Classic Tales by Famous Authors (Volume 16); Barbarians and Savages. Containing Complete Selections From the World's Best Authors, With Prefatory Biographical and Synoptical Notes - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905. Excerpt: ... BOW do I know when I was born? We black men cannot remember the number of years that we have lived. Perhaps it was forty years ago--I don't know, I am not an old man yet, am I? You see my muscles are strong and firm, my teeth are sound, my skin is smooth and shining, and not puckered and scaly, as it is with old men. And I know that I am not young, because I have left my country in the land of the blacks for a long, long time, and when I was first caught by the slavers I was a strong full-grown man, already married. What curious people you Europeans are! You ask so many questions, and you want to know so much about things that do not concern you. Why should you care about slaves from the Sudan, and how they live, and what languages they speak? See, you have written many words already that I have spoken of, Marghi and Fulde, and Mbudikum and Batta, and other tongues of the barbarians and pagans, who know not God, and reject the teaching of His Prophet. I, too, was like them once. The country where my mother bore me is far away--far, far away, beyond the Desert, beyond the Great River, beyond the kingdoms of the Muslemin, in a land of Kufar (unbelievers), where the people, my brothers, went naked. and knew not shame. It is a country so far that, though you may love travelling, I doubt if you would ever reach it; yet once or twice I have heard that white men have been near my mother-land. They came--I have heard it said--to spy out the country and the chiefs of the Ful people, and the Wazir of Bornu afforded them protection. Then, too, I have heard that the great rushing river, which was distant a month's walk from my home, towards the north--the river that the Ful-be1 call Mayo Fumbina, and the Batta call the Benue--that this water flowed towards the settin...