I found this video, ‘Iran’s Forgotten People: Afro Iranians’ on Beyond Your Borders’ channel on YouTube. Although short, it provides an informative outline of the history and culture of Iran’s Black minority. Iran is a patchwork of different peoples, and Farsi speakers only make up 60 per cent of the population. Afro-Iranians are one of these minorities. These are mostly concentrated in three of the country’s southern provinces, where they constituted 10-12 per cent of the population. They were mostly slaves taken from the Zanj, the east coast of Africa and shipped across to Iran as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade that went to Arabia, Iran, India and beyond to southeast Asia. The video notes that not all of them were slaves – some immigrated as free people in search of work. They’re mostly employed as fishermen and agricultural workers, which explains why they’re mostly concentrated on the south coast. Many of them were also servants and soldiers. Male slaves were often castrated for use as eunuchs, but many weren’t and had children. The women were often bought as concubines. Today Iran’s historic slaves are referred to as servants as it is felt they were not treated with the harshness accompanying slavery. Many Black Iranians have surnames reflecting their former homelands. Those, who came originally from Zanzibar, for example, have the surname ‘Zanzibari’. Not all Iranians slaves were Black. Some were White, such as the Circassians. However, the supply of Whites slaves dried up following conflict during Iran and Russia, so that country under the Qajar shahs turned to Africa for its slaves. There are three castes, which do not intermarry. The highest are supposed to be the descendants of free Black Africans, while the lowest are supposedly the descendants of slaves. Afro-Iranians vary in their assimilation to mainstream Iranian culture. Some are very acculturated, speaking fluent Farsi and the local language, while others are less. They have also been very influential in popular Zendari music of the Iranian south. Many intermarry with White Iranians and consider themselves Iranians. They would regard calling them ‘Afro-Iranians’ as a challenge to their Iranian identity. The speaker suggests that while it is important than they shouldn’t be forgotten, they shouldn’t be separated either from the rest of Iran.
Posts Tagged ‘Indian Ocean’
Video on Black Iranians, their Origins and Subculture
October 3, 2022History of Global Slavery in Maps
July 10, 2020James Walvin, Atlas of Slavery (Harlow: Pearson Education 2006).
I’ve blogged several times about the importance of putting western, transatlantic slavery in its global context. Slavery was not something that only White Europeans did to Black Africans. It has plagued humanity across history and the globe. It existed in ancient Greece and Rome, in the Arab and Islamic worlds and even in sub-Saharan Africa itself. And it reappeared in the 20th century in the Nazi concentration and death camps, and the gulags of Stalin’s Soviet Union, as well as the Russian dictators deportation of whole ethnic groups and nations to Siberia.
While concentrating very much on European transatlantic slavery, in which Black slaves were transported to the Caribbean and North and South America, Walvin’s book does place it in this global, historical context. James Walvin is a former history lecturer at the University of York, and was the co-editor of the journal Slavery and Abolition. He has also published a series of books on the subject. Walvin’s Atlas of Slavery presents the history of slavery throughout the world in maps. The blurb for it on the book’s back cover runs
The enslavement of Africans and their transportation across the Atlantic has come to occupy a unique place in the public imagination. Despite the wide-ranging atrocities of the twentieth century (including massive slave systems in Nazi Europe and the Russian Gulag), the Atlantic slave system continues to hold a terrible fascination. But slavery in the Atlantic world involved much more than the transportation of human cargo from one country to another, as Professor Walvin clearly explains in the Atlas of Slavery.
In this fascinating new book he looks at slavery in the Americas in the broadest context, taking account of both earlier and later forms of slavery. The relationship between the critical continents, Europe, Africa and the Americas is examined through a collection of maps and related text, which puts the key features of the history of slavery in their defining geographical setting. By foregrounding the historical geography of slavery, Professor Walvin shows how the people of three widely separated continents were brought together into an economic and human system that was characterized both by violence and cruelty to its victims and huge economic advantage to its owners and managers.
Professor Walvin’s synthesis of the complex history of Atlantic slavery provides a fresh perspective from which to view and understand one of the most significant chapters in global history. We may think of slavery as a largely bygone phenomenon, but it is a practice that continues to this day, and the exploitation of vulnerable human beings remains a pressing contemporary issue.
After an introduction, the book has the following chapters:
- Slavery in a global setting.
- The ancient world.
- Overland African slave routes
- 4 European slavery and slave trades
- Exploration and the spread of sugar
- Europeans, slaves and West Africa
- Britain, slavery and the slave trade
- Africa
- The Atlantic
- Crossing the Atlantic
- Destinations
- Arrivals
- Brazil
- The Caribbean
- North America
- Cotton and the USA
- Slave resistance
- Abolition and emancipation
- East Africa and the Indian Ocean
- Slavery after abolition.
The book concludes with a chronology, further reading list and index.
This is slavery minutely described. The maps and accompanying texts not only discuss the history of slavery itself, but also the general trading systems of which it was a part, the goods and agricultural products, like cotton, it served to produce, and the regions, towns and cities that produced and traded in them and the routes across which they were transported. There is even a map of the currents of the Atlantic Ocean as part of the background to the horrendous Middle Passage – the shipping route across the ocean used to transport slaves from Africa to the New World.
