Enslaved and emancipated Africans in the Ottoman Empire embodied two forms of ‘border crossing’: physically, from sub-Saharan Africa into Ottoman lands, and legally, from enslaved to free. This paper aims to explore the second form; the exact moment when emancipation is made official through state intervention. It argues that the inscription of freed Africans in state documents recorded important information on their lives, and created an opportunity for their ‘voices’ to be heard. Despite being officially prohibited in 1857, the African slave trade in the Ottoman Empire reached its climax in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. By that time, Ottoman and British diplomats had developed bureaucratic procedures to track, record, and register, and care for emancipated Africans. This new state emancipation process existed in parallel with traditional private/religious methods. This paper draws on a 30 January 1902 report sent from the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire to his superiors in London describing the latest Ottoman measures against the African slave trade. Contained in this report are 3 hitherto unknown lists naming all manumitted Africans in Istanbul over the last 7 years. These lists, copied from Ottoman Ministry of Police (Zabtiye Nezareti) records, contain details on 223 Africans and represent the most extensive source of their kind. This paper will first overview the state-led emancipation process that developed in the nineteenth century, drawing examples from Ottoman azatnames (emancipation papers). Then, it will examine the list contents, including gender ratios, naming practices, ethnic origins, professions of former owners, while also accounting for the irregular, such as “Ho?-kadem and her son Hikmet.” After, it will reflect on the inscription of non-traditional slave names such as Amber, Sumbul Calfa, and Cevher A?a to suggest that the registration process was a potential site of ‘agency’ where Africans could (re)inscribe a name of choice. And therefore, providing a rare instance where freed Africans ‘speak’ through state documents. This paper brings Ottoman world source materials together with theories on naming practices during enslavement and emancipation outlined by Patterson (1982). It therefore contributes to the historiography of subalterns in the late Ottoman empire and on African slavery more generally as well.