Histories of Black communities in Asia

Part III in my series on anti-Blackness in Asia

Another long one for you! Today’s post is not so much a comprehensive history of Black communities in Asia – because that would be an even bigger undertaking – as much as an attempt to name some specific historical patterns and dynamics that have led to how Black communities live and are perceived in Asia today.

From here on out, my posts have probably hundreds of links in them, many of them meant to serve as citations more than reading recommendations. Since I don’t expect anyone to read them all, I’ve also linked to some of the ones I found most insightful or interesting at the end.

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Many of the oldest Indigenous populations of Asia are racialized as Black. As I discussed in part one, there are countless Indigenous communities in Asia who are considered Black, largely because they were misidentified as Afro-descendant by European colonists. Some of these groups were collectively referred to by Spanish colonists by a term used derogatorily that means “little Black people”, even though the communities under this label don’t necessarily have any genetic or cultural links to each other either. Many of these communities are still called derogatory names that they reject. I will try my best to refer to each community’s own name^[1], and when I need to refer to them collectively, I will say “Black Indigenous Asians”.

The Black Indigenous Asian communities that exist in Asia^[2] today include, but are not limited to:

At least 260 separate ethnolinguistic groups of Papuan communities in West Papua, which is colonized by Indonesia
Communities in peninsular Malaysia – including Kensiu, Kintiq, Lanoh, Jahai, Batek, and Mendriq communities – many of whom identify also as orang asli (“original people”), the term for all Indigenous people (including non-Black Indigenous people) in Malaysia
Mani or Maniq people in southern Thailand, including Tonga, Mos, Chong, and Ten’en communities
Dozens of different ethnic groups of Black Indigenous folks in the Philippines, including Aeta, Agta, and Dumagat communities (collectively known as Aeta people), Ati, Tumandok, Mamanwa, and many more communities
Andamanese people in the Andaman islands (which are geographically part of Southeast Asia but are colonized by India as a union territory), including Onge, Jeru, Bo, Sentinelese, and Jarawa communities, who are legally designated as Scheduled Tribes by the Indian government
Potentially other Scheduled Tribes and Adivasi communities in India, such as the Kadar community in Kerala, which some people relate to other Black Indigenous Asian communities

The racialization of these Indigenous communities by European colonists originated from anti-Black stereotypes, but some of these communities have since associated with Blackness themselves, in particular many Papuan communities, who identify with Blackness as a form of political resistance and global solidarity. I’ll describe this in more detail in a future post, with a focus on Papuan liberation and their ties to other Black liberationist struggles.

I do want to be clear, though, that I have not found any accounts written directly by Black Indigenous Asian people in English about their identification with Blackness. The closest I’ve come is reading the words of Papuan scholars translated by non-Papuan scholars into English. For all of the other communities listed above, I’m relying entirely on the work of anthropologists and journalists in describing how they have been racialized, and how almost all of that racialization has been external rather than coming from the Black Indigenous communities themselves. In part one, I noted some of the tensions involved in the identification of Blackness, one of which is that some amount of Blackness is related to being seen as Black by others. I don’t have any good answers for how to resolve this tension when talking about communities that I am not able to listen to in their own voices, so that is an ongoing discomfort and open question that I have to sit with as I write this.

Afro-descendant communities have also lived in Asia for far longer than people think. Southwest Asia, with its proximity to North Africa, has had connections with African countries going back thousands of years, although it’s a little unclear how many Black people moved to and settled in Southwest Asia in ancient times. Most long-running Afro-descendant communities in Asia appear to have developed in the pre-modern era: Ethiopians are recorded to have moved to Sri Lanka in the 5th century, Yemen’s Muhamasheen community may originate from Abyssinian soldiers who settled there in the 6th century, and African pilgrims may have settled in Palestine as early as the 7th century. The 7th century also saw the beginning of traders capturing and selling enslaved Bantu people from East Africa across Asia, including in Southwest Asia, China, and South Asia.

