. In-depth conversations with the community elites also investigated whether Afro-Turks used their “majority” identity as “a form of resistance to attempts to relegate them to a position of pure marginality” (Campt Reference Campt1993, 115) or crafted a hybrid repertoire of belonging that transcends conventional minority–majority distinctions.
“The First Generation Suffers, the Second Generation Denies, and the Third Generation Questions”
Although Turks of African descent have been “free citizens” of the Republic since 1923, they have never been offered an official narrative of origins, any formal recognition, or special treatment or compensation for their years of suffering (Dincer Reference Dinçer, Dunin and Foley2014). On the contrary, as Muslim Turkish citizens, they have been a part of the “majority,” rendered invisible in the state’s official demographic records.Footnote 18 Even though their stories are represented in the Turkish literature,Footnote 19 and even though members of the Black community have become famous actors (e.g., Yasemin Esmergül, Dursune Şirin), singers (e.g., Esmeray, Melis Sökmen), and top models (e.g., Tuğçe Güder), Turkish audiences rarely, if ever, discussed the African diaspora in Türkiye, or the African roots of these famous entertainers. Visibility, in that sense, never translated into recognition.
Given their limited visibility in the Republic’s official historiography (Durugönül Reference Durugönül2003), many Turks of African descent know only fragments about the specific places from which their ancestors came. Both the field interviews conducted for this study and Mustafa Olpak’s (Reference Olpak2005) memoir, Kenya–Girit–İstanbul: Köle Kıyısından İnsan Biyografileri (Kenya–Crete–Istanbul: Human Biographies from the Slave Coast), reveal the same pattern: the first generation of Africans in the Ottoman lands and Türkiye deliberately severed their ties to Africa. This was particularly true for those who had been enslaved, and even after emancipation, many refused to discuss their past, leaving their descendants with little more than speculation (e.g., “I am not sure, but I believe my grandfather’s father was from Kenya,” and “I think my ancestors came from Somalia and settled here”). Olpak (Reference Olpak2005, 13–15, author’s translation) wrote about this experience in detail:
Even as a kid, I noticed that my mother was reluctant to talk about her past. I remember her being embarrassed or withdrawn when I asked her questions. That is why, without my mother’s help, my brother Cemil and I asked our grandmother questions about our family’s history. Afraid to cross any boundaries, we decided to ask only five questions at a time. We asked her, “Were your parents in Crete slaves? Are we descendants of slaves?” Over time, our questions became more detailed and covered the entire family history. One day, we placed a map in front of my grandparents and said, “Come on, Grandma, show us where you came from,” and asked, “Where were you born, Grandpa? Where did you come from?” … [Apparently], my grandfather was kidnapped and brought from the Slave Coast to Crete. My grandmother was brought to Istanbul, while my grandfather lived in Crete for a long time and then came to Ayvalık [Türkiye] – according to them, that was all.
This is a common experience across the community; however, some members of the older generation self-identify as zenci, invoking the region of Zanj (lit. the country of the Blacks), which roughly encompasses the Swahili Coast and Bantu-inhabited areas of Southeast Africa (Aksoy Reference Aksoy2019). Others, especially those who are more conscious of their African origins, recall partial family narratives involving stories of rich Ottoman families bringing “servant girls or boys” from their pilgrimage journeys to Mecca.Footnote 20 However, these narratives rarely amount to what Gans calls “a nostalgic allegiance to the culture … of the old country” or “a love for and pride in a tradition that can be felt without having to be incorporated in everyday behavior” (Gans Reference Gans1979, 205). Instead, they reflect an implicit disavowal of slave ancestry and instinctive orientation toward the cultural and religious norms of the host society. Durugönül attributes this denial of African origin to the stigma associated with slavery and partly to the pilgrimage connection: because many enslaved Africans entered Ottoman households through routes associated with Mecca, they became linked with Arabia rather than with specific African homelands.Footnote 21 The association of Arab identity with Islam, along with the respect and reverence Arab culture tended to receive among Turks, likely encouraged many Afro-descendants to emphasize their shared faith and cultural proximity to the local population, even as their skin color visibly marked their difference.
