Pushkin’s African ancestry

Pushkin's African ancestry

By Lea Celik Sommerseth Shaw

I realised that information outlets are edited by political motivatations when I was searching for information about my Native Kurds heritage and found out that they were genetically related to Anatolia Celts last year, but that has now been changed on information outlets and Pushkin's great grandfather, now being outlined as having connection to Russia through slavery, when its well known that he was the godson of the Russian tsar.

Having done genetic test and finding out that my heritage stretches from the Iberia to Mount Ararat and the Russian peninsula, my Iberian ancestry once the Al Andalus, traces back just a few generations, this explains Alexander the Great and his presence in the region, which stretched from Mesopotamia, Africa, and to Russian peninsula so theoretically, the Russian researcher Vadim Makarenka is right about Ayyubid's Russian ancestry.

Alexander Pushkin is what Yasar Kemal is to Turkey; they are the founders of their modern language and literature. History does not move in straight lines. It moves through people. The story of Abram Petrovich Gannibal is one of those histories. Pushkin's African ancestor Gannibal was born in Africa, most likely in the Horn of Africa, modern-day Eritrea or Ethiopia, around the end of the 17th century. That is where certainty ends, and reconstruction begins.

Moved through systems of power that erased names and replaced them with ownership, translation, and adaptation. By the time he reached Russia, he had already been rewritten. Under Peter the Great, Gannibal was not discarded. He was repurposed. He became a godson of the Tsar, a student of the empire, a subject transformed into a function

Gannibal’s life sits between contradictions: African origin, Russian authority, forced displacement, and achieved status, erased beginning, documented, he rose to become a general, an engineer, a man of rank. But none of that cancels the first act of his life.

Through Alexander Pushkin, Gannibal enters history, not as a record, but as a narrative. Pushkin did something rare for his time, he acknowledged. He wrote into literature what the empire had absorbed into silence. In “The Moor of Peter the Great”, he did not just tell a story—he reclaimed a lineage.

Not cleanly. Not completely. But visibly. And that visibility matters. Gannibal’s story is often simplified into something symbolic. “Pushkin’s African great-grandfather.” But that reduction is part of the same pattern: Gannibal is not an exception. He is evidence. Africa and Russia were never separate worlds; movement between them was not always voluntary. Identity can be reshaped without being erased

And most importantly, History remembers what power allows, but it also carries what power cannot fully erase., I do not write this as a biography. I write it as a correction. Abram Gannibal was not simply an ancestor. He was a man who moved through systems that did not belong to him, who learned to exist within them without disappearing.

Russia in Africa is not a new story. It is a continuation of routes, of influence, of unfinished strategies that began long before today’s headlines. And like all power structures, it does not arrive empty. It arrives with memory, with precedent, and with intent.

History does not divide itself the way modern maps do. Africa and Russia are often treated as separate stories—but historically, they have intersected through routes, empires, and power systems that connected them long before modern borders existed. Not directly as one people—but structurally, repeatedly.

Russia in Africa is often presented as a recent development—something emerging from modern geopolitics, from new alliances, from shifting power balances. But that framing is incomplete. Russia did not arrive in Africa recently. It came back.

Russia’s earliest connections to Africa were not imperial in the Western sense. There were no vast colonies, no carved borders across the continent. Instead, the connection appeared through individuals, through movement, through stories like that of Abram Petrovich Gannibal—taken from Africa, brought into Russia, and absorbed into its imperial structure.

And then we have Brazil, the Iberian Africa outside Iberia and Africa.

Lea Celik Sommerseth Shaw

17 March 2026 Saint Germain Des Pres