Slaves who were not eunuchs were sometimes assigned to the armies of the Qajar elites. The 14 pictured here belonged to Qajar prince Zell-e-Soltan, Ghameshlou, Isfahan, 1904. Photograph: Zell-e-Soltan/Modern Conflict Archive, London, UKAlthough Iran receives attention these days for a number of things, including the nuclear deal it reached with the U.S. and other nations, there are other aspects to the nation and its history that have remained elusive. Take, for instance, the history of Africans in Iran. Slavery had existed in the country for hundreds of years, and yet Iranians have not come to terms with their past, if they understand it at all.
One scholar has amassed a collection of photographs and texts that provide a narrative of the story of Black people in Persia, as the Guardian reports. Anthropologist Pedram Khosronejad, who is the Farzaneh Family Scholar for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at Oklahoma State University, has devoted his attention to the issue of slavery in Iran since the late 1990s, after studying the traditional clothing of Afro-Iranians.
In this staged photo taken by Zell-e Soltan at his summer hunting palace near Isfahan, one of his enslaved Africans holds his son. According to the caption, the infant (Iqbal) is the real son of the adult enslaved person, Haji Yaqut Khan, suggesting he wasn’t a eunuch and could father his own children. The caption says that Yaqut Khan is in his ethnic clothes (languteh), which was mainly worn by Africans outside of Iran. Photograph: Zell-e-Soltan/Modern Conflict Archive, London, UK
The history of Black people in Persia reaches back to the ninth century, and the Persian Gulf slave trade has ancient origins. Most Afro-Iranians emerged in Iran through the Indian Ocean slave trade, which included a trade route between East Africa and the Middle East. Enslaved Africans worked as soldiers, bodyguards, eunuchs and servants to households of the wealthy. The enslavement of African people continued until 1928, when Iran abolished the practice. According to the Ajam Media Collective, although Afro-Iranians were scattered throughout the country, many settled in the Southern region bordering the Persian Gulf following emancipation.
Haji Firuz—the Santa Claus-type figure that is an icon of the Persian New Year—is a jovial, red robed, minstrel-type figure who provides people with holiday wishes. And he is depicted in blackface and was intended to be a slave. But the topic of slavery in Iran is an invisible and sensitive one, the Guardian reports, given the lack of research on the subject.
“There are some Qajar families who have issues with the term ‘slave’,” Khosronejad noted, referring to the ruling dynasty in Iran from 1794 until 1925. “They say what their families had were domestic servants and they were not treated as slaves. This might be correct, but slavery is slavery and we should be able to talk about it openly.”
Khosronejad has collected 400 photos depicting Afro-Iranian slaves and servants, which he plans to compile into a book and a series of exhibitions.
From the Afro-Iran series by Mahdi Ehsaei (Copyright: Mahdi Ehsaei)
Meanwhile, Iranian-German photographer Mahdi Ehsaei has chronicled the lives of Afro-Iranians in the present day through beautiful photographs of a community that is little known, as Muftah reports. Ehsaei has published a photo-book called Afro-Iran – a historical and cultural exploration of the African presence in Iran. The photographer reflected on his project:
The Hormozgan province in the Persian Gulf is a traditional and historical region with a diverse and unexplored population. It is framed with unique landscapes and people with profound personalities. Iranians, who still have African blood in them and continue their African heritage with their clothing style, their music, their dance and their oral traditions and rituals.
From the Afro-Iran series by Mahdi Ehsaei (Copyright: Mahdi Ehsael
The resulting portraits reveal new facets and unfamiliar faces, which are not typical for the common picture of Iran. They show details documenting the centuries-long history of this ethnic minority. A confrontation between the Persian culture and the, for Iran unusual, African consciousness.
Efforts to unlock the history and present realities of Black people in Iran will hopefully lead to a greater understanding of this often-neglected and forgotten minority
John Bathan Vashon, hero in the War of 1812, and one of Pittsburgh’s great black leaders
I was only a pre-school Negro boy growing up in Jim Crow-segregated St. Louis, Mo., when my sainted mother, Rosetta, gathered me close and reported, “The best school for Negroes in St. Louis is Vashon High School.” So it didn’t mean much to me.
I would not learn of the greatness of the Vashon name in ensuing decades until nearly 10 years after my arrival in Pittsburgh in 1999 — by way of St. Louis, New York City and Syracuse.
All the same, 2017 marks the 225th anniversary of the 1792 birth of seaman, veteran, war hero, prisoner of war, abolitionist, businessman and, very significantly, Pittsburgher John Bathan Vashon. Active in Pittsburgh from 1829 until the early 1850s, Mr. Vashon was one of the most accomplished Western Pennsylvanians of his day or, for that matter, any day. That he carried the status of African-American renders his achievements all the more astonishing.
Moreover, Mr. Vashon was a hero long before his arrival in Pittsburgh from Carlisle, Pa., and even before his arrival in Carlisle from the War of 1812 and from his native Norfolk, Va.
