The Cyprus black people and its history

Slavery, Sugar Cane Plantations and Black Africans in Cyprus Greek and Turkish Cypriots who are the largest communities in Cyprus usually get caught up with themselves and forget that there are also other ethnic and religious communities living on the island. 

 

One of these communities which is also the most overlooked is that of the black African ex-slaves. 

 

Τhrough out its history, there have always been black Africans on Cyprus. As early as the Bronze Age, black Africans were being portrayed in Cypriot art as well as during ancient Egyptian times (when Cyprus was ruled by Egypt) and during the Byzantine/Arab Caliph/Crusader times, up to the Venetian and the Ottoman Period when Cyprus received a lot of African slaves, mostly from West/Central Africa /Ethiopia and southern modern day Sudan. 

 

The European Genoese first cultivated sugar cane in Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily using white slave labour during the 12th to 15th Centuries. It was in these colonies that Europeans developed the institutional apparatus they later used in the Caribbean. Complex sugar cultivation began in Cyprus and Sicily long before the Portuguese began exploring the African coast. 

 

Sugar cane cultivation had its origins in Southwest Asia. From there it was carried to Persia and then to the eastern Mediterranean by Arab conquerors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Shortly after the sugar cane introduction to the Mediterranean, it was being grown on estates similar to the later plantations of the Americas. The rise and spread of the plantation complex, began with the discovery of sugar in the Mediterranean during the time of the Crusades. 

 

On the island of Cyprus, Europeans harvested sugar for roughly two hundred years before the arrival of the Muslims. With the reconquest of the Levant by the Muslims, growers and consumers sought out new sources of the product. 

 

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christian estates in Palestine began to produce sugar with a mixed labor force made up of slaves, serfs, and free workers. After the fall of these lands to the Turks at the end of the thirteenth century, the center of sugar production moved to Cyprus. Thus, Cyprus became the main sugar producer in the Mediterranean. Here, Italian merchants and local rulers used slave and free labor to produce sugar. 

 

With ample land and watermills, many slaves were needed to process the cane. By the fourteenth century Cyprus became a major producer of sugar using the labour of Syrian and Arab slaves. The sugar plantations were mostly located in the rural areas of Limassol such as Episkopi, and in Paphos it began from kouklia, Aschelia, and was extended as far as the villages of Emba and Lemba. In the Venetian sugar cane plantations in Cyprus and Crete, a new kind of "plantation slave" grew into existence. Since sugar is a labour intensive industry, this new type of slave was acquired for purely economical reasons: the cheapest labor possible. 

 

These slaves were mostly imported from Africa. When the Turks took Cyprus, the island also became another gateway of importing slaves to the markets of the Levant and the Arabic trade routes to Asia. The Turks alone imported 20,000 Russian and African slaves annually for their army. 

 

Most of the African slaves made their way to Asia Minor through Cyprus. However, many African slaves were also kept on the island and particularly women to be used as harem girls or domestic workers for the rich Turks and Greeks on the island. These slaves were ordered from central Africa through European embassies in Larnaca, and were brought to Cyprus via Alexandria Egypt, by the Austrian-Hungarian steamship ''Lloyed'' which took port on the island every 14 days. 

 

During 1879 Dr. Karl Scheider who was a reporter of a German newspaper visited Cyprus, and in his book ''Cyprus under the British'' on page 43, we find disturbing accounts of the slave market in Nicosia. This slave trade on the island went on with the full knowledge of all the European ambassadors, but they closed their eyes to this human misery in order that they would stay in good terms with with Turkish Pasha of Cyprus. 

 

Afro Cypriots: An İn/Visible Community

When Sir Garnet Wolsley arrived in Cyprus during 1878 as the first British High Commissioner of the island, he pointed out in his Journal that it was ''curious to see so many Negro women in Nicosia.'' Then he found out from an article published in the ''The Times'' by correspondent Mr. Plamer that women slaves were offered for sale in the public market in Nicosia, whom Mr. Plamer saw himself. Sir Wosley send for an inquiring on the matter to the Archbishop of Cyprus. 

 

The Archbishop denied that such an act was taking place and claimed that no slave had been sold openly on the island for many years. However, on a dispatch send from Larnaca by the British ambassador to Constantinople aimed for the Ottoman High Porte dated 6 years (1872) before Sir Wolsley arrived in Cyprus, the ambassador informs the Ottoman Governor that ''For some time past in this island, an increase has been observable in the trafficking in slaves, and quite recently the operations assumed a new phase by the importation of negresses from the coast of Barbary''. 

 

The British ambassador requested that the Ottoman Governor of Cyprus Aziz Pasha, take measures against the trafficking of this inhuman trade. It was not only until 1925 when Britain took full control of the island that slavery in Cyprus was completely wiped out. The story of the slave trades in Cyprus, is a story, with little reference or debate today, buried in archives such as those of the British library. However, these life stories survive as memories of the few families of descendants of African slaves in Cyprus, both now part of the Greek-Cypriot community, but primarily of the Turkish-Cypriot community. 

 

Turkish Cypriots, whose name has the adjective Kara- which means black in Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots, who have the name Mavros (=black), are more likely to be descendants of African slaves, but of course not always. Apparently, slave trading was flourishing in Cyprus during the Frankish era, but this number increased a great deal with the Ottoman rule. 

 

In the 16th and 17th century, at the height of the slave trade from Africa, slaves were used in the lands of the Muslim religious organization of Cyprus (the Ekvav) as documented by historians also various observers passing through Cyprus refer to black villagers. In fact much later a village named Klepini/ Arapköy in the Kyrenia district was inhabited at one point entirely by African populations. It is no coincidence that its Turkish name is Arapköy since it means the "the village of the blacks". 

 

Today descendants of African slaves can still be found concentrated in the village of Fasoula in the district of Limassol, but they are also scattered throughout the island.