Nicholas Said

Nicholas Said (1836-1882), international traveler, soldier, and educator. Mohammed Ali bin Said was born in Kukawa, the capital of the Kanem-Bornu Empire, which included parts of present-day Chad, Nigeria, Libya, Niger, and Cameroon. His father was a prominent military leader, while his mother was the daughter of the leader of the Mandra people, and the two had married in an effort to make peace between the two nations. The Kanem-Bornu kingdom had once been one of the most powerful in West Africa, but by the 1800s it had declined due to internal conflict, war with other African nations, and slavery. For centuries Africa’s human resources were depleted by two international slave trades: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which brought 12 million people to the Americas between 1502 and 1888; and the Arab Slave Trade, which from 650 to the early 1900s brought 11-18 million to North Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. One of those was Said, who around 1851 was gathering fruit in the woods when slave traders captured him. He was purchased by an Arab merchant for the equivalent of $10 and forced to walk across the Sahara Desert to Libya, nearly dying along the way due to hunger, dehydration, and bleeding feet. He worked as a field laborer, suffering constant beatings from his supervisor, before being sold to a Turkish military officer who sent him to Tripoli. They later traveled to the Islamic holy city of Mecca, seeing the Egyptian pyramids along the way and surviving a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, jackals in the Ethiopian mountains, and robbers in the Sudan. He was sold to another Turkish officer and worked as a domestic servant in the Greek city of Smyrna and in Istanbul until he was sold again, this time to a Russian diplomat who took him to Odessa and St. Petersburg, where he was loaned to a prince who became his final master. The prince took him to most of the major cities of Europe, including Moscow, Warsaw, Vienna, Munich, Amsterdam, Milan, Rome, Paris, and London. These travels and Said’s natural talent for languages led him to become fluent in Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Armenian, German, Italian, French, English, and his native Kanuri and Mandara. He also converted to Christianity and changed his first name to Nicholas. Although his work as a servant was relatively mild, he became homesick and while in London in 1859 persuaded the prince to free him.

In order to raise money for his trip home, he became the paid servant for a Dutch businessman who was traveling to the Americas. Said had his first experience with American racism in New York City while he and his employer attended a Dutch Reformed Church, where he was forced to sit in the balcony. They then traveled to the British West Indies and Haiti, and Said later recalled that he was “exceedingly delighted to be in the country where the heroes [of] the ‘Haitian Independence’ contended with the armies of Napoleon. I had always admired the exploits of…negro leaders, whose heroism and military talents are an honor to the African race.” While in Montreal, however, his employer fled without paying their hotel bill, and the manager took all of Said’s money and possessions as compensation. A local minister encouraged him to move to Detroit, where “there were a great number of colored people,” and he used his linguistic skills to work as a teacher for black families. Although more than a half million African slaves had been brought to the U.S., the abolition of the international slave trade in 1808 meant that by 1860 nearly all African Americans had been born in America, so Said was one of the few of African birth. He was further distinguished from other African Americans by his travels and because neither he nor his ancestors had ever been enslaved in the Americas. Nevertheless, like all other free blacks, law and custom denied him the same rights and opportunities that whites enjoyed. He had also arrived just before American tensions over slavery erupted into the Civil War. Although African Americans were initially barred from joining the military, by 1863 the army began forming black regiments collectively known as the United States Colored Troops. Among the first of these regiments was the 55^th Massachusetts Infantry, which included black men from throughout the North. One of those was Said, who joined “because all his folks seemed to be doing so.” Said’s “curious and romantic history” and linguistic ability made him a popular subject in abolitionist newspapers, one writing that his “acquisitions and behavior go far to dispel ignorant and vulgar prejudices against the colored race.” He organized a school for his fellow enlisted men and was promoted to sergeant, making him one of the few black officers in the 55^th, but he quickly decided that years of working as a servant had made him unfit for this position and requested a reduction back to private.

When the war ended, Said moved to the South. His reasons for doing so were not recorded, but historian Douglas Egerton theorizes that he was more comfortable in the black majority regions of the southeast coast. He taught in Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama and gave speaking tours to black audiences on “Africa and its resources”; this frequent movement paid his bills and enabled him to share his experiences, combat stereotypes about black people, and continue his travels. He also decided to write an autobiography describing his “adventures,” motivated by his “honest and ardent desire…to render myself useful to my race wherever it may be.” When he opened a bank account in Tallahassee to help fund this project, he identified his place of birth as “Soudan” and his occupation as “Teacher,” but when asked where he lived, he simply said “Traveler.” By then the clerk had realized who the new customer was and wrote on the application “This is the wonderful Nickolas Said doubtless.” In 1873 The Autobiography of Nicholas Said; A Native of Bornou, Eastern Soudan, Central Africa was published. Its introduction describes his wish to “show the world the possibilities that may be accomplished by the African, and the hope that my humble example may stimulate some at least of my people to systematic efforts in the direction of mental culture and improvement.” The book vividly describes the peoples, cultures, and physical environments, of the many places he had traveled, but unlike other travelers’ biographies of the time, it gave a great deal of attention to Africa and provided a black person’s perspective on Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Nevertheless, some southern white journalists accused him of lying on the grounds that a black man could not have done what he did; one wrote, for instance, that “A semi-civilized party of the African persuasion…is devoting his valuable time at present to swindling the newspapers.” He eventually ceased lecturing and publishing, and little information is available about his later life aside from the 1880 census, which showed him teaching in Brownsville, Tennessee. Nicholas Said died two years later, ending a life as perhaps the most widely traveled person of African descent until the emergence of internationally known black celebrities and scholars in the late 20^th century.

©David Brodnax, Sr.