Turkey's global political engagements and strategic investments in regions formerly under Ottoman rule, spanning the Balkans to North Africa, are frequently referred to as "Soft Power" in European media discourse. It is widely acknowledged that under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's Islamist-oriented foreign policy has gained significant traction among Sunni Muslim populations in these post-Ottoman territories over the past decade. This influence is manifested through various neo-Ottomanist cultural initiatives undertaken by the Turkish state, including media projects, popular historical dramas that resonate in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, social activities organised by Yunus Emre cultural centres, and philanthropic endeavours. Turkey stands as a prominent example of imperial revivalism within the broader context of Islamist movements. However, a large proportion of such analytical narratives demonstrate a limited understanding of the complexity of imperial imaginaries of the Turkish public about Africa. By focusing specifically on the fieldwork with Turkish charities and philanthropists providing aid to Africa, this paper discusses the limits of Turkish philanthropic imaginaries about Africa and its colonial past. It studies the encounter between Western and Turkish Imperial Dreams through philanthropy at the water well projects of Turkish charities in different parts of Africa and its Muslim areas. It was 2006 when a Turkish charity (Deniz Feneri/Lighthouse) first started opening water wells as a form of aid. This one was to remedy the 2005-2006 Niger food crisis, which impacted over 3.3 million people in this Muslim-majority country. Since then, diverse Turkish aid charities and Turkey’s own Red Crescent have drilled thousands of water wells in Somalia, Tanzania, Chad, Togo, Uganda, Cameroon, and Ghana. Turkey’s alms culture is directed at Africa’s Muslim populations through a discourse around undoing the damages of Western Colonialism. Specifically, this paper focuses on economies of philanthropy and imagination, the ways in which the Ottoman past, race, and Islam are imagined in Turkey as a way to cultivate trust as an intimate interconnectivity in this economic relationship.