There Are BLACK People In Iran — And Nobody Is Talking About Them

A little girl with dark brown skin and coiled hair wakes up to the sound of explosions.

She doesn’t live in Chicago.

She doesn’t live in Lagos or Kingston or Johannesburg.

She lives in a port city on the southern coast of Iran.

And this morning, like every morning since the war started, she has no idea if her school is still standing.

You didn’t know she existed.

Neither did I until I went looking.

Because buried beneath the headlines about missiles and regime change and oil prices, there is an entire population of black people living inside Iran.

They’ve been there for over a thousand years.

They were brought there in chains.

And right now, in the middle of the most violent military conflict this region has seen in a generation.

The world has completely forgotten them.

This is their story.

And after today, you won’t be able to say you didn’t know.

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On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched a massive joint strike on Iran.

Within hours, Iran’s Supreme Leader was dead.

Missiles were flying in both directions.

US bases across the Middle East were hit.

Airports in Dubai were damaged.

The straight of Hormuz where a fifth of the world’s oil moves was threatened.

And then came the report that stopped me cold.

A girl’s elementary school in the city of Manab was struck.

Over 160 people killed, most of them children.

Manab sits in Hormosan province, the southern coastal strip of Iran that runs along the Persian Gulf, one of the poorest, most neglected, most invisible regions in the country.

A region that for decades has received almost nothing from the government in Thrron.

No proper hospitals, crumbling infrastructure, schools that barely function even in peace time.

And it is one of the places in Iran where black people live.

When that news broke, I started digging.

I wanted to know who lived in these southern provinces.

I wanted to know why they were so poor.

I wanted to know why in a country that has spent billions on nuclear programs and proxy armies, the people in the South were living like the government had forgotten they existed.

What I found was a story that goes back over a thousand years.

And not a single mainstream outlet covering this war has mentioned it.

On the eastern coast of Africa in what is now Kenya, Tanzania, Mosambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan, there were communities that lived along the shoreline for generations.

Fishermen, traders, farmers, families.

Starting as early as the 7th century, those communities became targets.

The Persian slave trade running alongside the broader Arab and Indian Ocean slave trades began pulling East African people across the AI water and into the Gulf region.

They were loaded onto Dows, wooden sailing vessels and transported across the Indian Ocean to the ports of what is now Iran, Oman, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula.

This was not a short chapter of history.

This went on for over a thousand years.

The enslaved Africans brought to Persia were forced into the most punishing labor imaginable.

Many became pearl divers in the Persian Gulf, submerging their bodies dozens of times a day into deep water, tearing oysters from the seabed with their bare hands, surfacing with bleeding fingers and burning lungs.

Others were put to work on date palm plantations in extreme heat.

Others served in households.

Others were made soldiers forced to fight in wars that had nothing to do with them.

A pattern that should sound painfully familiar.

The numbers are difficult to pin down because the Persian Empire did not keep the kind of detailed slave records that we find in the transatlantic trade.

But historians who study this period estimate that millions of East Africans were trafficked into the Gulf region over the course of the trade.

And unlike the transatlantic trade, which has been documented, debated, and at least partially memorialized, the Persian slave trade has been almost completely erased from public memory.

Iran did not formally abolish slavery until 1929.

Let that number land.

1929.

There are people alive today whose grandparents were born into bondage in Iran.

This is not ancient history.

This is living memory.

And when abolition came, there was no plan for what came next.

No land, no education programs, no reparations, no integration.

The formerly enslaved were simply released into the poorest corners of the country and left to survive, which against every odd stacked against them, they did.

They settled along the southern coast.

They built communities from nothing.

They kept their languages alive alongside Farsy.

They preserve spiritual practices carried across the ocean in the memories of their ancestors, including a healing ceremony called Zar, rooted in East African tradition involving drumming, movement, and trance states used to address grief, trauma, and spiritual suffering.

A ceremony born from the experience of people who had everything taken from them and needed a way to heal what couldn’t be spoken.

They created music, a style called bandari.

Rhythmic, percussive, full of energy that anyone from the east African coast would recognize immediately because that’s where it was born.

In the bodies and hands of people who were stolen from those shores, these are the AfroIranians, and they number anywhere from several hundred thousand to possibly 2 or 3 million people, though no one knows exactly because Iran refuses to count them.

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Here is what daily life looks like for AfroIranians.

Even before the bomb started falling, Hormasan province, where the largest Afro Iranian communities are concentrated, is among the most deprived regions in the entire country.

Healthc care facilities are scarce and underfunded.

Schools lack basic resources.

Roads in some areas are still unpaved.

Clean drinking water is not guaranteed.

Unemployment is staggering.

Economic opportunity is almost non-existent.

And none of this is accidental.

For decades, the Iranian government has poured its resources into two things.

Its military apparatus and the capital city of Tehran.

