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I Was a Slave
‘The ground was scarred by fire. My father came to us with his leopard-skin torn and his ostrich plumes bent and broken, snatching up my brother and gripping me by the hand, taking cover in the glare of the flames. Our land was devastated, warriors slain, women and children carried into captivity, yoked like cattle…’
‘My experience of life was limited. My idea of a house was a reed-and-mud hut. My notion of a palace was Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. I thought a horse-drawn carriage was the most marvellous invention in the world… To me a book was a mysterious thing…’
Memoir

I Was a Slave

Macar Cithiec / Salim Wilson
Edited by John Ryle and Joseph Diing Majok
Introduction. Map. Glossary.
Forthcoming 2027

First published in 1933, Macar Cithiec’s account of his enslavement in Sudan and subsequent life as a preacher in the north of England is republished for the first time in a critical edition.

Born in what is now South Sudan in the mid-nineteenth century, Macar Cithiec (Hatashil Masha Kathish) was taken into slavery as a boy and sold, as he wrote, ‘for six yards of calico’. Escaping captivity in the 1870s, he became one of the first people from the south of Sudan to travel to Europe, taking the baptismal name Salim Wilson, and working as a Christian missionary and preacher in the north of England. He died in 1946.

Macar Cithiec’s autobiography, first published in 1933, is a testimony of human survival, a notable document in the history of slavery and colonialism in eastern Africa. It is republished by City of Words for the first time, with maps, a glossary, and a new introduction by John Ryle and Joseph Diing Majok.