With my research questions on the historicity of Ulcinj’s Africans pre- and post-enslavement mostly answered, I wondered if Africans in Ulcinj could be traced back to Africa and if so, where. Why this information is not as readily available as other topics in world history begs the question on Western ways of knowing and whether the epistemology of knowledge has contributed to a lack of scholarship with respect to the history of Africa. The foremost importance of this study was to document the historicity of Ulcinj’s African citizens first as an enslaved community and second, as cultural, political and economic contributors to the region. The next important component of this research was to identify the connection between Ulcinj’s Africans and their ancestral homelands using historical maps as a guide.It is not widely known that there was a system of human bondage that predates the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, thus the methods for uncovering this history was multifaceted and necessitated an interdisciplinary approach. Through an extensive analysis of the subtleties of language and geography that have created imaginary situational and positional boundaries between the powerful and the powerless, there was an evolutionary process of tracing people of African descent into the New Worlds and with it, new truths that enrich the canon in transformative ways to provoke our ways of knowing and our ways of seeing from a subaltern perspective.
Akans are interwoven into this conversation as the staying power to authenticate the accuracy of my findings. From their origins in Africa to Ulcinj and Ghana to Jamaica, the Akan presence of resilience speaks through its endurance of the appropriated and expropriated labels of what Western societies refer to as culture.
Ottoman Empire's Demand
There are many speculative theories on why the Ottoman Empire increased its demand for Africans into its slave system. One theory coincides with the idea that owning more people signified wealth and power (power could also be obtained through militaristic strength or currency). Another theory is that the demand for free labor increased between the 13th-15th centuries because the pool of free white labor dissipated as a result of a series of bubonic plagues that cumulatively killed an estimated 25 million Europeans thus creating a severe labor shortage in Europe. The “conquest of the Genovese colonies in the Crimean peninsula and the submission of the Crimean Khanate in 1475”1 is also a theory, as is the fall of Constantinople which created an opportunity for the Ottomans to absorb Byzantine assets; and finally, Cristoforo Colombo’s launch of the Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade presented a new pool of slave labor from West Africa into the Americas. History, like theories, is a succession of events where no single event accurately tells the whole story. Given the span of two centuries, I believe there is no one single answer for all of the theories are correct—perhaps in incremental stages building upon previous events. However applicable and when, the Ottomans increased their demand for Africans of all ages, sexes, languages, regions and beliefs, and savagely commandeered the rights of home rule away from sovereign African nations to backfill Europe’s need for free labor.
Women and girls were generally prostituted, eroticized in harems; they also served as cooks and wet nurses. Men and boys served as Eunuchs, farmers, or guards of harems, and as pirates. 2 Three primary reasons for castrating young boys included: 1. Male guards were with the wives and concubines of Muslim rulers, constantly. To mitigate the possibility of sexual relationships developing between the two, the guards were castrated; 2. Theoretically, castrated males, unlikely to be distracted by sex, would show loyalty to their masters. This ideology was employed by the Ottoman Empire as it sought to replenish its armies with African soldiers and build military leaders among their captives; and 3. Sodomy. Handsome Eunuchs called “Ghilmans” were used as personal sex slaves of Muslim sultans, generals and nobles. 3
To be clear, young boys were the main targets of castration— young boys who had not reached puberty were preferable candidates for the procedure because once puberty onset, the odds of successful castration decreased. And although it was forbidden for Muslims to be castrated, they were also forbidden from performing the grotesque procedures on their lands. They hired non-Muslims and Jews to perform the procedure that killed an estimated 80 percent of the millions of African boys and men.