Childhood
Selim Aga, according to his own account, was born in Taqali valley controlled by a chief whose main possessions were the three wells. The people of Taqali practised primitive agriculture and sheepherding, their faith combined Islam with pagan Sun worship. Selim, the oldest boy in the family, was prepared by the father to plow his own farmland; he was abducted by slaveholders when herding the livestock. He and his fellow prisoners were forced to march away from Taqali, relayed between numerous Sudanese, Arab and Turkish gangs of slaveholders. After six months' service to one exceptionally vicious slaveholder, Selim was taken over by a new owner (his seventh) who set up a caravan heading to Dongola. After a brief stay there, Selim was sold again; he ended up on a slave market in Cairo. His ninth master was a European (identified as Mr. P in Selim's book); his tenth was Robert Thurburn (Mr. R. T.), British consul in Alexandria. The new owners taught Selim basic English, took him on a tour of the Cataracts of the Nile, and then prepared for the journey to Britain via Malta, Messina, Naples and the land route to Dover Strait.
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Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
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Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
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“She that but little patience knew,
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A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
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And from her fingers ate its bit.”
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“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)