My cemetery story is instructive. It demonstrates the active cognitive dislocations of being a member of the African Diaspora: dislodged and misplaced in the new and old home. It is that persistent feeling of being too Black for America and too white for Africa. It is a strange sense of abandonment; one that always runs in the background using precious bandwidth to try and rationalize inconvenient truths in the language of my ancestor’s abductors. Searching for answers to lingering questions of how we came to be is complicated for the Diaspora because the canon is silent on the fundamental questions of who, when, where, why and how. Where the canonical text is silent, there is also a scattering of bits of information that must be pieced together in order to tell a story that is different than what it is we think we know about the history of humanity. It is quite possible that as an astute history student, I missed the lesson on slavery in the Mediterranean perhaps because it has pseudonyms such as the Sub-Saharan Slave Trade, the Afro-Arab Slave Trade, the Arab- Oriental Slave Trade or the East African Slave Trade, but I think I would have remembered that there was more than one epoch in the trafficking of humans prior to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. What I discovered is that not only was the so-called Arab-Oriental Slave Trade an odious fixture in the concept of chattel slavery under the Turkish Ottoman Empire rule, slavery did not end in Southeastern Europe until 1945.

Some view The Armistice of Mudros, signed at the end of World War I, as the source document by which the Ottoman regime was said to have been dismantled; however, an analysis of the document does not read the same way as it has been interpreted as the end of the Ottoman regime. The crux of the agreement was to cease hostilities between the Ottomans and the European Alliance. Exchanges of prisoners and other territorial discussions such as international waters were mentioned but no language either expressed or implied, conveyed the end of the Ottoman Empire because if that were true, then an explanation of why La Traité de Sèvres emerged in 1920 would be necessary. Le Traité de Sèvres had the specific language and intention of abolishing the Ottoman Empire altogether while simultaneously building the foundational argument for a Jewish settlement in Palestine; however, the local sentiment in Turkey rejected the power grab by Europeans and protested the Turkish officials who signed the treaty. The opposition to the concessions agreed to in the treaty was led by Mustafa Kemal Pasa. Pasa persuaded the Grand National Assembly to revoke the Turkish citizenship of the treaties signatories rendering their power to sign on behalf of Turkey, persona non grata, in effect rendering the agreement null and void. The spirit of nationalism that surfaced within the public sphere was nascent to the Turkish War of Independence; a war that saved the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. The ratification of Turkey’s autonomy manifested with a new identity, the Republic of Turkey, through the signing of the Lausanne Treaty in 1923. In all of the conflict and struggles for power, signed and unsigned treaties, I could find no evidence to support the notion that the Ottomans disengaged from its practices of slavery either implicitly or explicitly. There were no demands made by freedom-loving democracies to end the practices. None. Not even a hint of disgust with the monetization of human bondage. Moreover, the idea that such a powerful regime would surrender its control and power from whence it was born in the 600s just because a piece of paper was signed contradicts meaningful analysis of the records.

Slavery did not end in Southeastern Europe until 1945.