The sergeant, p.4
The Sergeant, page 4
When the Tuaregs discovered the escape the next morning, their chieftain seethed with anger. After banning the use of hashish for the rest of the journey, he whipped the feet of the remaining boys so hard they could not walk. They were loaded onto camels for the next part of their journey: a five-day trek to the city of Katsina, former capital of a Hausa Kingdom that had been taken over by Usman dan Fodio’s jihadis.
From the outside, Katsina seemed imposing, with thirty-foot high walls stretching more than thirteen miles around the city. For centuries, it had been one of the largest cities in the region, with up to 100,000 residents or more, ruled by princes who lived as grandly as the sultans of Borno. But that ended with the jihad, which left the city in ruins. When Said and his fellow captives arrived, Katsina’s walls were mostly intact—some are still standing today—but fewer than 8,000 people lived inside and there was little evidence of its former glory. Much of the area within the walls now consisted of barren fields, with the humble shanties of goatherds and chicken farmers scattered among them. The palace where Katsina’s princes once lived was decaying into collapse.
The sight of such ruins made Said question his religion, although his anger was aimed more at jihadists than Islam as a whole. “I am unable to give the slightest idea as to the time when Mohammedanism was introduced into Central Africa. But be it as it may, it brought with it desolation and ruin. Anything like enterprise was rendered impossible, fanaticism and bigotry overruled everything, and the Mohammed proselytes at once arrayed themselves against every non-follower of the Prophet as his implacable enemies. Crusade after crusade was made against the pagan tribes, who, if they had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Moslems, were either massacred or reduced into slavery. Cities after cities were razed to the ground.”
The only part of Katsina that remained halfway vibrant was the commercial district in its northeastern corner, including a once-thriving slave market that now did little business since most caravans no longer stopped there. One by one, Said’s friends were bartered away for food, clothing, and weapons, since gold or other currency was useless to their captors in the desert.
Said caught the eye of Abd el-Kader, “a most ferocious and cruel-looking individual” of mixed Arab and African descent, whose business consisted of buying ivory and slaves on the cheap in Katsina and then reselling them at a higher price further north. After some haggling, el-Kader gave the Tuaregs a used burnoose and an old musket for Said, then towed him through the streets—a powerful “monster” of a man tugging a scrawny teenaged waif to his warehouse where he kept Said in chains as he ventured out to buy more goods. Before leaving, he set a plate of food before Said, who was so depressed he could not eat. After several days of this melancholic hunger strike, Said got so thin that el-Kader started beating him to make him eat, fearing he would lose his investment if the boy starved to death.
For three months, Said remained in chains as el-Kader bought elephant tusks, other cargo, and twenty more slaves: girls, boys, women, men, who were deemed healthy enough to walk across the Sahara. Finally, he loaded his goods onto fifteen camels and linked up with a northbound caravan with around five hundred travelers—merchants, guards, servants, slaves—and a long chain of camels laden with goods. Like all but the wealthiest travelers, el-Kader and his slaves traveled on foot rather than riding camels, which were valued too highly to be used for human transportation. He and his slaves would walk nearly 1,900 miles to the next major trading center: Murzuk, in the midst of the Sahara.
The journey began pleasantly enough. The caravan spent several days passing through a forest of butter trees, tamarinds, papayas, and banana palms, and because it was still the rainy season there were thick showers several times a day, filling streams that had been dry just weeks before. As the caravan traveled north, the rains grew less frequent, the streams disappeared, and the forest thinned until finally there was nothing but underbrush, which soon gave way to sand and rocks. In the drylands, el-Kader set new rules for his slaves, limiting their rations to three pints of water and three handfuls of dates and millet meal per day, except at oases. “We suffered very much from heat and thirst, and drew small comfort from the little oases we occasionally passed,” Said wrote. A few oases bubbled with sparkling water shaded by date palms, providing food and drink to the travelers. Others, however, had barely enough water to satisfy the camels, who took top priority. And often the water was too brackish for man or beast.