Enslavement in the Indian Ocean region had a huge role to play in the history of Black Asian populations. Firstly, many Black Indigenous Asians have been enslaved by non-Black Asian populations in their areas – Black Indigenous people in Malaysia were enslaved by Malay people as early as 724 CE, with ramp-ups in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then, the Indian Ocean slave trade lasted from the 7th through mid-20th centuries and likely included up to 10 million enslaved Africans sent to Southwest and South Asia. The trade of enslaved African people in Asia accelerated in the 17th century and reached its height with the emergence of the Oman Sultanate in Zanzibar during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Indian Ocean slave trade^[3] was multidirectional and involved both Asian and African people as both enslavers and enslaved people. Europeans also traded and sold enslaved people in the Indian Ocean beginning in the 16th century, largely shifting populations between their various colonies in Africa and Asia, and in many cases taking over and interacting with existing systems of slavery, indenture, and dependency. The Dutch East India company forcibly took enslaved people between South Africa, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, while Portugal shipped enslaved people between Mozambique and its colonies in India.

People were enslaved to do many different types of labor, including for military purposes, pearl diving, sex work, domestic labor, date cultivation, and more. Unlike in the Atlantic slave trade, which focused primarily on chattel slavery, there were numerous forms of slavery in the Indian Ocean region, including concubinage, domestic slavery, and bonded labor that gave enslaved people different relationships to their enslavers and sometimes an amount of upward mobility^[4].

However, chattel slavery – where enslaved people are treated as property who can be bought and sold, and, often, whose children inherit their enslavement – was still a big part of slavery in the Indian Ocean, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Enslaved people were often sold and traded numerous times throughout North Africa and Asia within the course of their lifetimes – see examples from Iran and India as well. Black Indigenous Asian communities were subjected to chattel slavery by both Europeans and other Asians; Black Papuans were part of a slave trade from the 16th century onwards, where they were raided and captured from West Papua, then sold in slave markets as far away as Mauritius and Réunion.

Blackness and anti-Black racism were key parts of the Indian Ocean slave trade. While the long history of the Indian Ocean slave trade included large numbers of enslaved Asian people, in Southwest Asia, with the boom of the pearl and date industries, enslavers shifted in the 19th century to primarily capturing and selling East African people. Up to 800,000 Africans were enslaved in the Arab Gulf in the latter half of the 19th century. 20% of Qatar’s population was African at the time, and the majority of enslaved people in Turkey and Iran were Black as well. In Kuwait, by 1904, about 11% of the population was Afro-descendant, who were primarily enslaved or formerly enslaved people. Even laws about slavery were racialized: in 1924, the enslavement of white girls and women was prohibited in Kuwait, but slavery was not abolished in full there until 1949.

The crucial work of historian and Africana studies scholar Beeta Baghoolizadeh expounds on the increase in the slave trade of African people to Southwest Asia in the 19th century, focusing on Iran. While earlier periods of slavery in Iran included large numbers of enslaved people from the Caucuses and South Asia, the shift towards enslaving primarily East Africans in the 19th century led to equating Blackness with Afro-descendant people (unlike previous eras, when South Asians were included in the idea of Blackness in Iran), and further equated Blackness with slavery, despite the existence of both non-Black enslaved people and free Black people in Iran at the time. Dr. Baghoolizadeh’s extensive research details the enslavement of Black domestic workers and eunuchs, who were enslaved by royalty, nobility, and other elite families in Iran until manumission in 1929. Her analysis of the ways that enslaved Black people were described in contracts (including marriage contracts, where enslaved people were often included in dowries), court records, art, literature, and photographs demonstrates the association of enslavement with Blackness, and how that Blackness was rendered marginal. Enslaved Black people in Iran also endured colorism that subjected the darkest-skinned people to harder labor.

Indeed, efforts to disavow Blackness in the Indian Ocean slave trade should be met with scrutiny. Near East studies scholar Parisa Vaziri calls out the breathlessness with which many scholars of the Indian Ocean region point to a lack of historical data and “archival paucity” to bolster arguments against Indian Ocean anti-Blackness, even though early scholarship of the Atlantic slave trade (which dates back further as a field, since the Indian Ocean slave trade really only developed as a field of study in the 1970s-80s) had similar levels of data. Moreover, early study of the Atlantic slave trade saw just as many attempted justifications for why slavery wasn’t anti-Black; it wasn’t until the concerted efforts of Black scholars and the development of Black studies that our views on the Atlantic slave trade shifted. Dr. Vaziri argues too that the very desire for the Indian Ocean slave trade to be distanced from narratives of anti-Blackness reflects a kind of racial anxiety that makes it well worth investigating, as Dr. Baghoolizadeh is doing in Iran, along with other research compiled by new media artist, educator, writer, scholar, DJ, experimental music producer and curator Hiba Ali in the Black Indian Ocean Reading List.

