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Turkey’s increasing presence and developing relations in Africa have increased the academic interest in this region in our country. While the bilateral agreements developed in the political, military and economic fields bring Turkey and the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries closer to each other, the reflections of this in the field of education are manifested by increasing academic studies. Not only the African students who came to study in our country, but also the theses produced by the local academicians of our country on Africa has approached two thousand. While academics in Turkey generally try to understand and make sense of Turkey’s new foreign policy initiatives towards Africa, the theses produced by students coming from African countries see the transformation in their own geographies during and after the colonial period as a tool in the construction of relations with Turkey. In a sense, the view of Turks towards Africa and the view of Africans towards Turkey intersect in these theses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work describes the earliest known image of a gorilla (Gorilla sp.) to appear outside Africa. This is found in an Asian miniature painted on silk from the second half of the fifteenth century, called Four captive demons. The inspirational source of this painting is obscure and the artist unknown, but it may have been created in the Timurid-Turkmen region of Central Asia. A commercial network linking the African Great Lakes region-where the eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei) still occurs-and the Swahili ports could have served to facilitate trade in fauna at that time in history. Countless African animals were sent by Egyptian and Eastern African rulers to their counterparts in Central Asia as diplomatic gifts, and a captive gorilla specimen could have been kept in one of the "gardens" of the Timurid-Turkmen rulers and portrayed by an artist working at their courts. This image is intriguing and worthy of attention because it opens up new scenarios regarding the extent of knowledge of Great Apes prior to the Age of Discovery, giving potentially important new insights into human-anthropoid interaction.