Everyone Found the Afro-Abkhazians First

For a century outsiders arrived in Abkhazia, found Black villagers on the Kodor and announced a discovery. Each generation read them differently. The villagers spoke Abkhaz, farmed, and said their ancestors came from somewhere in Africa they could not name.

A traveller came into Adzyubzha, twenty-two versts from Sukhum on the bank of the Kodor, and stopped to look. Wooden huts roofed with reeds stood against a wall of green forest. Children were playing on the ground. A woman walked past with a load on her head. Everyone in sight was Black and dressed in white against the sun, and he wrote afterwards that the place resembled nothing so much as a picture of an African village.

Villages on the Kodor

The people that photograph belonged to lived in a few villages on the lower Kodor, south of Sukhum. Adzyubzha, Kyndyg and Tamysh are the three usually named. Nobody agreed on how many of them there were. The naturalist Vyacheslav Vradii, who went looking in 1912, counted twenty to thirty households in Batumi province. A rival investigator named Elius put the figure at two hundred. Lily Golden-Hanga wrote in 1966 that several hundred remained in Abkhazia. Published estimates run from a few families to several villages, and they never converged.

What can be stated plainly is what those households were like by the time anyone wrote about them. They spoke Abkhaz and no other language. Most were Muslim, which is to say they held the faith of their neighbours; one Russian traveller who hired a boy as a servant in 1887 discovered afterwards that the boy was Roman Catholic. They farmed. Some had worked the tea and citrus plantations of the princely estates. They carried Abkhazian surnames, Abash and Chamba among them, and married into Abkhazian families.

The names outsiders used for them varied more than anything else about them. Around Batumi, Vradii was told that they were sometimes called Arabs and sometimes Lazs or Adzhars, the latter two being peoples long settled in the district who had intermarried with them. The label 'Arab' seems to have been kept for those whose features looked wholly foreign to the area. Golden-Hanga noted that nineteenth-century Russian statistical returns entered them as Arabs or as Jews. Imperial Russian writers had a small stock of words for them, arapy and negry among others, and every one of those words tied them to somewhere that was not here.

Slava Tynes, reporting for an American readership in 1973, recorded the local usage: the neighbours called them Black Abkhazians. They called themselves Abkhazians. The Abash family, Tynes wrote, spoke and thought in Abkhaz.

 
A Black 'Abkhazian' (Afro-Abkhazian), Abkhazia, 1912

Four answers, none of them closing

Ask where they came from and the sources give four accounts, and none of the four shuts the question.

The first is the Ottoman slave trade. In this version a prince of the Shervashidze, or Chachba, house bought Africans at the Istanbul market and set them to work on the citrus plantations of his estate. The Abash family told a related story about themselves. Their forebears, they said, had been taken from Africa to Turkey and from Turkey to the estate of a Prince Abashidze in Abkhazia, and after emancipation the descendants cut the prince's name down to Abash to be rid of it. Allison Blakely places the traffic broadly, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, in slaves brought for Turkish and Abkhazian rulers. Golden-Hanga narrowed the heaviest flow to the sixteenth through eighteenth. The AbkhazWorld account puts the purchase in the seventeenth century.

The second is an accident. Sergey Arutyunov of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow describes a ship sailing from Turkey, probably towards the Crimea, in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, carrying several dozen enslaved people, probably from Sudan or Somalia. A storm wrecked it off the Abkhazian coast. Russian soldiers from a fort on the shore appear to have taken the survivors off. They were freed, they settled among Abkhazians, they married Abkhazian women, and they took Abkhazian names.

The third is a legend about Peter the Great, who brought Africans to St Petersburg. Those who could not endure the northern climate, the story runs, were passed on to the Abkhazian princes.

The fourth is very old and refuses to die. Herodotus, writing around 450 BC, held that the Colchians of the eastern Black Sea were of Egyptian descent, and rested the claim on their dark skin, their hair and their practice of circumcision. In the fourth century AD Jerome and Sophronius called Colchis a second Ethiopia. Dmitri Gulia, the Abkhazian linguist and ethnographer, set Abkhazian place names and family names beside Abyssinian ones and argued for an ancient African origin, and he found black-skinned hosts in an episode of the Nart epic in which some of the visitors stay behind in the Caucasus. Patrick English gathered the classical and linguistic material into an article in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 1959.

