Most Afro-Iranians are concentrated in the southern provinces of Iran, including Hormozgan, Sistan and Balochistan, Bushehr, Khuzestan, and Fars.

To meet the demand for menial labor, enslaved black people who were captured by Arab slave traders were sold in cumulatively large numbers over centuries to; the Persian Gulf, Egypt, Arabia, India, the Far East, the Indian Ocean islands and Ethiopia.

[4] Others came as immigrants throughout many millennia or from Portuguese slave traders who occupied most of the contested Ormus's Bandar Abbas, Hormoz and Qeshm island ports in southern Iran by early 16th century.

[5][6] During Qajar rule, many wealthy households imported Black African women and children to perform domestic work alongside Eastern European Circassian slaves.

[8] Under British pressure, Mohammad Shah Qajar issued a firman suppressing slave trade in 1848.