The systematic erasures of Iranian enslavement, particularly after the 1928 Abolition of Slavery Law, has contributed to a glaring omission in Iranian historiography. Throughout the nineteenth century, slavers forcibly brought women and men to serve as domestic slaves from East Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, but memories of these slave trades remain shadowy in the Iranian collective memory. Despite the dismantling of this institution in the early twentieth century, its highly racialized legacy has lingered in Iranian popular culture. The deliberate historical elisions surrounding slavery and forced migrations to Iran have created significant fissures in the discourse of natives and foreigners in Iran. Due to their distinctive features, East African slaves were more readily racialized and otherized than their Caucasian or Central Asian counterparts. The popular identification of Black skin as slaves did not cease with abolition, and racial and racist stereotypes undermined freedpeople’s full citizenship as native Iranians. By analyzing archival documents, photographs, museum exhibits, documentaries, maps and geographic labels, and naming practices, this paper demonstrates the role of race and geography in narrating or obscuring the histories of forced migrations to Iran. More specifically, this paper considers the history of enslavement in two particular port cities along the Persian Gulf coast: Bandar Abbas and Bushehr. Both cities served as major cities for trading slaves from East Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continue to have visible Black communities today. Bandaris and Bushehris largely accepted Iran as a homeland, but had a complex relationship with East Africa. Despite knowing of their forced migrations and their non-native status in Iran, their relationship with East Africa remains understated for two significant reasons. First, despite speaking Swahili and maintaining region-specific beliefs and practices, their exact homeland remains unknown. Second, outward expressions of longing for a foreign homeland could undermine their already-vulnerable position in Iranian society. With special attention to the geography of migrations and settlement, this paper argues that race largely determined a precarious relationship between racialized individuals and their adopted homeland in twentieth century Iran.