In the absence of family histories, kin states in Africa, or shared communal experiences in Türkiye,Footnote 22 skin color and phenotype became the only identity markers transmitted across generations. This helps explain why the second (“silent”) generation, which came of age during the formative decades of the Republic, enthusiastically embraced the new nation-state and the communal identity it provided. Existing in a liminal space of the new Republic and having no knowledge of, or ties to, their ancestorial homelands, they adopted Turkish symbols, civic rituals, and linguistic norms as the foundations of their new social reality. In Billig’s (Reference Billig1995) terms, the everyday cues of nationhood, such as flags in schools, commemorations, textbooks, and the normalized language of citizenship became the very tools through which this generation internalized Turkishness. These mundane performances of belonging are not incidental; rather, they are structured outcomes of the republic’s broader nation-building project. As mentioned above, such practices reflect the deliberate policies and institutional narratives through which states cultivate national cohesion and reproduce a shared sense of identity. Yet, beyond the official discourse, the ordinary acts of identification, belonging, and boundary-drawing, or their “everyday nationalism” (Fox and Miller-Idriss Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008; Goode and Stroup Reference Goode and Stroup2015), demonstrate the success of such legitimizing efforts, as illustrated by family stories, field interviews, and local press coverage of Afro-Turks. For instance, Scott (Reference Scott2016) reports that a 93-year-old member of the community described her allegiance to the Turkish state by saying, “Atatürk freed my father; he was a free man after the Republic.” For her family, freedom arrived through citizenship in Türkiye, which conferred dignity, rights, and entry into the civic mainstream. This logic extended even to Afro-descendants from Crete who arrived in Türkiye during the 1924 population exchange: although technically part of a forced migration, many regard themselves as not as migrants but as yerli (locals, natives) and talk about their Turkishness as natural, self-evident, and territorially grounded.Footnote 23
These frequent references to Turkishness as a territorially bound identity not only illustrate the enduring appeal of the Republic’s civic narrative but also their psychological attachment to the homeland. This sentiment reflects the affective power of everyday nationalism, evident in repeated assertions that they were “Turks first, and Muslims second” (personal communications, June–July 2019). That these responses come from rural interviewees with no secondary education makes this attachment even more interesting because “living in urban areas, having more education, and being formally employed in the modern sector are all positively correlated with identifying with the nation above one’s ethnic group” (Mylonas Reference Mylonas2021, 11). Members of this subset of interviewees are, in many ways, the least likely to display strong nationalist sentiment. When probed further, however, they consistently emphasize that their African heritage plays little role in their contemporary identities, and that Türkiye, rather than any real or imagined African homeland, was the place that granted their families dignity, security, and social membership. In this regard, tangible benefits of belonging seem to have encouraged many members of the second generation to embrace their “imagined community,” which gives them an opportunity to “turn chance into destiny” (Anderson Reference Anderson2006, 12). The interviews suggest that the absence of state interference in their everyday lives, combined with the broader population’s willingness to accept those who embraced dominant civic (or cultural) norms, help make Turkishness both natural and desirable for a substantial portion of the community.
If the outcome of Turkish nation-building efforts is measured by “citizens’ identification with their nation-state” (Wimmer Reference Wimmer2018, 20), Afro-Turks stand out as a notable case of success. The overwhelming majority describe themselves as belonging to the Turkish nation as fully as any other community in Anatolia. They anchor their aspirations, loyalties, and everyday practices in the civic and cultural repertoire of the Republic, having contributed to the daily construction and re-construction of the nation through ordinary acts of sociability, ritual participation, and local engagement. A more concrete measure of success, based on citizenship acquisition, language skills, and intermarriage leads to the same conclusion. Across generations, Afro-Turks speak Turkish with a local Aegean dialect, give their children characteristically Turkish names, and live side-by-side with other Turks without having their Turkishness questioned (personal communications, June-July, 2019). “We only noticed non-verbal gestures and weird looks when we went to the city,” Mehmet Solmaz said, for instance. “It’s because there wasn’t a big difference [“çok bir farklılık”] in the village; we were all one” (quoted in Aksoy Reference Aksoy2019, 185, emphasis added). The community members interviewed echo this sentiment: their religious practices, culinary habits, family structures, customs, and traditions mirror those of surrounding communities so closely that most interviewees do not see a boundary between their “white” Turkish neighbors and themselves. Intermarriages are so common that a prominent community member, Şakir Doğuluer, whose son is married to an ethnic Turk, laments that even their most distinctive quality, skin color, will also disappear soon.