The southern provinces were treated as an afterthought.

The people living there, disproportionately Afroar Iranian, were never part of the national project.

They were never consulted, never represented, never prioritized.

Afro Iranians hold virtually no positions of political power.

They are not represented in parliament in any meaningful way.

Their issues do not appear on any political platform.

No Iranian president under the Sha’s regime or the Islamic Republic has ever visited these communities and addressed the conditions they live in.

They are governed by a system that pretends they do not exist.

And the racism they face daily reinforces that erasure.

The Farsy language contains slurs for black people that are still in casual everyday use.

Colorism in Iranian society is severe.

Lighter skin is equated with beauty, intelligence, and social worth.

Darker skin is equated with poverty and inferiority.

Afroar Iranian children grow up absorbing these messages from every direction, from classmates, from television, from advertising, from the complete absence of anyone who looks like them in any position of authority or visibility.

Perhaps the crulest form of this erasure is statistical.

Iran does not include Afro Iranians as a category in its census.

There is no official count of their population, no tracking of their poverty rates, no measurement of their educational outcomes or health indicators.

When you are not counted by your own government, you cannot be advocated for.

You cannot be budgeted for.

You cannot be planned for.

You become a ghost in your own country, present in body, but absent from every system that determines how resources are distributed and how lives are valued.

When AfroIranian activists have tried to change this, organizing cultural festivals, documenting their history, speaking to foreign journalists, the government’s response has ranged from surveillance to direct intimidation.

The Islamic Republic does not welcome discussions about race.

The official position is that Islam erases all racial distinction and therefore racism in Iran is impossible.

This is a convenient lie that every AfroIranian sees through, but few are safe enough to challenge publicly.

Now, drop all of that context into the middle of a war.

American and Israeli strikes are hitting targets across Iran.

Iran is firing back at US bases and Israeli cities.

The southern provinces, already the most neglected, already the most underresourced, sit in one of the most strategically sensitive zones in the entire conflict.

The straight of Hormuz runs right along their coastline.

Military installations dockt the region.

These communities are surrounded by targets.

And when the bombs land near those targets, the collateral damage doesn’t fall on the generals in Tehran.

It falls on the people who were already at the bottom.

The people without shelters.

The people without functioning hospitals to treat the wounded.

The people the government wasn’t protecting before the first missile was ever fired.

Where do they go? The communities further north don’t want them.

The racism that shaped their lives in peace time doesn’t pause for war.

It intensifies.

Displacement exposes every crack that already existed.

The people with wealth flee first.

The people with connections find safety.

The people who were invisible before the war become invisible casualties during it.

And no one is reporting on this.

Not a single international news outlet has filed a story about what is happening to Afroar Iranian communities in the southern provinces during this conflict.

The war coverage is about nuclear programs and regime change and oil prices and geopolitical chess.

The people at the very bottom of Iranian society, the descendants of enslaved Africans who were never given a fair chance even in peace time are not part of the story anyone is telling.

Think about the math of this for a moment.

Black American soldiers and who serve in the US military at disproportionate rates are participating in strikes that may be landing in or near communities where black Iranians live.

Two populations of black people, both descended from slavery, both neglected by their own governments, both carrying the weight of systems that were never built for them, and now positioned on opposite sides of a conflict that neither of them asked for and neither of them will benefit from.

If that doesn’t capture everything wrong with how this world operates, I don’t know what does.

I started making this video because of a number.

160 people killed in a school in Minab, a city most of the world had never heard of.

In a province that Iran itself barely acknowledges, in a community that has been invisible for a thousand years.

I don’t know the names of those children.

I don’t know their faces.

I don’t know if they were AfroIranian or not because Iran won’t release that information because Iran doesn’t collect that information because Iran doesn’t believe those distinctions matter.

But I know this, the poorest communities always absorb the most damage.

The most invisible people always suffer the most in silence.

And the descendants of enslaved people, no matter what country they live in, no matter what ocean their ancestors were forced to cross, are always the last ones anyone thinks to protect.

The Afroar Iranians of Hormuzan and the southern coast didn’t choose this war.

They didn’t choose the thousand years of slavery that brought them there.

They didn’t choose the poverty.

They didn’t choose the invisibility, but they built a culture anyway.

They preserved music and ceremony and language and identity across generations of erasure.

They survived the Persian slave trade.

They survived abolition without reparations.

They survived a government that pretends they don’t exist and now they need to survive a war.

The least we can do from wherever we are in the world is say their name.

Acknowledge that they are there.

Refuse to let them be erased from this story the way they’ve been erased from everything else.

Subscribe to this channel, hit the like button, drop a comment, and tell me, did you know about Afroar Iranians before today? Because I’m willing to bet that for 99% of you, the answer is no.

And that’s exactly the problem.

I’ll see you in the next one.