Adama Munu, TRT World

A new generation of Black and Afro-Iranians are revitalising their distinct histories and culture. California is one of the many places Priscillia calls ‘home’, adding to an impressive list that includes Nigeria, Mauritania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and her native countries of Congo-Brazzaville, Iran and France. She’s hoping Sierra Leone will be added to the list one day because of her husband’s heritage. She tells me, “No-one can really pin me and I do not belong anywhere, rather everywhere”.
But that doesn’t mean heritage isn’t important for the 38-year-old writer, filmmaker and human rights consultant. In fact it’s the basis of a new project she’s launched, that ties both her Black and Iranian identity together, bringing to light a part of the African diaspora that is rarely acknowledged. She and a group of Black and Afro-Iranians created ‘Collective of Black Iranians’, a multimedia initiative that uses storytelling, history and art, including graphics, music , and short films to tell the stories at the intersection of being African, Iranian and Black.
They include: Alex E. Eskandarkhah (Canada) Homayoun Fiamor (France), Pardis Nkoy, Parisa Nkoy (United States) and Norman Soltan Salahshour (Germany).
The exact number of Black and Afro-Iranians is not known. Their ancestry is linked to either the Trans-Saharan slave trade, the 19th century Pearl Diving trade, or more recent economic migration from Iran and African countries to the West for example. However, race and ethnicity are rarely discussed among Iranians- something Priscillia is all too familiar with.
“To be the only Black little girl in an entire bazaar and every street you turn in Tehran..you don’t really see blackness in Tehran or in Northern Iran. It’s a very singular and isolating experience where identities are at the margin. I never had conversations about race or things we should be having conversations about, such as anti-blackness, both on the African and Iranian sides of my family. For me it was a reality that I couldn’t ignore- that people had a reaction to my blackness and that I could now do something about it.”
Born in France to a Congolese father and an Iranian mother, Priscillia was raised between their native countries. The experience has contributed to her transnational outlook, which has also been the bedrock of her career. But drawing upon her youth, Priscillia explains that because one’s relationship with identity begins early; projects like the Collective gives people with similar experiences a safe space where they do not have to choose between their intersections.
“I wanted to leave something in this world for other kids like me who felt they were part of a community and hold different intersections. Over the years, it was a personal project I kept pushing, when I became a mother- it became more urgent. This is the result of such labor of love & pain & even more love”, Priscillia tells TRT World.
Alex Eskandarkhah’s experience was a little different. His upbringing exposed him very early on to the realities of race, identity and inclusivity- subject matters that heregularly discusses as a host of the podcast ‘The Gifted Gab’. He was born and bred in Canada which is considered an open and tolerant society today, but has its own racist history against groups including Black and indigenous peoples. But while race and multiculturalism are openly discussed within Canadian society, it was his mother (an Afro-Iranian with Nigerian roots and a descendant of enslaved people) and Iranian father who instilled in him pride in his identity and heritage:
“I was surrounded by blackness and raised by a Black mother who made me very conscious of that in addition to the interactions I’ve had in Canada. My parents did a really good job of giving me the right tools to understand how society works”.

Black people have been historically misrepresented, marginalised and negatively defined by non-Black people. It’s something that sits at the heart of the kind of change the group wants to push with the Collective. Alex explains an important starting point is to reclaim the term ‘Siyah’ -which in persian means ‘Black’ and has a negative connotation- to a positive and liberating definition for Black and Afro-Iranians. But the collective also respects the diversity of experiences that comes with blackness, which is why they mention both the use of ‘Black-Iranian’ and Afro-Iranian’ across their work. This is to accommodate the diversity of how Iranians of African descent choose to identify. The second starting point he emphasises is that the need to congruent the deliberate ‘erasure’ on how Black people ended up in Iran: