While in the last 20 years historians working in state archives have significantly enhanced our understanding of the history of African slavery in the Ottoman Empire, little is known about its lasting effects on their descendants in Turkey, known as Afro-Turks. This is owed in many ways to Turkish nationalism in the twentieth century: the new state promoted a monolithic view of Turkish culture and identity, and any public discussion or research into its historical diversity was looked upon as an existential threat. Only in the last 10 years have Afro-Turks begun attempting to wrest control of their own history away from state archives and other institutions – a process that has been fraught, to say the least. Focusing on the case of Afro-Turks, this paper I will explore aspects of the epistemological violence involved in the creation of the field of Ottoman slavery studies. As both Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault remind us, the very creation of ‘the archive’ in which historians work was itself an act of violence. With this in mind, I examine the development of two recently established archival repositories of the history of African slaves and their descendants – one held by the Turkish Historical Foundation (Tarih Vakfı) in Istanbul, the other, operated by the Afro-Turks themselves at the headquarters of the African Culture, Solidarity, and Cooperation Association (Afrikalılar Kültür, Dayanışma ve Yardımlaşma Derneği) in Izmir. Drawing upon interviews I conducted in the fall of 2015 with individuals involved in decision-making at both organizations, I will show how the legacies of slavery and archival violence have intersected in these spaces to work against the long-term goals of the Afro-Turkish community. For example, despite helping the Turkish Historical Foundation to collect the oral histories of descendants of slaves in a major state-backed project in 2012, the Afro-Turk association has since been denied access to these recordings, with no explanation given. Thus, the documents and sources that constitute authoritative knowledge have been removed and concealed from the very objects and producers of that knowledge. This paper thus seeks to open a broader discussion about the nature of archives and the impact of the inherent violence of their creation upon the history of marginalized peoples in late Ottoman and modern Turkish history.