Ziba Khanum of Yazd: an enslaved African woman in nineteenth-century Iran

ABSTRACT Ziba Khanum (d. 1932) was, an African woman, a slave in the city of Yazd in the second half of the nineteenth century. She bore her master a son who, in accordance with Islamic law, should have inherited part of his father’s wealth but did not. Although she is subaltern, information about her life and the life of her son, Ghulam ‘Ali Siyah, can be recovered from family oral histories. The son, an Afro-Iranian merchant, converted to the Baha’i religion, traveled to Palestine and to India, and became a wealthy and notable person in Yazd. Ziba Khanum lived in her son’s household, with his children and grandchildren until the end of her life. Some of her descendants now live in the United States. This paper will discuss issues of race, gender, slavery, assimilation, sexuality. and religion as experienced by an Afro-Iranian family in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.