Respectable Trade Read online

  “This is where it stops,” Mehuru said firmly in one town council after another. “One nation has to refuse. One nation has to throw up a wall and say that it must end here. Otherwise what will become of us? Already the trade routes running north are unsafe, and the wealth of this nation depends on our trade. We send our leather goods, we send our brassware, we send our rich luxuries north, across the Sahel Desert to the Arab nations, and we buy our spices and silk from them. All our trade has always been north to south, and now the slavers are cutting the routes.

  “The coastal forests and plains are becoming deserted. Who will fish if the coast is abandoned? Where shall we get salt if the women cannot dry it in the salt pans? Where shall we get food if we cannot farm? How can a country be strong and safe and wealthy if every day a hundred, two hundred men are stolen?”

  The men in the village councils nodded. Many of them showed the profits of the slave trade, with ragged shirts of cotton woven in Manchester and guns forged in Birmingham. But they were quick to notice that the vivid dyes of the cottons bled out after a few washings and the guns were deadly to the users as well as to the victims when they misfired. No one could deny that the slave trade was an unequal deal in which Africa was losing her brightest sons in exchange for tatty goods and shoddy wares.

  Mehuru worked his way north, persuading, cajoling. He and Siko became accustomed to riding all day and camping out at night. Siko grew deft at building small campfires for cooking when they were out in the open savannah. The young man and the boy ate together, sharing the same bowl, and then rolled themselves up in their cloaks and slept side by side. They were fit and hardened by exercise and quietly companionable. Every time they stopped for Mehuru to tell the village elders of the new laws, they heard more news, and all of it bad. The trade goods were faulty; the muskets blew to pieces the first time they were fired, maiming and killing. The rum was poisonous; the gold lace and smart hats were tawdry rubbish. Worse than that, the white men were establishing gangs of African brigands who belonged to no nation and followed no laws but their own whim, who cruised the rivers and seized a solitary man, a child playing hide-and-seek with his mother, a girl on her way to a lovers’ meeting. There could be no rule of law where kidnappers and thieves were licensed and paid in munitions.

  Some of the coastal nations now dealt in nothing but slaves. They had turned from a rich tradition of fishing, agriculture, hunting, and trading to being slaving nations, with only men to sell and gold to buy everything they might need. Nations of brigands, terrible nations of outlaws.

  And the white men no longer knelt to the kings of the coastal nations. They had built their own stone castles; they had placed their own cannon in their own forts. Up and down the rivers, they had built great warehouses, huge stone barns where slaves could be collected, collected in hundreds, even thousands, and then shipped on, downriver, to the forts at the river mouth. There was no longer any pretense that the African kings were permitting the trade. It was a white man’s business, and the African armies were their servants. The balance of power had shifted totally and completely. The white men commanded all along the coast by the power of the gun and the power of their gold.

  The more Mehuru heard, the more certain he became that the Yoruba states were right to stand against slavery. The wickedness of slavery, its random cruelty, no longer disturbed him as much as the threat to the whole future of the continent that was opening before him like a vision of hell: a country ruled by the gun for the convenience of strangers, where no one could be safe.

  “If slavery is such a bad thing,” Siko said one night as they lay together under the dark sky, “I suppose you’ll be setting me free as soon as we get back to Oyo.”

  Mehuru reached out a foot and kicked him gently. “You buy yourself out as we agreed,” he said. “You’ve been robbing me blind for years anyway.”

  He smiled as he slept, but in the night, under the innocent arch of the sky, he dreamed of the ship again. He dreamed of it cruising in warm, shallow water, its deck misshapen by a thatched shelter, the sides shuttered with nets. In its wake were occasional dark, triangular fins. There were sharks following the ship, drawn through the seas by the garbage thrown overboard and by the promising smell of sickness and despair. They could scent blood and the likelihood of death. The prow sliced through the clean water like a knife into flesh, and its wake was like a wound. Mehuru started awake and found that he was sweating as if he had been running in terror. It was the ship again, his nightmare ship.

