Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

A number of the women wear no clothing above the waist, yet they do not seem to feel that they are immodest. I saw one near the ferry as I landed this morning. She was a good-looking girl about eighteen, as black as oiled ebony, as straight as an arrow, and as plump as a partridge. She was standing outside a mud hut shaking a sieve containing sesame seed. She held the sieve with both hands high up over her head so that the wind might blow away the chaff as the seed fell to the ground. She was naked to the waist, and her pose was almost exactly that of the famed “Vestal Virgin” in the Corcoran Art Gallery at Washington.

Omdurman is the business centre of the Sudan. Goods are sent from here to all parts of the country, and grain, gum arabic, ostrich feathers, ivory, and native cotton are brought in for sale. The town has one hundred restaurants, twenty coffee houses, and three hundred wells. It has markets of various kinds, and there are long streets of bazaars or stores in which each trade has its own section, many of the articles sold being made on the spot. One of the most interesting places is the woman’s market. This consists of a vast number of mat tents or shelters under each of which a woman sits with her wares piled about her. She may have vegetables, grain, or fowls, or articles of native cloth and other things made by the people. The women have the monopoly of the sales here. Men may come and buy, but they cannot peddle anything within the women’s precincts nor can they open stands there. I understand that the women are shrewd traders. Their markets cover several acres and were thronged with black and brown natives as the mamour and I went through.

Not far from the market I came into the great ten-acre square upon which centre the streets of the stores. There are a number of restaurants facing it. In one corner there is a cattle market where donkeys, camels, and horses are sold. The sales are under the government, to the extent that an animal must be sold there if a good title is to go with it. If the transfer is made elsewhere the terms of the bargain may be questioned, so the traders come to the square to do their buying and selling.

It is strange to have shops that sell money. I do not mean stock exchanges or banks, but real stores with money on the counters, stacked up in bundles, or laid away in piles on the shelves. That is what they have in Omdurman. There are caravans going out from here to all parts of north central Africa, and before one starts away it must have the right currency for the journey. In financial matters these people are not far from the Dark Ages. Many of the tribes do not know what coinage means; they use neither copper, silver, nor gold, and one of our dollars would be worth nothing to them. Among many of the people brass wire and beads are the only currency. Strange to say, every locality has its own style of beads, and its favourite wire. If blue beads are popular you can buy nothing with red ones, while if the people want beads of metal it is useless to offer them glass.

In some sections cloth is used as money; in others salt is the medium of exchange. The salt is moulded or cut out of the rocks in sticks, and so many sticks will buy a cow or a camel. The owner of one of the largest money stores of the Sudan is a Syrian, whose shop is not far from the great market. He told me that he would be glad to outfit me if I went into the wilds. I priced some of his beads. Those made of amber were especially costly. He had one string of amber lumps, five in number. Each bead was the size of a black walnut, and he asked for the string the equivalent of about fifteen American dollars. The string will be worn around some woman’s bare waist, and may form the whole wardrobe of the maiden who gets it.

Not far from this bead money establishment the mamour and I entered the street of the silversmiths. This contains many shops in which black men and boys are busy making the barbaric ornaments of the Sudan. Jewellery is the savings bank of this region, and many of the articles are of pure silver and pure gold. Some are very heavy. I priced rings of silver worth five dollars apiece and handled a pair of gold earrings which the jeweller said were worth sixty dollars. The earrings were each as big around as a coffee cup, and about as thick as a lead pencil at the place where they are fastened into the ear. The man who had them for sale was barefooted, and wore a long white gown and a cap of white cotton. His whole dress could not have cost more than ten dollars. He was a black, and he had half-a-dozen black boys and men working away in his shop. Each smith sat on the ground before a little anvil about eight inches high and six inches wide, and pounded at the silver or gold object he was making.

In another shop I saw them making silver anklets as thick as my thumb, while in another they were turning out silver filigree work as fine as any from Genoa or Bangkok. The mamour asked two of the jewellers to bring their anvils out in the sun in order that I might photograph them and they kindly complied.

A little farther on we entered the shoe bazaar, where scores of merchants were selling red leather slippers turned up at the toes, and in a court not far away we found merchants selling hides and leather fresh from the tanneries. They were salting the hides in the square, and laying them out in the sun to dry.

During my stay in this section I bought some ostrich feathers of a merchant who sold nothing else. He had a large stock and his prices were fixed. My feathers cost me about two dollars apiece, but they are the long white plumes of the wild ostrich, which are far finer than any of those from South Africa, where the birds are reared upon farms.