At one such oasis, the caravan encountered a middle-aged slave who had been left to die after becoming too weak to keep up with his master’s pace. The slave begged for food or fresh water, but when el-Kader heard the man’s pleas, he loaded his pistol to put him out of his misery. Another merchant, Abu Tounzi, argued that if the slave could be brought back to health, he could be sold at a price that would make up for any transportation costs. El-Kader was doubtful but relented. Under Abu Tounzi’s care the man recovered and was eventually sold at a profit, but to Said the incident was a reminder of how little a slave’s life was worth: “Some Arabs would rather lose four or five slaves than a single camel.”
Beyond the rocky plain lay the mountainous land of Tibbou. Whenever the caravan paused for the night there, everyone—slave or freeman—was warned to stay within a tightly guarded circle, since Tibbou slave-trappers often lurked in the dark to capture unprotected travelers. Except for the slaves, everyone in the caravan carried guns to ward off attacks.
After four days, the caravan reached Tibbou’s northern frontier, an ancient volcanic lava flow studded with razor-sharp rocks. At the edge of this stony wasteland, el-Kader and his fellow merchants wrapped the feet of their camels in thick layers of camel hide and distributed sandals of the same material to their slaves, who had previously been barefoot. Even with the sandals, the rocks cut into their skin. “What with hunger, thirst, bleeding feet, and intolerable heat, we suffered intensely, and I was often upon the point of fainting by the wayside,” Said wrote. “The camels’ hide sandals did not last long enough to do us a particle of good.”
Beyond the lava flow was one final set of mountains to pass through, with trails so narrow that several camels lost their footing and slid down the rocky slopes, bellowing loudly as they tumbled toward their death. And then came the Sahara: a wide expanse of dunes as far as the eye could see. Years later, Said remembered the Sahara as “an ocean of scorching sand,” littered with the corpses of slaves from previous journeys: “human carcasses, completely dried up by the scorching rays of the ever-unclouded sun. The heat is so great that flesh becomes as dry as bone, before it can be dissolved. Here are found no hyenas, no vultures to prey upon the dead, and the traders never bury anyone who falls in the desert. The bodies lie until inhumed by the parching sand storms, or until pulverized. It is said that the traders leave these dead bodies exposed to frighten their caravans of slaves into faster walking.”
Said lost track of time while treading through the Sahara, but eventually there were wisps of grass and brush along the trail. Oases became more frequent. Clusters of date palms appeared. And finally there were some small villages and towns, with farms watered by irrigation ditches. This was Fezzan, an arid land in what is now southern Libya. It was the homeland of Abd el-Kader who, now that he was no longer worried about the perils of the Sahara, relaxed and became “not quite the monster” he had seemed at first. He promised his slaves that when they got to his hometown in Murzuk, he’d fill them with honey, mutton, and couscous and give them two or three days of rest before selling them off, which was enough to spur them to keep up their pace without constant prodding. “My anxiety to reach the end of the journey was so intense that I could hardly restrain myself from breaking into a run…,” Said wrote. “Believing every word [el-Kader] said, I was fairly beside myself with joy at the prospect of good food and rest.”
4 In the Realm of the Ottomans
The fortressed city of Murzuk was the capital of Fezzan, the westernmost province of the Ottoman Empire. The sands of the Sahara lapped up against its southeastern walls, but elsewhere the city was bordered by sparse strips of farmland and small stands of trees. Although most of Murzuk’s residents were Kanuri—a reminder that Fezzan had once been held by the nation of Borno—it was currently presided over by a Turkish governor living in a massive citadel overlooking the town’s narrow main gate. Four hundred Ottoman soldiers—Turks, Arabs, and Africans—were stationed in the barracks adjoining the citadel, and as the caravan carrying Mohammed Ali ben Said inched through the gate, a bespectacled Turkish official painstakingly counted the slaves to ensure that their owners would pay the appropriate Ottoman taxes on their transportation or sale.
To the Turks, this parched and broiling province—separated from Istanbul by more than 800 miles of Mediterranean and 500 miles of desert—was so unpopular that whenever they were sent to an undesirable location, it was called a Fizan’a sürmek (exile to Fezzan). To Abd el-Kader, however, Murzuk was home, so after warehousing his ivory and slaves, he headed to his house, with Said following along, since el-Kader had decided to keep him as a slave rather than sell him. Thankfully, Said no longer viewed el-Kader as a monster, but he was disappointed to learn that he was “a poor man,” with just one wife, a simple townhouse, a farm, ten camels, a few donkeys, and one other slave: an Arab dwarf named Hassan. Of course, someone with that much property was not really poor, but Said, who had grown up in luxury, had a skewed notion of wealth, and he also knew that a slave’s social status depended on the wealth of his master, with a rich man’s slave bearing a higher social ranking than the slave of a poorer man. As el-Kader’s slave, Said’s feared his status would be much lower than he deserved.
