Afro-Iranians Erotic

Afro-Iranians are not held together by a language, a tribe or a separate faith. What marks them is descent and memory. Their ancestors were carried across the Indian Ocean from East Africa, and the families they founded on Iran's southern coast kept pieces of that crossing alive in drumming, song and healing rites long after the names of the old homelands had faded. Most live in Hormozgan and Bushehr provinces, in towns like Bandar Abbas, Minab and Bushehr and on Qeshm Island. Smaller communities live in Khuzestan and Baluchestan. They generally see themselves first as Iranians and as people of their own coast, not as a separate minority.

The trade that brought them grew in the nineteenth century. Omani and Gulf merchants shipped enslaved people from Zanzibar, the Swahili coast, Ethiopia and Somalia to work as pearl divers, sailors, farmhands and household servants. Some ended up far inland, in the homes of Qajar elites in Shiraz and Tehran. A royal decree banned the seaborne trade in 1848, but smuggling went on, and slavery was not formally abolished until 1929. Freed families largely merged into the Persian, Arab and Baloch communities around them. They married in and spoke the Persian, Arabic or Balochi of their neighbors.

The clearest inheritance lives in ritual. On the southern coast, illness and misfortune can be traced to winds: spirits that settle into a person and must be calmed rather than cast out. People touched by a wind join the ahl-e hava, the people of the wind. Ceremonies such as zar and noban bring them together for long nights of drumming, chanting and trance, led by a baba or mama. The chants mix Persian and Arabic with Swahili. Afro-Iranians are Muslim, mostly Shia, with Sunnis among the Baloch and in parts of the coast. The wind ceremonies run alongside the mosque and Muharram, not against them, and they draw neighbors with no African ancestry at all.

Public recognition is recent. For much of the twentieth century Afro-Iranians barely appeared in national histories. Haji Firuz, the blackface figure who dances through the streets before Nowruz, has only lately drawn open criticism. Since the 2000s, historians, photographers and Afro-Iranians themselves have been recording the community's past on its own terms. The African roots of Bandari music, the drum-heavy sound of southern weddings, are now discussed more openly.