Respectable Trade Read Online Free Page B

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 overboardand by the promising smell of sickness and despair. They could scent blood and the