Taken together, these interviews show that the standard assimilation thesis, which is dominant in analyses of Turkish nation-building (see Cagaptay Reference Cagaptay2004), cannot fully account for the Afro-Turkish case. It does not explain how a visibly distinct minority came to inhabit Turkishness so willingly and comfortably, nor why they were able to integrate so smoothly under a nation-building project whose demands were broad and often fell more heavily on larger or more organized communities. The Afro-Turkish experience instead suggests an incorporation driven not by coercive pressure or the erasure of difference, but by community members’ ready alignment with the everyday norms, moral codes, and civic rituals that structured early Republican life. By speaking Turkish, participating in national ceremonies, and enacting the civic identity prized by the new regime, Afro-Turks rendered their difference legible, familiar, and ultimately unthreatening within a nation preoccupied with cohesion. At the same time, this very success exposes the limits of the assimilation model: it still cannot account for how a community that so seamlessly embodied the dominant civic ideal could later began to articulate a differentiated identity (Afro-Turk instead of simply Turk), nor why such expressions arise even when their material circumstances remain largely unchanged. It is this question – how a once-invisible minority comes to name, narrate, and reclaim its difference – that the next section of the article explores.
The Creation of the Afro-Turkish Identity
Stuart Hall (Reference Hall, Williams and Chrisman1994, 394) reminds us that identity is always “a matter of becoming as well as being,” never fixed, but continually reshaped through historical experience. From this perspective, the emergence of new identity categories may not be so surprising. Yet in the Turkish context, where generations of Black citizens have downplayed their African origins and embraced the civic promise of Turkishness, the construction and widespread use of the term Afro-Turk may present a genuine puzzle.
As the following sections demonstrate, the term “Afro-Turk,” coined by Mustafa Olpak in his 2005 memoir, has emerged as a flexible site of agency in response to shifting conceptions of Turkish nationalism and the broader transformations in the country’s political landscape. Rather than signaling a rejection of Turkishness, the term arose because people who were perfectly comfortable identifying simply as Turk found themselves needing a language that could both reaffirm that identity and acknowledge the differences others ascribed to them. The label gives them a way to underscore their Turkishness while also naming the particular experiences that come with being visibly distinct in a majority society. This dynamic is borne out in both the semi-structured interviews and the broader fieldwork data. For many, Afro-Turk has become a conceptual space through which they can rethink, redefine, and reclaim the intertwined elements of their past, something earlier generations, integrated through the quiet mechanisms of civic nationalism, neither needed nor had the vocabulary to do.
This new vocabulary did not emerge in a vacuum, of course. Beginning in the early 2000s, the dissolution of the hegemonic Turkish identity and the rise of the AKP marked a profound shift in the Turkish national idea (Christofis Reference Christofis2018). Departing from the earlier, territorial model of civic nationalism, the AKP under President Erdoğan articulated a vision of belonging rooted in religious unity (ümmetçilik) and shared morality, which evolved into an “organic” conception of the nation under the guardianship of a strong, paternalistic state. In this reimagined order, civic participation and the older notion of ahali played a smaller role, both of which were eventually replaced by hierarchical forms of communal recognition. At the same time, the debates surrounding Türkiye’s new constitution brought long-suppressed questions about identity to the surface. As pro-Kurdish parties demanded constitutional recognition of ethnic sub-identities and introduced distinctions such as üst kimlik (overarching, state-level identity) and Türkiyelilik (“being from Türkiye”) as alternatives to Türklük (“being a Turk”), conservative actors rejected such hyphenated identities and categories (Al and Karell Reference Al and Karell2016), instead calling for a fusion of ethnic and religious identity and advocating a new “homegrown” (yerli ve milli) definition of the nation.
While none of these competing models have displaced the legal, citizenship-based definition of the Turkish nation yet, they have nonetheless widened the discursive space in which questions of belonging could be openly debated. Communities such as Kurds, Alevis, and Assyrians now had the conceptual vocabulary to ask who counts as a Turk, on what terms, and according to which narratives. It was within this expanding ideological landscape that Afro-Turks, too, began to reassess their place in the nation and articulate a differentiated identity. Yet these discussions and outreach initiatives did not signal a governmental turn toward liberal pluralism or a genuine celebration of difference. Although AKP and its allies criticized the early Republican elite for suppressing diversity, their own project was not oriented toward protecting it; rather, it repurposed difference for new political ends. As Keyman (Reference Keyman2012) argues, they constituted state-mediated forms of recognition that echoed the Ottoman millet system: acknowledgment granted from above, conditioned on political salience, and unevenly distributed across groups. Those with organizational capacity or geopolitical importance gained access, visibility, and material benefits, while communities like Afro-Turks, historically incorporated through republican civic norms rather than communal institutions, found themselves increasingly peripheral to the new identity regime. Since the AKP’s reimagining of the nation hinged less on civic conformity and more on public visibility and communal representation (Tezcür Reference Tezcür2009), the very invisibility once celebrated as evidence of seamless integration now became a liability: Afro-Turks lacked the institutional structure, representational channels, and organized communal presence that the new politics of recognition rewarded.