  He woke Siko. It was nearly dawn; he wanted the company of the boy. “Let’s go and swim,” he said. “Let’s go down to the river.”

  The boy was reluctant to get up, warning of crocodiles and hippos in the river and poisonous snakes on the path. Mehuru caught the edge of the boy’s cloak and rolled him out.

  “Come on,” he said impatiently. He wanted to wash the dream away; he wanted to play like a child in the water and then run back and eat porridge for breakfast. They had camped in the bend of a river and slept on the dry bank. Mehuru left his things by the embers of last night’s fire and jogged, half naked, to the river. Siko trotted behind him, still complaining. The coolness of the morning air cleared his head; he could feel his breath coming faster and the dark ominous shadow of the ship receding.

  Ahead of them was the river, fringed with trees, the tall, nodding heads of the rhun palm making a continual comforting clatter as the dried leaves pattered against each other. He ran between an avenue of locust bean trees, the broad, gnarled trunks on either side of him, the fluttering, feathery leaves brushing the top of his head. He could see the river, the green water gleaming through the thick undergrowth. A flock of plantain eaters swooped overhead, pied birds calling coop-coop-coop in a melodic chatter, and brightly colored parrots flew up as Mehuru and Siko ran easily side by side. Mehuru’s feet scrunched on white sand, and he was pausing to catch his breath and to check the water for crocodile or hippo when he saw, from the corner of his eye, a shadow launch forward, and in the same moment he was buffeted by a blow that flung him to the ground.

  He struggled to get his arms free, but he was winded and helpless under the weight of his attacker. He heard another man running forward and saw a club rising above him, and he cried out in terror, “Siko! Run! Run!” as the blow crushed his head and flung him into fragments of darkness.

  His last thought, as the dark shape of the nightmare ship rose up in his mind to blot out the sunlight and the gleam of the green water, was that he, of all people, should have known how far inland the slavers might have come.

  At Mrs. Daley’s house,

  Dowry Parade,

  the Hot Well,

  Bristol.

  11th November 1787

  Dear Frances,

  I am Writing this before I leave for London as I Know you would want to Know at once my thoughts on Mr. Josiah Cole.

  I find him a Plain and simple Man, on whose Word I think we can Rely. I have had sight of his Company books, and he seems to be well established, tho’ he is not a member of the Merchant Adventurers nor of the Africa Company, which is a regret to him. However, the Friends you can bring may Rectify the Omission.

  He was Not demanding as to your Dowry, and we have settled matters to our Satisfaction. I have taken a Share, on your behalf, in the cargo of one of his ships, the Daisy, which is loading off Africa in this Month. Another of his ships, the Lily, came into port while I was there, and I watched the unloading of his Wealth in the Form of Sugar and Rum. It is a Risky business, but highly profitable. I have no Hesitation in believing that you will be well Provided for during your Marriage; and if Widowed you will Enjoy an adequate jointure. We have Agreed that there is no haste for the Marriage, and since you have to complete your contract with Mrs. Snelling, and he hopes to Buy a house Suitable for his new Family, we have fixed it for the month of July next year. It is Not what your father would have wished, but I Agree with you that it is the best you can Anticipate.

  As to th
e Pupils you were to teach, he made no Mention of them, except as a Scheme he had in Mind for later. My principal concern was your Sister-in-law, Miss Sarah Cole, who does not Seem to welcome the Match. However, you will have Dealt with more Intractable domestic situations at Home and with Mrs. Snelling.

  I shall be home within the Sennight, and will drive over to Mrs. Snelling’s house to discuss the matter with you then.

  Yours,

  Scott.

  Mehuru regained consciousness with an aching head and the sound of flies buzzing about the blood on his temple. His arms were bound behind him, and his neck was lashed into a forked wooden brace with rough hemp twine. At his side was Siko, whimpering pitifully, his neck brace paired with Mehuru’s so that they were bound together like some misshapen yam that sprouts a twin. They were whipped to their feet and then directed down the river path to where their captors had hidden their boats. Every stumble Siko made tore Mehuru’s neck and knocked him from his stride. They fell together in a helpless embrace and were whipped until they stood again. Only when they fell into a slavish, head-bowed shuffle could they move forward, and even then both their necks were rubbed through bruises into bleeding sores. “I am sorry, sir, I am sorry,” Siko wept. “I am sorry.”

