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