Enslaved Black people in Asia (or anywhere) should not be reduced to stereotypes^[5], such as that they took their enslavement passively. Many scholars characterize some historical uprisings in pre-modern Asia as Black slave rebellions: in Iraq, rebels believed to be Afro-Iraqis staged two unsuccessful uprisings almost fifteen hundred years ago during the reigns of Musab bin al-Zubayr and Al-Hajjaj bin Yusuf al-Thaqafi. Two hundred years later, the Zanj Rebellion in Iraq led to parts of Iraq being ruled by formerly enslaved East Africans from 869-883 CE. However, historians like Gwyn Campbell debate the degree to which the Zanj Rebellion was distinctly a Black rebellion or a slave rebellion as we would think of those ideas today, because the identifications of “Zanj” people didn’t necessarily only refer to Black folks.

Regarding slavery in the modern era, historian Markus Vink uses the example of Dutch slavery in Asia to show how the Indian Ocean slave trade did not lend itself to mass revolts for multiple reasons, including the relatively small number of enslaved people owned by a single enslaver; the lack of famine and or external distress in the colonies; the difficulty of uniting enslaved people from different cultures and languages; that the “social structure of the slaveholding regime did not permit the emergence of an autonomous Black leadership”; and more. Instead, enslaved people resisted in other ways, including through slowness or refusal to do their work, stealing from enslavers, breaking equipment, poisoning or physically attacking their enslavers, and more. But the most common forms of resistance were marooning and escape: when enslaved people could escape into inaccessible areas like mountains or dense forest, they formed free communities there.

The Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and Western ideas of race had a huge influence on Asia too. The Atlantic slave trade was so impactful worldwide that Asia cannot be fully separated from its effects. It transformed global systems of trade and capital, creating the foundations for modern economies; provided the basis for Western scientific racism, which spread across the world; engaged the sociopolitical processes that defined our contemporary concepts of nations; and much, much more. Western perceptions of Blackness as tied to slavery were also influential worldwide.

For example, historian Sandra Khor Manickam analyzes the 19th century European racialization of Black Indigenous Asian communities through the books written by two white British government administrators posted in Southeast Asia, texts which unfortunately continue to be referenced by anthropologists. While both Brits believed there were some phenotypic similarities between Black Indigenous Asians and Africans (where the entire continent of African, here, is somehow homogenized into a single racial phenotype), they also recognized where the physical similarities ended, noting that no one could confuse one population for the other. Instead, the racialization of Black Indigenous communities as potentially Afro-descendant was directly tied to the perception that Black Indigenous people should be associated with being enslaved (even though non-Black people were also enslaved in Asia), and as “primitive”. And the link with American chattel slavery was key: these administrators drew on their perceptions of Black slavery in the Atlantic to racialize Black Indigenous people in the Pacific, and to perpetuate that racialization through their writings and drawings.

Along with direct enslavement, European colonialism more broadly also had horrific implications for Black Asian communities. In 1789, the British colonized the Andaman Islands to establish a penal colony for prisoners from their other colonies in Asia. While this first penal colony failed after seven years, their “exploration” of the islands included kidnapping Black Indigenous Andamanese people to “study” them, and in some cases enslave them. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, another British penal colony was created in the Andamans to imprison rebels and other prisoners from India and Burma, which remained in operation for another eighty years.

The interactions between the British, Indian and Burmese convicts, and Andamanese communities led to the development of a complex racial hierarchy promoted by the British, where Andamanese people were distinctly racialized as Black and treated as “primitive”. Colonization had a devastating impact on the Andamanese communities that lived there, whom the British continued to kidnap, attack, rape, and enslave – particularly in the “Andaman Home” where they were imprisoned and suffered “civilizing” tactics and forced labor – as well being exposed to outside diseases and subjected to over-extraction of key natural resources by the settlers. As a result, the Andamanese community was halved by the beginning of the 20th century^[6].