As these identity debates unfolded, they intersected with another major transformation reshaping the terrain of belonging: Türkiye’s more assertive foreign policy and “axis shift” (eksen kayması), which reoriented the country away from its traditional Western trajectory and toward deeper engagement with the Middle East and Africa. The liberalization of migration and asylum policies in the 2010s and Ankara’s expanding diplomatic footprint on the African continent, consisting of opening new embassies, supporting the African Union’s “Agenda 2063,” strengthening trade partnerships, and launching student exchange programs (Özkan Reference Özkan2021), brought unprecedented numbers of African visitors, residents, and students to Türkiye. İzmir, long home to the Afro-Turkish community, became one of the primary sites of this new visibility.
Under these circumstances, the construction of Afro-Turkish identity was also a reaction to “the responses of others to their color and the meanings they attach to it” (Campt Reference Campt1993, 114). Afro-Turks, long accustomed to the quiet comfort of being an unmarked minority, now found their Turkishness subject to scrutiny. As African migration to Türkiye increased and public anxieties about refugees intensified, encounters that had once affirmed their belonging now required explanation, proof, and self-definition. Many members of the community describe being stopped and asked, “Where are you from?” “When are you going back to your country?” or “How do you speak Turkish so fluently?” – questions that may signal harmless curiosity but also reveal rising xenophobia and broader insecurities about foreigners. Olpak recounted one such incident, which took place when “three buses full of black people” went to Ayvalık to celebrate the very first Calf Festival in 2012. “We were passing a police checkpoint. The first bus passed, and the police did a double-take. The second bus passed, and they did another double-take. When the third started to pass, they stopped all of us. They thought we were refugees! They checked all our IDs, but they couldn’t find even a single foreigner. All of us were Turks, all of us with names like Ayse, Fatma, Abdurrahman [that is, stereotypical Turkish names]” (quoted in Zalewski Reference Zalewski2012). Because their physical appearance “is immediately perceived as ‘blackness,’ which in turn is constructed to mean African (or African-American), as foreign or external” to Turkish culture (Campt Reference Campt1993, 112), such encounters are often experienced as unsettling, generating a sense of having to prove themselves or attest to the authenticity of their identity.Footnote 24
As Afro-Turks confronted new forms of racialization in their daily lives, they increasingly turned inward, seeking language and frameworks to make sense of these experiences. Olpak’s memoir became one such catalyst: it circulated widely within the community and prompted many to revisit questions of ancestry, memory, and belonging that had long remained unspoken. The establishment of the African Solidarity, Culture and Assistance Association (Afrikalılar Dayanışma, Kültür ve Yardımlaşma Derneği) institutionalized this turn and connected Afro-Turks to one another and to broader diasporic networks. Community leaders like Mustafa Olpak, Şakir Doğuluer, Orhan Çetinbilek, and Beyhan Türkkollu helped articulate shared concerns and develop an agenda that balanced acknowledgment of African heritage with continued attachment to Turkish civic identity.Footnote 25
For the Association’s founders, building an organizational platform was only the beginning. Community members sought recognition, but as their stories began circulating in national and international media, they quickly became wary of being misread through Western racial frameworks or reduced to racialized symbols in a context where “race,” in the American or European sense, has never been a primary axis of political life. Afro-Turks did not want to be perceived as foreigners by their fellow citizens, yet they also resisted being cast as representatives of a globalized “Blackness” that had little resemblance to their own historical experience. Moreover, even though some members admitted feeling racially marginalized from time to time, they argued that theirs “has not been the most disadvantaged group in the country” (Şakir Doğuluer, personal communication, January 3, 2023).Footnote 26 Türkkollu, for instance, wanted to distinguish the ignorance and curious remarks the community routinely receives from the discrimination and systematic racism that the African diaspora often endures in the West (personal communication, July 21, 2020). Likewise, Çetinbilek rejected the frameworks offered by Western scholars, conflating “Turkish” with “white” and requiring Black Turks to claim either their racial or national identity, as if to say that the two could not co-exist (personal communication, June 26, 2019). This, in his view, necessitated the reconceptualization of the Turkish identity in the first place. The goal was never to supersede the civic identity with an ethnic or racial one; rather, it was to demonstrate how rich, inclusive, and pluralistic Turkishness had always been.
Yet even as the Association expanded the vocabulary of belonging, internal debates revealed ambivalence common within the community: “I am not sure if highlighting ‘the other’ and exaggerating the differences will help,” one member said. “Why don’t we simply acknowledge and celebrate this community?”Footnote 27 Hearing similar concerns from others, Şakir Doğuluer noted, “for everyone that promoted the celebration of their African heritage, there was someone else that cautioned against the excessive emphasis on the physical and cultural differences” (personal communication, June 19, 2019). This hesitation stems partly from faith in the national ideal and partly from a fear that visibility may actually invite exclusion and produce the sort of “tribalization” that could undermine the very stability their families had long enjoyed.