English also made the obvious objection to the slave-import account. This coast exported slaves. It was famous for it. Importing them here makes little commercial sense. Blakely's answer is that both explanations can be true at once, since an ancient presence would not prevent a later importation, and he notes that the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in the fifteenth century disrupted the Black Sea trade and pushed European buyers towards Africa instead.

The villagers themselves were consistent and unhelpful. Vradii's informants near Batumi said only that they had been there since time immemorial. An old man remembered that when the region passed to Russia some households had chosen to move into Turkish territory, which is why there were also African families around Trebizond. The ethnographer Vianor Pachulia visited eleven villages and found the same answer in all of them: their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had come from Africa, and nobody knew from which part. In 1925 the young American communist Otto Hall spent several weeks in a village near Sukhum where the elder told him that they had been Sudanese mercenaries in the Ottoman army in the late nineteenth century, that they had deserted, and that he himself had gone on to serve with the Cossacks in the tsarist cavalry. The oldest man Professor B. Adler met in 1931 said he had been brought from Africa at the age of four, together with about three hundred others.

Each investigator arrived amazed, and most of them had no idea that anyone had arrived before.

Discovered, and discovered again

Vradii published his article in the Tiflis paper Kavkaz in March 1913, after his visit to Batumi the previous year. Elius published his in the magazine Argus. Letters followed, and the letters revealed further settlements around Sukhum. Then the two men fell to arguing about which of them had found the villages first, and about whether there were two dozen of these people or two hundred. Vradii collected the correspondence into a booklet the following year, printed in Batum by Tavartkiladze and running to twenty pages.

One of the letters, signed Markov, contains the passage everyone has quoted since. Riding through Adzyubzha on the bank of the Kodor, twenty-two versts from Sukhum, the writer found a tropical landscape, wooden huts roofed with reeds, and, as he put it, 'curly-headed Negro children played on the ground'. He noted that these people differed in no way from the Abkhazians around them, spoke only Abkhaz and held the same faith. He then explained them as an accident of the Turkish period, since the Turks had always brought African slaves from their colonies. Another correspondent, Lavrov, wrote in to remind readers that this was Colchis, and that Herodotus had described the Colchians as dark-skinned.

The Baltimore Sun. February 10, 1935 - Afro-Abkhazians.

The war put a stop to the argument. In 1923 the journalist Zinaida Richter found a whole village of them near Sukhum and reported it as news in Izvestiia. Albert Parry wrote them up for the American magazine Opportunity in 1925. Abbott's Monthly carried them in 1931, and in the same year the New York Times reported Adler's fieldwork in Abkhazia and his small, isolated colonies. The Baltimore Sun ran a photograph of an Afro-Abkhazian family in February 1935. The Pittsburgh Courier followed in 1937. Golden-Hanga's booklet appeared in 1966. Tynes arrived in 1973 and filed three articles.

Blakely's summary of this pattern is the sharpest thing anyone has written about it. Each investigator arrived amazed, and most of them had no idea that anyone had arrived before. Tynes, for one, ran the 1913 articles and the Markov letter under a subheading promising new data on Africans in Abkhazia.

A case made for foreign readers

The Soviet state never made them a nationality. This was not a small omission. Between 1923 and 1938 the state demarcated autonomous regions and republics, set up quotas, and established presses and schools in nearly two hundred languages, and it extended nationality status to peoples who had no territory of their own, the Roma and the Jews among them, on grounds of linguistic, historical or cultural difference. On those grounds the Abkhazian villagers had no case to make. They spoke Abkhaz. They practised Abkhazian customs. Only colour set them apart, and colour was the one criterion Soviet policy could not use, because in official language the colour bar was a disease of capitalist colonialism and had no application at home. Kesha Fikes and Alaina Lemon draw the consequence in their 2002 review: no category existed under which these villages could constitute themselves as a group, and therefore no route existed by which they could publish anything of their own.

