The Ottoman slavery passed to a new phase by the second half of the nineteenth century with the general prohibition of the slave trade in Africans. While discussions of slavery created a controversy for the intellectual and political agenda of the empire, the matter of African enslavement was received more as an international problem that should be handled on the humanitarian ground. Relying upon parliamentary debates and literary pieces of the period, this paper lays out a discussion on the joint formulation of Africanness and slavery in the late Ottoman Empire. It highlights a genealogy of blackness through the currencies, practices, and discourses of the period that casted African bodies as “real slaves” within the Ottoman Empire. In doing so, the paper offers an insight to the history of African enslavement in the Ottoman Empire in a way to follow how that history produced and articulated through a certain set of racialized perceptions and affects around the notion of Africanness. It finally argues that vocabularies and perceptions pertaining to blackness currently were hailing from the history that interlinked to and operated through racialized labor systems of the imperial past.