After letting Said rest three days, el-Kader took him to his farm three miles north of the city, where there were fields of wheat, barley, onions, watermelons, and radishes, watered from wells drilled into an aquifer deep beneath the ground. Said’s task was to draw water from el-Kader’s well and irrigate his fields, under the slave Hassan’s watchful eyes. It was grueling work under the hot desert sun and Said was bad at it. He had never done hard labor before, since his family’s slaves handled such chores, but Hassan offered no sympathy. After all, this spoiled teenager was only doing what Hassan had long done himself, so whenever he complained, Hassan whipped him and told him to work harder. For two weeks Said labored under constant lashing from Hassan’s whip, with nothing to eat but a daily ration of dates and boiled turnips. When Abd el-Kader visited to see how things were going, Said was exasperated.
“Between the limited choice of food and the abuse from Hassan, I’m having a miserable time,” he said. “I’m not used to such work. Can’t you sell me to a Turk or an Egyptian? I’ve heard that Turks are very good masters.”
El-Kader wasn’t necessarily surprised to hear a slave talk that way. Under Islam, slaves had the right to complain about their working conditions and even to ask to be sold to a different master, although slaveholders had no duty to grant their requests. “So you’re not used to this work?” el-Kader asked. “What kind of work did your father do?”
“He was a warrior. Barca Gana.”
El-Kader was stunned. “Barca Gana? Why didn’t you tell me that before? I knew him well. I even joined him on an expedition once, about fifteen years ago.”
El-Kader immediately told Said to stop what he was doing, since he felt the son of Barca Gana should not be treated like a common slave. After deliberation, he offered to set Said free and let him return to Borno, although he offered no food or money to help him get there. In response, Said made a decision that sounds bizarre to modern ears, but made sense to him at the time. Instead of embracing freedom, he chose to remain a slave.
Years later, Said wrote that he rejected el-Kader’s offer because he was “unwilling to recross the inhospitable Sahara.” If that sounds petty, consider that he had just traveled 2,500 miles—mostly on foot—in various states of hunger, thirst, fear, and exhaustion, trudging past the bones of men, women, children, and beasts who could not finish the journey. Penniless and with no supplies, there was no guarantee he would survive the return, and there was a risk of being kidnapped and sold back into slavery to someone worse than el-Kader.
On the other hand, by remaining a slave, there was a decent chance he could gradually regain his freedom and maybe make enough money to return to Borno in style. He had seen slaves earn their way to freedom before. In Borno, he had seen gamblers use their own freedom as a stake on their bets, confident that if they lost, they could eventually work their way out of slavery. Said was making a similar gamble now, hoping that his time as a slave would only be temporary. However strange his decision may seem, it once again highlights the differences between slavery in the Muslim world and the Americas.
Said had just one request. He wanted to be sold to a Turk, since they had a habit of paying allowances to household slaves which they could save to buy their freedom. After a thorough search, Abd el-Kader sold him to Abdy Aga, military aide-de-camp to Fezzan’s governor, Ibrahim Pasha. With an Albanian father and Arab mother, Abdy was not technically a Turk, but culturally he was fully Ottoman, and Said found him to be “an excellent young man, very good and kind, full of life and fun.”
Said’s status improved immediately after he was sold. Together with Abdy and his wife Fatima, he now lived in officer’s quarters attached to the governor’s citadel, an 85-foot-tall fortress with cannons positioned among its battlements. Instead of being relegated to tiresome fieldwork, he spent his time accompanying Abdy on his daily rounds, following him through the citadel’s long and winding passageways to the governor’s quarters, where he dined on mutton and couscous as Abdy and the governor discussed the matters of the day. Abdy gave him a small allowance, but as a teenager, instead of saving it to buy his freedom, he spent it as soon as he got it, going to the bazaar to splurge on Turkish candies. “You’re growing fat,” Fatima joked, as he recovered from the emaciation he had suffered on his grueling journey through the Sahara.