Experts fear that closures will become a trend nationwide because of the covid-19 virus, devastating an already vulnerable population
Dr. Joi Bradshaw-Terrell provides obstetric care to the majority-black population in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, where three nearby maternity wards have shut down in the past year. Credit…Joshua Lott for The New York Times
By Kelly GlassMay 5, 2020
Shamya Bland had both of her children at St. Bernard Hospital in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. When she found out the hospital would stop delivering babies until further notice “to respond more effectively to the increase in patients who are sick with the Covid-19 coronavirus,” according to an announcement issued on its Facebook page, she was devastated. “It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “It’s in the heart of the hood. Most black people in the neighborhood were going to go there.”
Englewood, which is 95 percent black, is slowly becoming a maternity-care desert, with two other nearby hospitals closing their maternity wards within the past year. St. Bernard Hospital has coordinated transporting women in labor to Mercy Hospital, about six miles north, according to St. Bernard’s media relations representative David Rudd, but transportation is not the main concern for doctors and patients in the neighborhood.
Research has shown that black patients receive better care and communication when they see black doctors. Official statistics weren’t available, but St. Bernard boasts a racially diverse care team, according to staff members like Dr. Joi Bradshaw-Terrell, M.D., an OB-GYN. “There’s a trust factor,” Dr. Bradshaw-Terrell said. “We have black men and women taking care of you. We got you.”
Black women in America are three times more likely to die of pregnancy- and childbirth-related causes than white women are, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Chicago, that tragic disparity doubles, with black women six times more likely than white women to die because of pregnancy and childbirth and even more experiencing injury or trauma.
Bland, 24, came back to Chicago to give birth after moving more than two hours west to a town near the border of Iowa, seeking a doctor she could trust. “I was five months pregnant and having heart palpitations. I knew something wasn’t right, and my doctor kept telling me it was fine,” she said. He told her it was her weight and her heart “pumping for two.”
Bland drove to St. Bernard Hospital to see a black doctor, who quickly ordered EKGs and a CT scan and told her she had a heart condition — the leading cause of maternal death. “I was out there with new doctors and new faces, and I was kind of getting blown off,” she said. “But here I got taken care of and treated as if I actually mattered.”
Her story could have ended differently, and she’s concerned for the fate of the women in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood whose birth stories will soon unfold in a different hospital than they originally planned. Dr. Bradshaw-Terrell shares that concern.
“It’s a big disadvantage to our population in Englewood,” she said. “Black women have more pre-eclampsia, more hypertension, gestational diabetes. People here are high-risk, and to feel like you have abandoned them is a horrible feeling.”
A 2019 study, among others, found that patient outcomes are better when hospitals not only understand but also focus on the experiences of the communities and populations they serve as part of the care they give. Racial bias in health care and consequently black people’s distrust of the health care system are well documented. Hospitals in black communities that employ black doctors and health care workers combat this by reimagining health care to fit the needs of their population, Dr. Bradshaw-Terrell said.
“Half of the time I’m basically a social worker and a psychologist. If you don’t have water at home, I’ll bring you a case of water,” she said. “I don’t have to do that, but these are real-life issues.”
Disregarding the importance of race, poverty, gender and other social factors on health outcomes makes it all too easy for institutions to prioritize the financial bottom line over saving lives, say those who track the connection between race and health outcomes.
Andre Perry, a fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution think tank and author of “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities,”said that as the coronavirus pandemic moves the United States into an economic downturn, cities and states will start looking to cut budgets.
“They’ll create austerity measures,” Perry said. “Oftentimes that means shutting down resources or assets in the black community. Black people and our assets are sort of like sacrificial lambs of this virus.”
Budget-driven closures of both urban and rural hospitals have plagued communities nationwide over the past decade. Since 2010, nearly 130 rural hospitals have closed, leading to an increase in births without proper obstetric care and preterm births in rural areas.
Dr. Laurie Zephyrin, M.D., vice president of delivery system reform at the Commonwealth Fund, an independent health care research foundation, said inner-city hospitals and safety-net hospitals (which see patients regardless of financial or insurance status) tend to run on tight operating margins, putting some of their health care services at risk. “When it becomes about funding and it becomes a budget issue, they forget about the people we’re trying to serve,” Dr. Zephyrin said.
It’s the people — the black women living in neighborhoods marked by poverty, violence and the chronic stress they both cause — that Dr. Bradshaw-Terrell worries about most. “I have a lot of patients say if they wanted to deliver at another hospital, they would have gotten care there. They trust me. They know we’re going to take care of them, and now we can’t,” she said, expressing concern that some patients might skip out on prenatal appointments altogether and show up at an unfamiliar hospital while in labor.
Keep in mind most of these beauty supplies marketed to African Americans are produced and supplied by Asians or Europeans. There are still Black suppliers and producers of beauty products, so before you buy please READ THE LABEL AND BUY BLACK!
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