  “It is I who am sorry,” Mehuru said only once as they struggled to their feet. “I brought you far from your home and mine, I should have taken more care. I did not know that they had come this far inland.”

  He did not finish his thought: that it was not only Siko whom he had failed. If the slavers were raiding this far inland, then the whole of Africa was open to them, and Mehuru could not send a warning. “The gods only know what will be the end of this,” he said to himself. He was worried for the Yoruba kingdom and for its plan to boycott the slave trade. He did not yet know enough to fear for himself.

  Siko wept like a little child, but Mehuru stayed calm. He knew that while they were within the borders of the Yoruba states, his authority would be recognized. The men who had captured them were ignorant, violent peasants of the worst sort. Mehuru tried to speak to them in all the African languages he knew, but they answered him only with a threatening wave of a cudgel. He decided to wait until they reached their base camp. As soon as they reached their master, Mehuru would explain who he was, and they would be released. In his more optimistic moments, Mehuru thought what an excellent anecdote this would make back at the court, and what a hero he would seem: fighting slavery and personally endangered.

  It took three days walking downriver to where the slavers’ boats were waiting, and at every halt the slavers went out and hunted down another man, another woman, another little child. Mehuru’s opposition to the slave trade had been theoretical, but when he saw the women sick with fear and the children too terrified to weep, he knew that he hated the trade and would be against it all his life. Then he longed to be back at court—not only to boast of his escape but to add his voice to the counsels against slavery. He had heard it named as a sin, but when he saw the whipping and the casual brutality, he understood for the first time in a comfortable, leisured life what a mortal sin could mean.

  And he was afraid—if the slavers had penetrated this far to the north and east, then how far might they yet go? Africa was a massive continent, rich with people living well on fertile soil. Slavers using the river routes could penetrate deep and deeper into the very heart of nations. Mehuru had been in the borderlands of the Yoruba kingdom, but even so he was thousands of miles from the coast. How far would the slavers go for their trade? What would it take to stop them?

  They were twenty in all by the time they were loaded into the boats to travel downriver. They were made to kneel on the floors of rough wooden canoes, still bound neck to neck. The sun burned down on their heads, and where the lashes of the whip had cut, the flies crawled and feasted. With hands tied tightly behind him, Mehuru felt the skin of his back cringe at the touch of the insects, the minute trampling of their feet against his eyelids, the probe of their tongues into the gash on his face. The men paddled the canoes out into midstream and caught the smooth, fast current, but the flies were not blown away. They followed like a haze, tempted by the smell of fearful sweat and open wounds.

  Mehuru’s heavily laden canoe slipped past green, thickly wooded banks like a dream, rocking only slightly as the men held it in the center of the river. Sometimes the water was so wide that you could hardly see from side to side; sometimes it narrowed, and Mehuru looked longingly at the banks. The sun beat down on them, the boat rocked them like a cradle. The heat haze danced on the banks, and the flies buzzed around their heads. Mehuru thought of the silent progress of his ship, his nightmare ship, and its wake of sharks and the stink that hung around it in his dream.

  On the fifth day, they rounded a bend in the river and saw before them a large stone building, which could only have been built by white men with their strange desire for block shapes and their disregard for the contours of the land. It was nothing more than a cube, with little slits for windows, the roof steeply thatched. Before it, sticking out into the river, was a wooden jetty that led to a stone quay. Behind it was a cluster of huts, a poor, slovenly place with no women to keep it tidy and no men to farm the land.

  Mehuru thought that here at least he would find someone who would see sense and release them. He was anxious for Siko, who had stopped weeping and was now like a man drugged. The boy sat in the boat in silence, his eyes downcast on the green water, and neither the pain of the neck brace nor the discomfort of sitting in the heat of the midday sun prompted him to speak. His eyes had gone blank with fear; he would not eat. Mehuru wanted them both to be released promptly, before the boy fell sick. He readied himself to demand to see whoever was in charge.