The book’s an excellent resource for people studying or simply interested in the history of slavery. The book is almost totally devoted to transatlantic slavery, as you’d expect. But not totally so, and as I said, this global historical context is needed if an equally racist, anti-White view of the history of slavery is to be avoided.
The Flightless Bird So Good It Evolved Twice
May 12, 2019Another fascinating piece of news in yesterday’s, for 11th May 2019, was about the discovery by evolutionary scientists that a type of flightless bird had evolved twice on the same Indian Ocean atoll. It reappeared the second time thousands of years after it had first come extinct, in a process biologists call ‘iterative evolution’. The article, ‘Evolution strikes twice for flightless bird on isolated atoll’, by Ben Mitchell, reads
A flightless bird that became extinct when its home island became flooded by the sea “came back to life” when a similar species evolved in the same location, scientists have discovered.
Researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the Natural History Museum found that a species of rail colonised an isolated atoll called Aldabra in the Indian Ocean on two occasions separated by tens of thousands of years. On both occasions, the white-throated rail evolved independently to become flightless. The last surviving colony of the flightless rails is still found on the island.
A University of Portsmouth spokesman said: “This is the first time that iterative evolution – the repeated evolution of similar or parallel structures from the same ancestor but at different times – has been seen in rails.
The co-author of the study in the Zoological Journal of Lennean Society, Professor David Martill of the University of Portsmouth, said: “We know of no other example that demonstrates this phenomenon so evidently.”
How fascinating! It sounds similar to the phenomenon of parallel evolution, in which unrelatedly creatures develop similar features through occupying similar ecological niches. One example is the way penguins have evolved features similar to other marine creatures like whales and fish, with their wings becoming flippers. Another example is the thylacine, the marsupial wolf, otherwise known as the Tasmanian tiger. This creature is, unfortunately, now extinct, as it was hunted down as a pest by the Australian farmers. Although it was a marsupial, and had evolved independently in Australia over millions of years, it was remarkably like a European wolf. There was speculation at one time that the different human races were also the result of parallel evolution around the world, each evolving separately from common hominid ancestors. This has since been rejected, not least because it’s considered to be more than a little racist, somehow suggesting that the different varieties of modern humanity are biologically different species.
The palaeontologist Simon Conway-Morris has been so impressed by parallel evolution, that he considers that humans would have evolved anyway, even if the dinosaurs had not been wiped out by the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretacious Period 64 million years ago. He also believes that this means that other, extraterrestrial alien races, would also be humanoid. The final chapter of one of his books describes an alien spacecraft landing in southern England. When the aliens leave their ship to make contact with us, they are a humans. So much so that when asked if they want food, not only do they say yes, but they also ask for water for their dog.
Conway-Morris’ views are extreme, and not shared by other biologists. And some researchers into extraterrestrial life, like Seth Shostak, believe that aliens would be radically different from us.
Even so, this piece of science news is fascinating, and makes you wonder about the other possibilities of similar species evolving parallel or iteratively.
Another Fascinating Video from Ha-Joon Chang
August 17, 2016I put up a piece yesterday about an interview Owen Jones made with Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean lecturer in economics at Cambridge. Mr Chang’s the author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. He makes it clear in his book that he is not opposed to capitalism, but is very definitely opposed to neoliberal economics, the free market rubbish that has dominated global economic policies at the expense of the poor since Thatcher and Reagan. The book’s well worth reading, if you can find a copy. It’s written for the general reader, and so is written in clear, simple language to make a devastating critique of current economic dogma. He shows how states can make good economic decisions, constructing and managing efficient industries and planning the general economy. The welfare state does not make people lazy, but actually makes them willing to accept change. And western, developed nations are hypocritical and destructive in demanding that the developing world should open their countries up to free trade. He shows very clearly on this point that both Britain, America and the other industrialised nations actually industrialised under a system of very strict protectionism to keep foreign competition out and protect their nascent industries. He also goes on to disprove some of the twaddle that’s been talked about the difficulties Africa faces in industrialisation, such as tribal conflict and the supposed racial or national character of its peoples. He points out that there were also vast ethnic or regional friction in the developed countries of Britain, France, and even Korea, for example, until very recently. As for the supposed laziness of Africans, this was also said in the 19th century of a people, who now have a colossal reputation for hard work: the Japanese. It was also said of the Germans even further back in the 16th century.
Michelle also commented on the piece, and enclosed a link to another of Mr Chang’s videos. She wrote
Several years back when I used to blog I had links to Ha-Joon Chang’s writings, he’s brill! This recent RSA animate video of his perspective is also very much worth a watch, ‘ ‘Economics is for everyone’ (or thinking outside the matrix part one, to go with Beastie’s post): https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=_a53Qt0ZpsUhttps://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=_a53Qt0ZpsU
When I posted both these links last week, a commentator rightly said “Neoliberalism is not a matrix it’s a crime against humanity.”
I haven’t seen the video, but anything by Chang is bound to be great. And I entirely agree with her last comment. Neoliberal has caused mass suffering across the globe. It is responsible not just for a growing number of impoverished people, both unemployed and in work, in this country, but also for wrecking the economies of whole nations in the Developing World. People are dying of starvation in this country. It’s contributed to mass starvation there. And this has also fuelled political and social unrest, from militant Islamism, to Marxist uprisings and piracy off Somalia and the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. In terms of the magnitude of the suffering it’s caused, it is indeed almost literally a crime against humanity.
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