This article suggests that the Ottoman occupation of parts of Africa lasted for upward of three centuries, but several areas were always provinces of secondary importance where Turkish control was largely limited to the control of ports, in Sudan’s case the Red Sea area and military forts along the Sudan Nile Valley. Despite substantial autonomy, local rulers continued to recognise the religious authority of the Ottoman sultan as caliph and further acknowledged his suzerainty by receiving recruits for their armies from the Ottoman Empire. Much of the surviving Ottoman material record in North Africa, or at least academic research relating to it, concerns the built environment. The discussion recommends the need to expand research on the nature, extent, and physical traces of slavery, slave raiding and the trans-Sahara and transoceanic trades in slaves.