  But there was no one on the landing stage. There was a big iron gate in the massive stone wall, and their boat was simply unloaded with shouted commands and whipped in through the gate. The men ignored Mehuru’s demand to see their master and pushed him into the entrance vestibule with the rest. When the outer gate clanged shut behind them, another was opened before them, and they stumbled into a huge stone chamber ten times as big as the largest barn. A group of men pushed them into line and chained them, quickly and efficiently, with the chain running through their manacles, then fastened each end to rings set into the stonework of the wall. Mehuru noted the clumsy cast-iron manacles and chains, nothing like the light, well-crafted metal of his own people. But it was good enough to hold him, to hold them all.

  Time passed. He tried to count the dawns with marks on the dirt in the floor, but there was no space, they were packed too close, and every day another couple, another dozen new captives were added. The food was scanty and often bad. Many people were sick, vomiting into the slop pail, or voiding uncontrollably on to the earthen floor. The smell was dreadful. There was no water for washing and no change of clothes. Mehuru banked down the flickering panic at his own degradation. He refused to let the dirt and the humiliation touch him, and he spoke encouragingly to Siko.

  “This is a mistake,” Mehuru said. “They should not have taken us. When someone in authority comes, I will tell him who I am. A Yoruban envoy cannot be so treated. When they realize who I am, they will let us go.”

  Siko did not reply. He would not look at Mehuru.

  When new men and women were brought in, Mehuru tried to speak to the jailers. Every time one of them came within shouting distance, he called out to him, first in Yoruban, then in Dahomean, then in Mandinka: “Tell your master that I am an obalawa of Yoruba, on the king’s business. Tell him the king will pay a high ransom for me. Tell him I demand to speak with him!”

  They did not understand, or they would not listen. Mehuru knew he must be patient and wait until he could speak to their leader. Then he would be released, and he could demand that Siko be returned to him. His main fear was that they would try to keep Siko when they released him; and Mehuru’s duty to his slave, to offer complete protection in return for complete obedience, would be threatene
d.

  He let himself worry about Siko, let his concern for Siko be the principal, the only thing in his mind. While he could think of himself as a master, as a man of property with obligations, he could pretend that he did not belong in the nightmare storehouse, soiled with his own mess, with dirty hands and matted hair. He thought his sanity depended on his remembering that he did not belong there, that he was not a slave, he was a Yoruban envoy on a mission for the alafin himself.

  After about a month in which conditions in the storehouse grew worse and worse, there was a gathering, like some nightmare market. A new boat, a white man’s boat, had come upriver from the coast, bringing two white men. Mehuru readied himself to explain to the men that he must be released. All of the captives were dragged one at a time from their prison and brought out to a white man, who lolled on a chair under a tree.

  It was Mehuru’s first sight of a white man, the race that was destroying his country. He had expected a towering demon or an impressive god—not this dirty weakling. His skin was pale, his clothes were gray and foul, and the stink of him as he sweated in the sunshine was so bad that he could even be smelled above the stench from the storehouse. The man was wet all the time. He lounged on a chair in the shade, but he did not sit still and consider his purchases. He shifted all the time in his seat, getting hotter and hotter, and his terrifying pallor went an even more frightening flushed red color, and all his face grew shiny and wet with sweat.

  When they pulled Mehuru forward by a twitch on the rope around his neck, he was so shocked by the corpse face of the man, and the disgusting thick clumps of stubble hair on his chin and at the open neck of the dirty shirt, that for a moment he could barely speak. But then he drew himself up to his full height and looked the man in the eye.

  “I am an envoy of the Yoruban Federation,” he said clearly. “I must be released at once, or there will be severe reprisals.” He repeated the sentence first in Portuguese, the language of the slavers, and then in all the African languages he knew. “I demand the release of my personal servant and my own freedom,” he said.