What could be published was individual biography, and the best example ran in wartime. In 1942 the journalist Isidor Schneider profiled Bashir Shambe in Soviet Russia Today, an English-language organ aimed squarely at American readers. Shambe had been born in Teheran to parents bought in a North African slave market by agents of the Persian nobility. A Georgian prince, Kimshiashvili, acquired him during a Russian campaign in Persia and took him to the Caucasus, where he was kept for amusement and mounted on a white donkey to sharpen the joke. After the Civil War he joined the Red Army, then the Tbilisi fire brigade. He entered the Komsomol in 1923, was elected to the Tbilisi Soviet, joined the Party in 1928 and received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. The profile lingers on the respect of his white neighbours and on his son's Young Pioneer tie.

The published material has one further feature worth noticing. Soviet culture was generous with Black individuals. Samuil Marshak's Mister Twister, published in 1933, puts an African guest and an outraged American millionaire in the same Leningrad hotel. In Alexandrov's Circus, released in 1936, an audience of Soviet nationalities passes a Black baby from hand to hand and sings to it in their own languages. Fikes and Lemon point out that stories of this kind always trace the African in Russia back to an origin somewhere else, and never to a settled community with a past on Soviet ground. Yelena Khanga records that African Americans in the USSR who heard about the Abkhazian villages and tried to reach them found that officials made the meetings difficult.

The Abash brothers of Adzyubzha had comparable careers, and theirs were not written for export. Shaaban was conscripted into the tsarist native division during the First World War, met revolutionary politics in the trenches, and fought with the Abkhazian Red Mounted Regiment. His honorary certificate was signed by Sergo Ordzhonikidze. He was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Abkhazian Soviet. His brother Shirin, who had been a shepherd on the Abashidze estate, became the first chairman of the collective farm board in Adzyubzha, was decorated for labour, and died in 1958 at the age of seventy-five.

In 1963 Shirin's daughter Nutsa published a short piece in Pravda headed 'In Defence of My Sisters'. She wrote that reports of racist violence in the United States made her blood boil, that her skin was the same colour as her sisters' in America, that she had been born under Soviet power and had never met so much as a hint of discrimination, that her higher education had cost her nothing, and that she had lately been made head doctor of a district hospital. Ten years later Tynes found her working as a gynaecologist at the maternity hospital in Sukhum. She had entered the Tbilisi Medical Institute in 1949. Komsomolskaya Pravda printed her photograph as a model student, congratulatory letters arrived from across the country, one of them from a Russian technician near Ryazan named Semyon, and after four years of correspondence they married.

These were real careers and real lives. They were also being put to work in an argument aimed abroad, and both things are true on the same page.

Shaaban Abash, member of Abash family from Abkhazia

What Bertha found

Svetlana Allilueva, Stalin's daughter, gave a different account of the same villages in a book published in the West. Her source was a friend she called Bertha, a scholar at the Africa Institute who had visited them while researching a book on Africans in Russia. Blakely identifies the book as Golden-Hanga's.

Bertha found dire poverty and near-total illiteracy. She was told that the other local peoples had refused to mix and had driven the villagers back towards the mountains. She could not speak to them directly, because they had only Abkhaz and she had none, so she worked through official interpreters. Even so, she understood that they believed her arrival meant they were all to be moved somewhere else. Some of the women began to wail. A few young men with some Russian calmed them. They told her they wanted schooling, and that their race was dying out.

The fear had a basis. Within living memory the Chechens, the Ingush and the Balkars had been deported wholesale from the Caucasus, and Blakely reads the villagers' reaction as evidence that they had already seen relocations at close range. None of this appears in Africans in Russia. That book was printed for distribution abroad.

+ Afro-Abkhazians

+ African Presence in Former Soviet Spaces, by Kesha Fikes and Alaina Lemon

+ Scientists explain story of 'Afro-Abkhazian' from 19th century photo

+ When Did Africans Get To Soviet Union? (Part - 1 of 3)

1992

In the war of 1992 and 1993 the Georgian side held the coastal strip and pushed inland to cut off the mining town of Tkuarchal. The Kodor villages lay across the line of that operation.

John Colarusso, writing in Central Asian Survey in 1995, recorded that the three villages of Adziuzhba, Kindigh and Tamsh, which held the only population of African descent in the entire former Soviet Union, were destroyed by Georgian troops as part of the operation to besiege Tquarchal. Their fate, he wrote, 'has yet to be determined, though at least one survivor has been seen'.