Western colonization impacted other Black Indigenous Asian communities as well. Under Spanish rule, forests in the Philippines, where Black Indigenous communities lived, went from being 92% of land cover to around 50% by 1900, due to logging and clear-cutting for agriculture. And the geopolitical separations made by colonialism have left their scars: the Dutch and the British divided up the island that is now known as Papua into two sections, which are now independent Papua New Guinea and West Papua, the latter of which is colonized by Indonesia, leaving Black Indigenous Papuans there oppressed and disenfranchised.

Since the late 19th century, wars and militarization have brought Black American soldiers to numerous Asian countries, with profound and complicated implications for imperialism, racism, orientalism, and misogyny. Black American soldiers were involved in U.S. wars and occupations in Asia as early as 1899, when “Buffalo Soldier” units were sent both to help quell the Boxer Rebellion in China and subdue Filipino freedom fighters in the Philippine American War. World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and other U.S. imperial exploits in Asia also took Black American soldiers abroad.

Some Black soldiers noted (and were able to act on) the fact that U.S. imperialism in Asia was part of the same structure of oppression they faced, as evidenced during the Philippine American War, when some Buffalo Soldiers defected and joined Filipino freedom fighters. One of them was David Fagan, who accepted a commission in the Filipino revolutionary forces and led several successful missions against U.S. troops. At the end of the war, around 1,200 Black American soldiers chose to stay in the Philippines rather than return to the United States.

But it is undeniable that most Black American soldiers abroad represented the military power of the United States over occupied Asian people, which created problematic dynamics between Black soldiers and locals, particularly Asian women. As Channelle Russell writes about Black American soldiers in Japan:

“In Japan, African-American men were allowed more freedom to express their manhood –intrinsically tied to their status as soldiers – in a militarized context. Wilson quoted Lieutenant Moorman, himself a Black serviceman engaged to a Japanese woman at the time, as saying, “[The best type] of Japanese girl is loyal, devoted, thrifty, and a good homemaker,” ascribing to the Orientalist belief that essentializes all Asian women as docile and subordinate. Like the characterization of Japanese women as accessorial to men, American occupation of Japan was contingent upon widely-accepted conceptions of American superiority by American servicemen…

…Undeniably, African-American men occupied a position of power when considering their presence as American soldiers, they were also subject to both the prejudice of racially-segregated policy and wide-spread colorist notions concerning darker skin in Japan. For example, during the period of occupation, it was commonplace for Black soldiers to be referred to [by]…a highly-derogatory Japanese racial slur for Black.”

Some Black soldiers posted in countries such as Philippines, Vietnam, and Korea became parents to mixed-race Black Asian children, many of whom were abandoned when the soldiers were not permitted by the U.S. government take their children back to the United States at the end of their deployment.

However, for Black Indigenous Papuans in New Guinea and Indonesia, the arrival of Black American soldiers during World War II gave Papuan people an unprecedented view of Black people in positions of knowledge and power: Black sailors, engineers, pilots, and even Black officers who commanded white soldiers. This was so contrary to Papuans’ own treatment under both Dutch and Indonesian colonialism that, according to Papuan nationalist Nicolaas Jouwe, these experiences with Black American soldiers “laid the foundation for later [Papuan] political awareness”.

Black students have been coming to Asia for university and graduate education for decades. Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, Black students, primarily from African countries, started attending Asian universities; there have been high-profile stories regarding small numbers of African students in Israel and China in the 1960s, and even North Korea in the 1980s. But it wasn’t until the 2010s that numbers really began to increase, as students from countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Sudan found that studying in Asia was relatively inexpensive, and for countries that were former British colonies, there were opportunities to study in English in countries like India. Within a decade, China beat out France as the number one choice for African students studying outside of Africa. Many Asian countries have actively courted African students as a way to establish relationships with their governments, and have done so by offering scholarships and removing obstacles in student visa processes, including in China, India, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Japan, Saudi Arabia, North Cyprus, and more.

