Historians who are interested in explaining the lives of people of African descent in Iran face a number of challenges, and perhaps the greatest of these is a lack of good sources. Official census records and British Foreign Office documents give broad outlines of the size and distribution of the population, and memoirs and official histories can be mined for stories of Africans who served in palaces and elite households. But finding information on the tens of thousands of Africans who toiled in less prestigious circumstances has been much harder. My paper bridges this gap by analyzing 186 English-language travel narratives written by British and American citizens who came to Iran during the Qajar Period. Historians of Iran have long recognized the importance of this category of documents, yet to this date only two dozen or so of the most famous ones are in regular use. This is particularly sad given the astounding breadth of the travelers’ experiences. These men and women mingled with the richest and poorest Iranians in both urban and rural settings in virtually every province, often writing in vivid detail about subjects that Iranian writers would have balked at mentioning at all. I show that these narratives are a deep, rich source for information on the everyday lives of Iranians of African descent—male and female, slave and free. These stories are not written by the Africans themselves, of course, and are still embedded within the writers’ own cultural contexts. Yet when placed alongside the governmental and elite Iranian documentation that is most often our window into this world, this corpus can at least help to provide a more balanced portrayal of what life was like for this too often misunderstood people. In addition, I hope that my use of these documents will serve to underscore their importance for scholars of Iran who focus on other subjects, as well.