In this context, Afro-Turks’ emphasis on cultural rather than political recognition reflects not a quiet resignation but a deliberate engagement with the changing terms of belonging. Across interviews, community members draw a clear line between the minor, often curiosity-driven slights they experienced and the forms of anti-Blackness or structural racism familiar in Western contexts. In contrast to media narratives that cast them as a racialized minority systematically oppressed by the Turkish state, the discrimination they describe tends to take the form of exoticization, intrusive curiosity, or being mistaken for foreign migrants, as opposed to systematic exclusion enforced through law, bureaucracy, or formal racial categories. This distinction matters, because it explains why Afro-Turks do not frame their experiences through the language of racial grievance, nor articulate demands for separatism, special rights, or minority status. Their claims remain firmly within the cultural domain: “a desire to be recognized and understood as part of the national story” rather than apart from it (Fatma Gül Kırcı, personal communication, May 25, 2023). Even when recounting uncomfortable encounters, most insist that they seek no special treatment and affirm simply that they are “Turks, and that’s that” (personal communication, June 18, 2020). For many, recognition matters only insofar as it affirms that Afro-Turks are woven into Turkish culture, loyal to the Republic, and attached to the civic ideals that defined earlier generations (personal communication, July 19, 2019). For this reason, even those reclaiming African heritage consistently foreground the “Turk” in “Afro-Turk,” underscoring that ethnic differentiation is not a rejection of civic belonging but a reframing of it.
Conclusion
In an era when nation-states face transnational pressures, demographic change, and renewed debates over identity, Türkiye offers an especially revealing case for understanding the complex, often paradoxical dynamics of nation-building. Officially, the Republic rests on a civic mythology that celebrates an inclusive Turkishness, “a peaceful and inclusive nationalism” that extends belonging to all citizens regardless of race, ethnicity, or creed (Gökay and Aybak Reference Gökay and Aybak2016). Yet the invented traditions that sustain this civic narrative (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger1983) have long privileged ethnic Turks and Sunni norms, creating a tension between the universalist promise of citizenship and the ethnocultural hierarchies embedded within the national idea.
This contentious history of nation-building in Türkiye led many scholars to see the Turkish state as an omnipotent and centralized authority, with significant powers to dictate an “exclusionary nationalism” (Geri Reference Geri2018, 80) and “Turkify” all its population through its citizenship laws, educational system, and cultural resources. However, the Afro-Turkish experience complicates this conventional narrative. As Ergin (Reference Ergin2008) argues, Turkishness historically aspired to symbolic whiteness as a marker of civilization and proximity to Europe, but this whiteness was more cultural rather than biological: individuals who shared the dominant linguistic, religious, and moral codes could be rendered culturally proximate, even when visibly different. Thus, Afro-Turks were incorporated not because race was irrelevant, but because sameness outweighed difference in a system where whiteness operates as a cultural idiom rather than a biological category.
At the same time, Afro-Turks have never been mere subjects of state projects; they had been part of the social fabric for generations, long before anyone spoke of an “Afro-Turkish community.” They have actively fashioned their belonging from below as everyday nationalism, linguistic assimilation, and participation in republican rituals anchored their civic identity. Their recent organization-building and cultural activism illustrate a new form of agency: one that reclaims African heritage without relinquishing Turkishness. Their demands center not on political autonomy or minority rights but on cultural recognition, an insistence that their history, contributions, and presence be acknowledged as part of the national story.
Ultimately, the Afro-Turkish case demonstrates that Turkishness has always been more elastic and more contingent than either its official mythology or its critics allow. It illustrates how the nation is lived and reproduced through everyday practices, how symbolic whiteness shapes the boundaries of belonging, and how communities creatively inhabit national identities even in the absence of formal recognition. Their story stands as a quiet but powerful reminder that behind the “deafening nationalist, fundamentalist, and monocultural noises” are enduring forms of hybridity, complexity, and diversity (Cohen Reference Cohen2007). Whether contemporary political elites will acknowledge these possibilities and integrate them into future narratives of belonging remains an open question. What the Afro-Turkish case makes clear, however, is that the category of “Turk” has always been negotiated in practice, stretched by those who inhabit it as much as by those who seek to define it.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the members of the African Culture and Solidarity Society for their insights and guidance.
Disclosure
None.
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