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:
“Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.”
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)
“It is not however, adulthood itself, but parenthood that forms the glass shroud of memory. For there is an interesting quirk in the memory of women. At 30, women see their adolescence quite clearly. At 30 a woman’s adolescence remains a facet fitting into her current self.... At 40, however, memories of adolescence are blurred. Women of this age look much more to their earlier childhood for memories of themselves and of their mothers. This links up to her typical parenting phase.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.”
—Edna O’Brien (b. c. 1932)