The 20th and 21st centuries have also brought increased movement from African countries to Asia because of immigration, work, and business – and, unfortunately, also because of labor trafficking and asylum-seeking. New immigration policies, increased industrialization, population growth, globalization, and medical tourism in Asia, and more restrictive immigration policies in Europe, have led folks from African countries to move to countries like India, Turkey, Malaysia, Korea, and many more in the last several decades. The most significant immigration outside of Southwest Asia has been people from African countries moving to China, including from Nigeria, Guinea, Mali, Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many merchants and businesspeople from these countries started coming to China in the late 1990s and early 2000s to buy manufactured products and sell them in their home countries, and have settled in places like Guangzhou, Yiwu, Hong Kong, Macau, and Beijing.

The kafala system of legal sponsorship for migrant workers began in the early 20th century and expanded in the 1950s to bring workers to the countries in Southwest Asia that are part of the Gulf Cooperation Council – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – as well as Jordan and Lebanon. Initially the kafala system mostly drew workers from other Asian countries, but in the past few decades it has included large numbers of workers from Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and other African countries, particularly women who do domestic work. I’ll talk more in the next post about the abuses of the kafala system and how much of it has turned into slavery.

Other Black folks have traveled to Asia as refugees and asylum-seekers. Ethiopian Jewish people moved to Israel in several waves within the last hundred years. Many asylum-seekers from countries like Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia who intend to travel to Australia go through Indonesia and Malaysia first, where they often get stuck as undocumented immigrants. Turkey hosts some of the largest refugee populations in the world, largely from South Asia and other Southwest Asian countries, but with growing numbers from Somalia and Cameroon. Lebanon has also become a site for asylum-seekers from Sudan, Ethiopia, and other African countries.

The end of Western colonialism in Asia did not mean self-determination for all. The mid-20th century saw the transfer of traditional lands of Black Indigenous Asians from European colonists to other non-Indigenous Asian settlers. The Andaman Islands, geographically located closer to Southeast Asia than to the Indian subcontinent, went from being a British colony to becoming a union territory of India, instead of being returned to Black Indigenous Andamanese people. In the 1960s, control of West Papua was given from the Netherlands to Indonesia instead of to the Black Indigenous Papuans. The United States also had a big role to play in this, helping to broker the deal between the Dutch and Indonesian governments in order to get Indonesian support during the Cold War.

The transfer of power did include a farce of involvement of Papuan people: 1,026 Papuans (less than 0.2% of the Papuan population) were picked by the military, taken to a plebiscite (many at gunpoint), and asked whether they favored Indonesian annexation – which they supposedly supported unanimously. Over the next several decades, Indonesia proceeded to deliberately resettle non-Black Indonesian people across West Papua, displacing Papuan communities. West Papua is not even recognized as a colonized territory by the United Nations. Of course, countless other Black Indigenous communities in Asia have suffered settler colonialism by other Asian communities over millennia; these are only two of the most recent examples of occupation of Black Indigenous Asian land.

Afro-Palestinians, many of whom are descended from immigrants from Chad, Sudan, Nigeria and Senegal (who came to Jerusalem either on pilgrimage, or who wanted to join the Palestinian struggle against Zionism), were killed, displaced, and incarcerated alongside non-Black Palestinians under the 1948 Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine known as the nakba (“catastrophe”). Afro-Palestinians served in the Arab Salvation Army to fight against Israeli forces in Jerusalem, and almost a quarter of their community was displaced and became refugees in other countries during that time. Afro-Palestinians have continued to suffer under Israeli colonization in the decades since the nakba began, including under Israel’s most recent escalation in horrific genocidal violence, which I’ll discuss more in future parts of this series.

Many historic Afro-descendant communities in Asia are now hard to identify or enumerate due to acculturation (becoming socially incorporated into the dominant culture), outmarriage (marriage to people outside their communities), and religious conversion. In many Asian countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Jordan, and Iran, historically Afro-descendant communities are not included as a separate category in census data collection, or they are integrated enough into society that they no longer consider themselves Black. However, cultural elements still remain from Black ancestors even in those areas: Sirambiyadiya’s Afro-Sri Lankan community keeps up the musical tradition of manhas; oral histories in the Maldives also link bodu beru, a local genre of drum music, to African settlers of the past; and formerly enslaved African diaspora communities in the United Arab Emirates create music influenced by songs from Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya.