Like Said, Fatima was a Kanuri. Abdy tried to speak Kanuri with her, but even though he learned the grammar and vocabulary, he spoke with such a thick accent he asked for Said’s help, and in return he taught Turkish to Said. “I have possessed all my life an extraordinary aptitude for the acquirement of languages, but I have found none so easy to learn as the Turkish,” Said later wrote. For several months, Said “lived very well with Abdy-Aga [and] was becoming, in some degree, reconciled to my fate,” until—without warning—Abdy announced he was sending him as a gift to his father in Tripoli, 600 miles to the north.
Said was stunned. “I was unwilling to leave such an excellent man as my present master, so long as I was a slave; and I so told him,” Said wrote. But Abdy assured him that his father would treat him just as well as he had. And that was the end of the discussion.
To transport Said to Tripoli, Abdy hired Abd el-Kader, who was already preparing a shipment of slaves for the next northbound caravan. It took forty days for the caravan to reach Tripoli, but the journey was much easier than the Sahara, with small villages and lush oases where the slaves could rest. “I had a very pleasant time on my journey…,” Said later wrote, noting that Abdy had given el-Kader enough money to make sure he was properly fed. “With all the money that the good Abdy had spent, I had plenty of chickens and other good things to eat, and at every halting place was the center of a very affectionate group composed of my less fortunate but not less hungry fellow slaves.”
Gradually, the landscape gave way to vineyards and olive orchards, and as the caravan neared the Mediterranean, rows of date palms lined the road so thickly that for several miles the caravan was almost completely shaded. To the northwest they could see Tripoli, a jumble of whitewashed buildings hunched between the sea and the coastal foothills, dotted by minarets, watchtowers, and the domed roofs of public baths. Ancient stone walls ringed the city and a pair of centuries-old fortresses flanked its harbor, where tall-masted ships from as far away as New York and Boston stood at anchor.
The day after their arrival, el-Kader led Said to the home of Abdy’s father Haji Daoud, a middle-aged Albanian tobacco merchant with a long white beard, who was reclining on a silk-covered divan while puffing a narghile (hookah). After making sure Said was properly bathed and providing him with a fresh set of clothes, Daoud introduced him to his wife, “a cross and overbearing woman of very bad disposition, [who] began to manifest her ill-temper towards me the very next day after I entered the house.” Said got a much better reception from Daoud’s two young concubines, a Kanuri and a Hausa. In her midtwenties, the Kanuri was not much older than the teenaged Said, but she insisted he should think of her as his mother and Daoud as his father. “He is thinking about having you educated at one of the Turkish schools, with a view to adopting you,” she confided.
And that was probably why Abdy bought Said in the first place. Abdy was pursuing a military career rather than selling tobacco, and since he was Daoud’s only child, that meant his father would have no heir to handle the business when he retired. Daoud likely bought the concubines hoping they’d give him another heir, but that hadn’t happened, so Abdy bought him a slave young enough to be an adopted son. That could explain why Daoud’s wife was so harsh to Said, since he was a potential threat to her rank in the family. And it explains why Daoud’s concubine offered to act as Said’s mother, which would bolster her own status. Otherwise, if she failed to produce an heir, she might be sold to another master or even end up in a brothel.
Daoud certainly treated Said like a son. Every day, he took him to his tobacco emporium in the heart of the bazaar to teach him the trade, including the art of the chiboukji. The Turks served tobacco with intricate ritual, and the chiboukji, or pipe bearer, was a master of that ritual. Chiboukjis learned how to shred tobacco into fine silky threads, artfully tamp it into a pipe, and light it with burning shards of charcoal. They could flavor tobacco with rose petals, molasses, lemon peels, or cloves, and match those flavors with the pipes, which had different aromas depending on which wood they were carved from: jasmine, cherry, lemon, or plum. They were adept not only with the chibouk, a pipe of four or five feet long, but the narghile and kablioun, which could be up to eight feet long. Wealthy families typically had at least one or two chiboukji servants or slaves. So did cafés and restaurants, as well as tobacco dealers like Daoud. It was the type of skill a tobacconist would want to impart to a potential heir.