Trying to find demographics on Black populations in Oman and the United Arab Emirates presents a special challenge. Zanzibar, an archipelago in East Africa that is now part of Tanzania, was part of the Omani Empire from 1698-1856, leading many Omanis to move to there, where a community of mixed race Black Zanzibaris descended from Omanis developed over the centuries. In 1964, the Zanzibar Revolution led to the deaths and expulsions of many Zanzibaris of Omani descent, many of whom fled to the United Arab Emirates or outside Asia instead of to Oman, because of Oman’s then-restrictive immigration policies. In 1970, an invitation from Omani Sultan Qaboos bin Zaid for people of Omani descent to “return” to Oman led to another wave of migration. But those who were granted Omani citizenship had to do so on the basis of their ancestry in an Arab tribe, and that, as well as racism and xenophobia that many returnees faced, and the lack of an official census category for Zanzibari Omanis, makes it hard to enumerate their community as well. It’s even harder to figure out who in this community might consider themselves or be considered Black, which I have also had trouble finding research on^[7].

It’s worth noting too that even when historic Afro-descendant communities are recognized, there are attempts to falsely homogenize them. Historian Anisha Padma discusses how in India, the category of “Siddi” is applied to many different Afro-descendant communities that trace their roots to different waves of migration over the centuries, some who were enslaved and brought to India, others who came as merchants and sailors. Indeed, the very desire to frame all Siddi people as from enslaved communities has the impact of othering them further. (Siddi communities in India share some origins and connections to Sheedi communities in Pakistan as well.)

However, we do have some estimates of Black populations in Asian countries today. I am listing as many countries as I’m able to find data for with more than ten thousand Black folks residing there. These numbers vary widely across different data sources, and they are likely severe underestimates.

Yemen: 3.5 million Muhamasheen, an oppressed caste that is racialized as Black, as well as Black Yemenis descended from enslaved people, and at least 35,000 contemporary African diaspora people
Iraq: 2 million Black Iraqis, including 500,000 descendants of the Zanj Rebellion, who live across Iraq but with the largest communities in Basra
Indonesia and occupied West Papua: 2 million Papuan people
Turkey: potentially over 1.5 million Black folks, including 20,000 to 25,000 Afro-Turks, who are likely descended from formerly enslaved people, as well as 1.5 million contemporary African diaspora people
Pakistan: 1 million Sheedi people, many of whom are descendants of enslaved Bantu communities going back centuries
Oman: between 100,000 and 600,000 Zanzibari Omani people, though it is unknown how many are mixed race Black folks
China: prior to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, 500,000 contemporary African diaspora folks, primarily from Nigeria but with sizeable populations also from Guinea, Mali, Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with largest communities concentrated in Guangzhou; numbers are less certain now because many Black folks were driven out in 2020
Lebanon: over 400,000 in the contemporary Ethiopian diaspora
Saudi Arabia: about 370,000 Black folks (~10% of the country), including numerous tribes across the country that are majority Black Arab
United Arab Emirates: over 300,000 in the contemporary African diaspora
Occupied Palestine (including what is called Israel): about 144,000 contemporary Ethiopian Jewish people; around 55,000 other contemporary African diaspora folks, primarily from Sudan and Eritrea; around 5,000 Black Hebrew Israelite people; and the small community of 350-450 Afro-Palestinians who live in the Muslim quarter in East Jerusalem between police blockades
India: more than 150,000 Black folks, including 50,000 Siddi people and about 100,000 contemporary Nigerian diaspora folks
The Philippines: over 100,000 Black Indigenous people, including approximately 55,000 Ati people, 50,000 Aeta people, 18,000 Mamanwa people, and many more
Malaysia: about 50,000 contemporary African diaspora people and about 4,800 Black Indigenous people
Qatar: between 30,000 to 50,000 contemporary Kenyan diaspora folks and unknown numbers of contemporary Nigerian diaspora folks
Iran: tens of thousands of Black Iranians, many descended from formerly enslaved people, who primarily live in southern Iran
Bahrain: about 25,000 (1.6% of the population) contemporary African diaspora people, and an unknown number of Afro-Arabs
Korea: about 20,000 contemporary African diaspora folks
Japan: about 17,000 contemporary African diaspora folks, including about 3,000 from Nigeria and 2,300 from Ghana as of 2019